REVIEW: The Festival d'Avignon Presents UMA LUZ CORDIAL By Carolina Bianchi and Cara de Cavalo

In his essay "Problems of the Theatre," German playwright Friedrich Dürrenmatt argues that poetry should be made with the stage, not merely written for it or placed on it. In Brazilian metteuse en scène Carolina Bianchi and Cara de Cavalo's Uma Luz Cordial, the final installment of their Trilogia Cadela Força, now playing at the Festival d'Avignon, poetry serves as artistic thesis, case study, and primary literary resource. This striking, if uneven, exploration of poetry conjures a Hieronymus Bosch landscape of the human condition that exists at the crossroads of its most refined and its most animalistic.

The piece opens with Bianchi introducing her intense philosophy of poetry: for her, sex is carnal, a renunciation of the self to the point of death. She then departs as lights swing hypnotically upstage and a coterie of nude performers enters the space. Poetry appears on a red screen; as audiences read, the performers imitate violent, ecstatic sex acts. It's a Dionysian revelry, like a postmodern opening to Tannhäuser. Unfortunately, or fortunately, depending on the audience member, the action onstage blurs as attention concentrates on the projected text. This sequence offers the least context for the poetic elements brought to the stage. Later scenes lay more theoretical groundwork.

Bianchi's dramaturgical choice to introduce poets, their creative visions, and her relationship to them lands unevenly: tedious at times and welcome at others. Her introduction of the Brazilian figure Hilde Hilst is a highlight. An enfant terrible of Brazilian letters, Hilst left a substantial footprint across poetry, prose, and theatre. Bianchi projects an interview in which Hilst discusses her work O Caderno Rosa de Lori Lamby, a self-described pornographic text in which an eight-year-old girl describes being raped with childish, gleeful innocence. A puppet then appears, depicting the young girl, as a performer reads from Hilst's text. Like the work of de Sade, the piece moves from shocking to tawdry to, against all probability, repetitively dull. Bianchi keeps the audience in Hilst's text long enough to endure this full experiential spectrum.

None of this is to say the piece contains no poetry made with the stage. Though the seams of devised theatre occasionally show, the piece is at its best when its energetic, courageous performers build poetic images with their own bodies. A performer in the guise of Emily Dickinson reveals her genitalia and inserts a strawberry inside herself. Another appears to draw a hollow egg from within her body, then smashes it against her head after seeming to threaten the audience with it. A male performer, dressed in a sharp suit and an oversized papier-mâché frog head, masturbates at the audience. The carnal body is at the forefront of the creative process.

Bianchi closes with a coda that cools the audience down, a surprising turn toward the cerebral after more than two hours of the carnal. She explores Emily Dickinson's poem "My Life Had Stood — A Loaded Gun." After spinning for two hours through Jo Rios's operatic lighting, Luisa Callegari's eccentric, fabulously constructed costumes (designed in collaboration with Bianchi), and Miguel Caldas's sublime soundscapes melding metal, pop, and classical, Bianchi's tender closing carves out a space to sober up. The poem isn't carnal; it's delicate. I welcome this shift, it was sorely missing from the evening. But after a journey through the Garden of Earthly Delights and to the precipice beyond it, the ending contradicts more than it counterposes the evening's work.

Photo Credit: Raynaud de Lage

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