In the last post we heard from the Coimbra-based actor, Sofia Lobo, about her experience of making theatre during the COVID crisis. Here we interview Carlos J. Pessoa, a scholar in the Theatre and Cinema Superior School, and the artistic director of Teatro da Garagem (Garage Theatre), in Lisbon.
In a time of pandemic, how did you reinvent yourself as a teacher in a School of Drama and Film and as a director of a theatre company?
The answers to confinement are disparate: compulsive festivity, depressive experience, argumentative discourse seeking explanations for the inexplicable, discreet waiting, indifference. These behaviours express the harshness of a time. This is reflected in the theatre.
As a teacher I can say that it was a positive thing for the students to dive in on themselves, because they had to work from a distance, via zoom. The apparent digital solitude, applied already in a second year of a teaching before executed in person, made possible an introspection on the artistic choices of each one. It was possible to produce sketches, the first seeds of art. For most of them it served, I want to believe, as an overview on their aesthetic options.
For me, as a teacher, this experience has reinforced the need to change academic programs in order to achieve greater student autonomy; everyone learns more, and better, in this circumstance than if submerged in group dynamics.
Something was missing in this semester? The return to school, to the common space, where the projects worked on at a distance could be done on stage, live. This would allow the technical work to be included, the tunings and the indispensable repairs to be made, which add theatrical quality to the projects in development.
As an author and director, I see a need for greater conciseness and objectivity in the rehearsal. It is not possible, in the current circumstances, to experiment with the actors and the rest of the team for an indefinite period of time. It is necessary to define beforehand what one wants, or what one does not want, in a more rigorous way. These imperatives will determine that the theatre does not happen so much with the actors and the rest of the team, but much more in the head of the director? Who knows… Perhaps we’ll see the return of the director’s theatre?
What paths do you see for the theatre – and for teaching performing arts – in the near future?
From the work done by the students in a digital environment — small videos — some suggestive topographies were established for the classical texts, which served as a motto for the semester work, moving them to a performative urgency.
However, many questions arise, starting with the place of the drama schools. What is their role? My provisional conclusion is that they should attend less to the transmission of consolidated artistic practices and more to the accompaniment, pedagogical and didactic, of the student. The teacher can provide a starting point: a text, a set of bibliographic references… The route is the student’s.
This does not represent passing a sponge over previous theatrical practices, it means putting them in perspective, criticising them and the sense of their reception.
To train an actor is, first of all, to allow the student to decide about the actor he wants to be, about the theatre he wants to do. Each teacher, more than talking, will have to listen and from what he or she hears try to understand, try to follow. This attempt must not only mean effort but, above all, fluidity.
I believe that due to the current political tensions the theatre will imply a greater militancy in pressing causes, in public statements, which will make the strict idea of “art for art” impossible for some time.
Theatrical projects will increasingly focus on media issues: from climate emergency, to racism, to changing lifestyles, to the very conditions of making theatre.
And migratory flows, will they promote exotic artistic practices, which at first seem strange and gradually are assimilated?
And how will the regression in globalisation and industrialisation affect the new proletariat, the new civic modalities and geopolitical alignments? Will we be occidental or accidental?
This idea of networks, of shared theatre projects, will open up a fairer, more inclusive and operative distribution of resources, financial and logistical, in order to renew and strengthen the theatre, in its different agents? Will this dynamic open new horizons of expression? And by whom, and how, will we be heard?
This inclusive theatre will put the emphasis on the Other, the strange, the different. Will the theatre, in the future, imply this devotion to the Other as fraternal imaginary? Will we be able to speak of a greater humanity, the daughter of a more lucid conscience?
The limbo in which all these issues are intertwined will perhaps be the place of the theatre to come. A limbo that favours the notion that it is worth getting lost in order to meet and that, in this way, there will be a time of waiting, a time of hope.
Carlos J Pessoa, Beringel, July 2020.