1970-01-01 02:00:00
Turning on the television on Tuesday night, I saw a scene from the windows of the apartment of José Celso Martinez Corrêa, known as Zé Celso, releasing flames. Nothing surprised me, as I had worked with him since the 1960s and I know very well his power to set fire to situations, ideas, cultures, contexts.
Zé, who died this Thursday, is a volcano of ideas that has an incredible coherence within his most daring, outrageous and surprising anarchism. Very different from other cultural adventurers that plague us today. He, more than anyone, knows how to read and understand the content of a dramaturgical text.
Just recently we witnessed the murder of Carlos Gomes and the depredation of his masterpiece “O Guarani” at the Municipal Theater of São Paulo, where incompetent adventurers and criminals made idiotic jokes with a work of universal musical culture.
They performed the ultimate work with Rohr metal ladders, ball-bearing carts dragged onstage by employees in headphones and theater work clothes, with a metal drill falling from the sky piercing the stage as if looking for oil in a scene from centuries ago in the carioca forest.
And poor Ceci, while recounting her most passionate love for a naive native, saw herself in electronic projections above her drama, phrases claiming land, political manifestos.
Then came a body of indigenous people singing claiming songs with a shameless “little guitar” playing C major chords —harmonies that the indigenous people had never known— and a fiddle typical of Northeastern folklore trying to show the ingenuity and “human value” of a possible claim of independence. lands on a stage that had nothing to do with political demonstrations.
The difference between this adventure that the incompetent direction of Theatro Municipal de São Paulo allowed —offending even singers and the theater symphony, who presented first-class music— is that Zé Celso knows how to read and understand a text, without deviating a millimeter from the core of the original idea of the work.
If he does a Shakespeare play in a chicken coop, he’ll be more Shakespeare than ever. When he approaches a text and transforms it into a current reality, its content will be preserved and multiplied and not depredated.
When Zé Celso and I did Brecht’s “Galileo Galilei” together at Teatro Oficina in the late 1960s, the drama of the great discredited scientist and the reading of Brecht were brought to Bexiga in a revolutionary, incandescent, dignified and respectful way — Galilei and Brecht.
At the height of tropicalism, when values and cultural languages of the various arts were being blown up, it would not have made sense to stage that work by Brecht within the parameters of the Berliner Ensamble in Berlin at the time of its foundation, since the Brechtian “aproche” was dated as a language, but universal as provocations and content.
Therefore, in the midst of tropicalism, a movement in which I participated with arrangements, we brought the work to the context of that true São Paulo Broadway and “66th Berliner Ensemble”.
And when the concretist poets Augusto and Haroldo de Campos and Décio Pignatari resurrected the work of Oswald de Andrade, Teatro Oficina and Zé Celso with “O Rei da Vela” exploded and multiplied the ideas contained in a book of a single edition and already almost forgotten in the years after the cultural revolution of 1922.
The explosion of ideas that tropicalism brought to Brazilian music, which mixed the refined and the tacky, the avant-garde and the rearguard, the poetry of Cuíca de Santo Amaro and concrete poetry, singing and screaming, sound and whistles, the political and the intimate, the social and the sentimental, the berimbau and the theremin, portunhol and Latin, were present in dimensions, context, boldness and cultural dignity similar to what Oficina and Zé Celso’s troupe performed on Rua Jaceguai .
I saw the birth of Hurricane Zé Celso/Oficina in September 1960 when he, together with Augusto Boal, translated and staged a masterpiece by Jean-Paul Sartre, “A Engrenagem”, for which I wrote the music.
Jorge Amado had brought Sartre to Brazil and he made a point of attending the performance. At that moment, the brilliant and revolutionary phase of the Teatro Brasileiro de Comédia, the TBC, which brought us masterpieces of universal culture, was in some way surpassed, leaving behind in part an almost vaudeville theater earlier in our dramaturgy.
Arena left for a critical theater with more socio-political content —with Gianfrancesco Guarnieri and Boal— and Zé Celso would understand, “avant la lettre”, what the dazzle of the 1960s would be, similar to the “roaring twenties”, in the arts and popular culture worldwide.
Our staging of Sartre’s work, despite the seriousness and dense political and critical content of the text, had the dramaturgical provocation of every particle of the text, something that left the French philosopher enchanted and led him to participate daily in debates with the São Paulo intelligentsia.
Sartre returned to France, praising all sides —including my music— thus passing on a certificate that all seriousness can be treated with allegories and dignity, with dazzle, but without the addition of gratuitous pyrotechnics that are harmful to the meaning of the text approached.
And it worked. A large part of the Brazilian arts became other after the implementation of Uzyna Uzona by José Celso Martinez Corrêa in Bexiga São Paulo.
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