Performance and Discussion

Desterrados Ur Ex Des Machine, created by Companhia Antropofágica (São Paulo, Brazil), was presented in the Cricoteka/Tadeusz Kantor Museum as part of the ongoing program, Gra z Kantorem/Playing with Kantor. Gra z Kantorem, as noted by its curator, Anna R. Burzyńska, introduces the Polish audiences to international theatre companies, which, in their works, make use of, critique, or align themselves with theatre practices used by Kantor in his productions. Some of these practices include a performative or a visual arts exploration of the attributes of objects or bio-objects; of memory, history, and myth; or of the concepts of repetition, echo, or the reality of the lowest rank.

Companhia Antropofágica is a theatre group founded on the principles of Oswald de Andrade’s anthropophagy—a cultural movement articulated in the end of the 1920’s in Brazil of ingesting foreign cultures, in order to acquire and invert their characteristics and world-views in terms of the local reality.

Throughout Companhia Antropofágica’s 19 years of existence, Kantor’s work has been an integral part of the group’s creative metabolism, as evidenced by the 2015 production of Desterrados Ur Ex Des Machine as part of the celebration of the 100th anniversary of Kantor’s birth. It is in conversation with the political dimension in Kantor’s work, extracted from the objects and the space itself, as well as from their characteristic theatricality and historical materialism.

Burzyńska’s discussion with Michal Kobialka, professor of Theatre Arts at the University of Minnesota, which followed the screening of Desterrados Ur Ex Des Machine, focused on the creative process used by Thiago Vasconcelos, the director of Antropofágica, and Ludmila Ryba, the actress who worked with Kantor. Although Kantor had never worked directly with the concept of Desterrado, coined by the Brazilian intellectual Sérgio Buarque de Holanda, Kantor’s productions were charged with the idea that the artist is always an exile, an outcast, in short, a Desterrado. Equally important, the audience was interested in the concepts of anthropophagy, Brazilian modernism, Companhia Antropofágica’s place in the topography of the Brazilian avant-garde theatre, and its use of Kantor’s notions of memory and history in the process of staging Brazilian difficult pasts—the time of the Colony, the Empire, the Republic, and today’s unstable political reality. The audience asked: How does Companhia Antropofágica stage historical narratives of its difficult pasts? How does Companhia Antropofágica offer new insights into the role of objects in representing difficult pasts? How can Kantor (Poland) and Companhia Antropofágica (Brazil) expand our understanding of difficult pasts in a transnational context.

Images from the Event

See the gallery below to view images from the event. Click on the thumbnail to expand the slideshow.

Read an interview with Anna R. Burzyńska in Dziennik Teatralny in which she discusses the project Gra z Kantorem / Playing with Kantor and “Desterrados Ur Ex Des Machine.”

Click above to download the Anthropophagy Manifesto by Oswald De Andrade translated into Polish by Daria Mikocka.