18 | TREMA!

2018

TREMA! Festival

Over the last 500 million years, the world has experienced five brutal mass extinctions. Of these, the best known was the collision of an asteroid with “our planet,” wiping out, among other living beings, the dinosaurs. Sixty-five million years have passed since then.

Upturned pavement, shattered windows, fallen streetlights, and burning cars. This is how contemporary narratives, especially cinema, depict the end of the world, right? Ah! Let us not forget that our anguish over the “end of the world” is always confused with the idea of human extinction. Confrontations, gunshots, flags held aloft, shouting, people in the streets. While some make their way to Noah’s Ark, others are forcibly loaded into police vans. But is this the end of the world, or June 2013, May 1968?

Here is some information in apocalyptic tones: in recent years, scientists have been monitoring our “sixth extinction,” which has the potential to be the most devastating in Earth’s history. What is striking is that, this time, the cause will not be an asteroid or anything similar. We will be the cause. But let us not worry. We Brazilians know this territory very well, after all, we are specialists in self-destruction. The “beef, bullets, and Bible” caucus leaves no room for doubt!

We have also heard that the first human species to become extinct will be artists. This secret organization that stretches across every continent, named by director Gerald Thomas as “And, Dead, We Walk,” while others call it “theatre.” The ongoing extinction process involves rather simplistic tactics, including the deterioration and/or closure of public spaces dedicated to the arts, cuts to investments in this activity guaranteed by the constitution, the vilification of workers, the undermining of the roles we play in society, cyberattacks, and even arrests. Yes, it is all orchestrated. We have little time left. So what do we do? A theatre festival? Will we make it to the sixth edition, or will we become extinct?

Here comes the Anthropocene Era. Here comes the moment when humans have replaced nature as the dominant environmental force on Earth. To give you an idea, over the past 40 years, we have witnessed a massive erosion of the greatest biological diversity in the planet’s history! We kill animals. We kill people. What difference does it make, right?

We don’t need asteroids. We are a corpse-country rotting away. The end.

For a school without political parties, since I’m not worried that it has no desks or school meals. For the extinction of Cuban doctors in our country, since I couldn’t give a damn that the hospitals don’t even have stretchers or beds. Let those shitty, pedophile artists stop sucking on the government’s teat. We will not become Cuba, Venezuela... That’s what the rabble says, isn’t it? Quack, quack, quack...

It is no coincidence that we have brought these performances together for our sixth edition. Have you ever stopped to think about what it means to be a woman, to be Black, to be from the Northeast, to be trans, to be gay in this fucking country? Bodies marked by everyday crosshairs, destined to be extinguished.

This festival is a barricade. A front line of open chests facing this punch-to-the-gut life. Run, my comrades, the old world is behind us! One hope remains. Without art, the very narrative of the end will become impossible to narrate. As Portuguese writer Pedro Eiras puts it, “in fact, witnessing the end of times would imply continuing time, a contradictio in terminis: therefore, there can only be an account of the end of the world thanks to the existence, performatively demonstrated, of the world itself.”

And so, we throw ourselves into the abyss of yet another edition. Perhaps the most difficult of them all. Perhaps because 50 years have passed since May 1968 and almost nothing has changed. Perhaps because 50 thousand can also be read as a shameful offer of support from the public authorities (that is, the government and city hall) toward making our festival happen. Perhaps because we really are close to an attempt at extinction.

We regret to inform you. For Marielle, for Matheusa, for so many other extinguished bodies. So that none of this will have been in vain. We will survive.

Change the language, change the text, change the scene. TREMA!
*** text from the festival program

PUBLICATION LAUNCHES: Book: Pasolini, from Neorealism to Cinema Poetry | Davi Kinski, Book: Kill Your Father | Grace Passô, Trema Magazine | Censorship Edition

WORKSHOPS: Kill Your Father with participation in the performance | Inez Viana/RJ; From the City to the Stage: Text, Video, and Acting Based on Elements of Reality | with Henrique Fontes and Matheus Cardoso, Teatro Carmin/RN; Questions for Theatre Criticism in Contemporary Brazil | with Danielle Avila Small/RJ; Contemporary Ibero-American Documentary Theatre, with Danielle Avila Small.