With the intent of bringing a contemporary look over one of the most important Shakespeare’s plays, Richard III, the Brazilian theatre group Companhia Bufomecânica stupefied the audience at the Roundhouse during the past weekend, evoking aerial skills, multimedia devices, symbolic objects and stunning costumes. The performance is part of the on-going World Shakespeare Festival 2012.

An actor brandishing a hunting weapon and a wild boar’s head – the personal device of the English King Richard III and an important symbol of the political affiliation during the War of the Roses – saluted the Roundhouse’s viewers, followed by drums, dance and clothes’ stripping off on stage, leaving clear Companhia Bufomecânica’s intention: to provoke.

An invite to be part of The World Shakespeare Festival, especially in England, is a challenge so far as Shakespeare’s plays have been brilliantly presented in so many ways, by so many countries and by the best theatre’s actors worldwide. Being innovative is a risk as the performance may look amateur, cliché or even seem overacted; on the other hand it is undoubtedly avant-garde. In an attempt to bring this challenge to the audience, the Brazilian theatre company invoked meta-theatricality in a twist that probably impressed as many as it annoyed others.

The production carries a contemporary aesthetic that sometimes reminds the spectators of Sofia Coppola’s modern Marie Antoinette, in a mix of modern musical themes, including rock, drums and a melancholic accordion;carnivalesque outfits and multimedia projection on the background.

The use of aerial skills maximised the drama and the audience’s involvement in the plot, providing a forefront reading over the Shakespeare’s play catching the audience’s eye with its rhythm during the whole performance. The Companhia Bufomecânica made use of this feature brilliantly in a mesmerizing show, presenting remarkable scenes, especially in Margaret’s prophetic curses, in the dialog in the second act between Richard III and his mother, in which she cursed his future as a king and begged for his death; and most significantly in the parade of the ghosts that visits Richard and Richmond the night before the battle.

The murder of the Duke of Clarence in the tower was beautifully acted and designed. Clarence, portrayed by a woman, sat precariously balanced on a ladder lowered from the grid and suspended from two central points, in which the murderers – after a very interesting Shakespearean debate about consciousness – danced and bounced while listening to Clarence’s begging. The Duke’s death, falling from around twelve feet of the ground was a successful example of how theatre and circus can match perfectly well.

In a memorable scene, also evoking meta-theatricality, the talented interpreter of the spectrum of Queen Margaret, widow of Henry IV, carries her “own dead” and, at the same time, creates a dialogue with the audience, making the spectators think about how challenging a Shakespeare’s play can be – as far as how exaggerated the interpretation must be, how an actor must act and how can Shakespeare be reinterpreted.

Taking risks, the Companhia Bufomecânica scored some points and lost others during its path, as when it made the option of using five actors to play Richard III, making it difficult to establish a relation of complicity between the villain Richard III and the audience, distancing the character of the anti-hero stereotype proposed by Shakespeare. The best interpretation of Richard III was saved to the end, surprisingly, by a woman.

The Brazilian play probably didn’t please Greeks and Trojans, but it was certainly an original take on the story. The fusion between circus and theatre was remarkable and so was the use of multimedia features, offering a fresh approach over this Machiavellian story about power-seeking.

By Bruna Gala

Back in 2010, the Youth Orchestra of Bahia became the first Brazilian youth orchestra to perform in Europe, at the Southbank Centre, in London. Almost a year after, the young and talented musicians of Bahia came back to Southbank’s Royal Festival Hall on Saturday 21st May. This time the Youth Orchestra of Bahia were accompanying the world acclaimed Chinese pianist Lang Lang and the seventeen year-old Venezuelan conductor virtuoso Ilyich Rivas.

The concert was dedicated to the work of four different composers. The first part started with a very slow and tranquil – but amazingly beautiful – piece by Ottorino Respighi, “Fountains of Rome”, which the Orchestra played without the piano of Lang Lang. Fountains of Rome is a sixteen minute-long soothing piece of music that seemed perfect as a warm up for what was about to come.

The second number of this superb night at Southbank had the presence of 28 year-old Chinese pianist Lang Lang, probably the most talked about young pianist of recent years, who has a special interest for charitable causes. That is one of the reasons why Lang Lang personally invited (or simply chose, as an invitation from him is almost a recruitment) the Youth Orchestra of Bahia to perform with him at the Southbank Centre.

Together they played one of Frederic Chopin’s finest compositions, written in 1830, “Piano Concerto N°2 in F minor, Op. 21″, which is almost two times longer than “Fountains of Rome”. However, Chopin’s masterpiece was played with rare perfection, which instantaneously made the whole audience engage with what was happening on Southbank’s stage that Saturday night – from anonymous fans at the back to the men at the royal balcony, including Brazil’s former Minister of Economy Pedro Malan, who I spotted from my seat.

A quick interval and we were all back to the Royal Festival Hall to admire the second act of this magnificent concert. As in the first number of the night, the orchestra was alone, without Lang Lang’s piano. It was time for Igor Stravinsky’s “intoxicating” piece of music called “The Firebird: Suite”, one of Stravinsky’s most emotional compositions. It was during this number that I realised the Youth Orchestra of Bahia were never alone on that stage. The conductor, Ilyich Rivas had this amazing energy and was literally guiding those youngsters to success. I grabbed my program to find that this passionate Venezuelan conductor is only seventeen years old, despite his screaming talent. Combined with the fact that the musicians of the Youth Orchestra of Bahia range from 12 to 25 years-old, I was more than overwhelmed.

At this point the audience was wanting more. Lang Lang appeared once again to play one of the most beautiful and appreciated music pieces in history, George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue”. The Royal Festival went on a trance almost. Even the few people that were coughing stopped. There was no other sound in that room apart from the incredible sound that was coming from this young and unusual – yet brilliant – combination of a Chinese pianist, a Venezuelan conductor and a Brazilian orchestra.

The reader could be thinking that so far Lang Lang and Ilyich Rivas have stolen the show from the Youth Orchestra of Bahia. However, the encore was still to come. And the piece chosen to be the last number of the night was perfect to show what the Youth Orchestra of Bahia is all about. The boys and girls from Bahia, a state in the northeast of Brazil well-known for its amazing music and culture, performed “Tico Tico No Fuba”, a choro piece composed by Zequinha de Abreu, in 1917, and made famous by Carmen Miranda and Ray Conniff. The song was introduced with cuica chords and other typical samba instruments, which made the audience instantly realise that it was the Youth Orchestra’s big moment. Their unique mix of samba and classical music, combined with their young attitude, has made that the most ravishing moment of that night at the Royal Festival Hall.

The “transgression” of classical music didn’t stop on the mixing of samba with it. The youngsters also brought a couple to dance samba in front of the orchestra (see the video below), asked the audience to clap along with the musicians themselves were standing up, flipping their instruments and taking part in some creative choreography while playing Tico Tico No Fuba. In other words, the Youth Orchestra of Bahia was feeling at home, as if they were saying to the audience “yes, we can play classical music to perfection, but look at what we can also do”.

After almost two hours of pure music indulgence, every single person in the Royal Festival Hall stood up and effusively applauded the Youth Orchestra of Bahia, Lang Lang and Ilyyich Rivas for some good fifteen minutes after the concert ended. My hands were even sore from clapping so much; however my ears seemed like they were massaged by the astonishing music I listened at the Southbank Centre.

by Eduardo Pagnoncelli

Here’s the end of the show. Not your normal classical music concert then?

Once the lights dim we have plenty of time to sink into the darkness while listening to the notes of a deep piano melody. What follows is an intriguing dialogue where an assertive voice instructs the second person’s imagination, endorsing or disapproving of their responses. After the sound of a car crash, we are introduced to the first visual images of Throats: a dinner table set amongst the debris of the World Trade Centre, a wounded head lying on top of it, and a pompous mâitre d’hôtel who carries out his honours to the spectators. All of this was constricted by a transparent panel, a tangible fourth wall that separated the stage area from the seats of the audience, guiding us from an immersive sound experience into a more pictorial one.

The butler, whose bald head constantly bleeds, welcomes his guests to this macabre version of the Last Supper. One by one, the characters present themselves, their attitudes both daunting and fearful. Some of them mention the orders they have received from a certain “he” – who could perhaps be understood as the same man whose voice we heard in the beginning.

The atmosphere is sobering and dense, with a hint of irony. However, shards of comedy also bring some humorous aspects to the piece: for example, with a character randomly dressed in a Brazilian football strip, and a man in blue high heels who states, in the middle of a serious discussion, that he is John Malkovich.

During the piece, some of the dramaturge’s political concerns are made clear through his use of text. There are allusions to realistic and fictional ‘facts’ of happenings in Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, New York, London and Berlin. In another instance, a woman walks in carrying a tray that contains different drugs, ID cards, European passports, recipes for Molotov cocktails and biological weapons. Moreover, constant references are made to the attack of September 11^th, as well as a possible conspiracy in which that same woman seems to be, or not, involved.

There is a religious debate in Throats as one of its characters often affirms having reached a low point in her devotion to God, whilst a – black – orthodox Jew admits feeling excited before he is seen crucified after a change in the set. In this new image, there is a big cross that resembles the one erected by the rescue workers of the WTC, created from remains of the towers. In this scene, the characters alternate who is to be crucified and they often touch upon the theme of independence.

As it draws to an end Throats does begin to lose a grasp on the audience’s attention with the use of some loosely presented images, and dialogues that become wearing, leaving an unresolved feeling along with a great deal of wine – a metaphor for human blood – spilled around the stage.

In more traditional terms, there is little to be comprehended from this piece’s sequence of facts, but this does not affect its overall value. Its fragmented dramaturgy offers us a rich collection of images and references that are recurring all through the play, giving clues to our interpretation. It would seem that those who do not simply endeavour to find a coherent narrative can actually connect with the piece, and thus, attribute to it a sense of wholeness. A thought-provoking experience.

By Mafê Toledo
Photo credit: Alastair Muir

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Throats @ The Pleasance Theatre
Islington, London
18 February — 27 March 2011
Tue-Sat: 8pm, Sun: 7pm
Full Price: £8 – £15
pleasance.co.uk

If you had to choose one term that’s on everyone’s lips in the design world today, it would be ‘sustainability’. It has struck a chord in the market of product design and these designers were some of the few who knew how to capitalise on the benefits of working with such a fascinating concept, full of possibilities.

In order to show avid consumers the sheer range of products in the market, whilst serving primarily as inspiration for other professionals, Taschen has launched the book Product Design In the Sustainable Era, authored by Dalcacio Reis and edited by Julius Wiedemann, both Brasilians, graduated in design. Spread across over 400 pages it features 180 projects from 20 countries, exploring products like a chair made of old skateboards and a bicycle (above) that collects and filters water when pedaled.

“It’s important to highlight that what is sustainable today could be outstripped tomorrow, after all it’s a process that’s in constant evolution”, affirms Wiedemann. “It’s still difficult for people to understand the complexities involved in the creation and the development of a sustainable product; it’s necessary to have an educational process”.

The editor’s favourite item is the Bware Water Meter from the Israeli studio A2: a simple device that is applied to taps and showers which informs the user how much water is being used. Simple and intelligent, and definitely sustainable.

By Heloisa Righetto

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Product Design
in the Sustainable Era
£24.99, 444 pages
taschen.com

During the eight editions of FLIP, the number of visitors has increased, reaching 20 thousand people in 2010. The tourist city of 35 thousand inhabitants became packed and the promoters’ profits reached the record height of £2.26 million. But what exactly is FLIP? Well, it’s an opportunity to see and listen to your favorite writers close-up. If you are lucky, they won’t follow the example of songwriter Lou Reed who cancelled last-minute. If you’re even luckier, the authors may take part in a panel, led by a good chairman that won’t pose irrelevant questions or make unnecessary remarks, and then the experience will be a very interesting one. However, if the chairman isn’t as good, you can also try a tête-à-tête with the writer. You just have to brave the enormous queue for autographs and pray that the security guard will allow you to have a brief chat with the writer, sat with a yellow and bored smile after so much autograph signing.

Of course to be fair there is more to FLIP than just this. It’s also a festival of promotions and advertising. Free coffee and papers from Folha de S. Paulo, the biggest Brazilian newspaper. A big band plays in the corners of the historic centre sponsored by the beer Bohemia. Free internet access in bars full of people, supported by Vivo. Publishing houses promoting parties every night – but only for authors and journalists.  And at FLIP there are many “writers” who, left out by the main market and the organisers of the event, place themselves at strategic points of the city and along with a few hippies try to sell their art to passers-by, an art which is not made out of PVC pipes, clay and copper wire, but rather ink on pages bound in small booklets of photocopied sheets, financed by themselves and sold for however much you can- or want – to pay.

Does FLIP deserves its ‘I’ for “International”? Well judging by the lineup it does. Big names like Julian Barnes, Don DeLillo, Eric Hobsbawm and Hanif Kureishi have already appeared at previous editions of the festival and this year Isabel Allende, Terry Eagleton, Robert Crumb – who left Paraty asking himself why he was invited to the event – and Gilbert Shelton join the list. On the other hand, if we take into account the way the panels are organised, the question has another answer. The main tent has a capacity of 850 people. There is another across the river Perequê-Açú which has a big screen and capacity for 1400 people, where all the foreign writers are simultaneously translated into Portuguese. Whoever pays to watch the discussions in this tent may be lucky enough to find a headset with the original audio. If not, the remaining 17,350 spectators (given that the organisers announced they were expecting 20,000) are obliged to stay outside the tent, sitting on small cardboard seats sponsored by Itaú Bank, listening to a typically erring and boring voice translating what is being said in the main tent.

However this is not actually a big deal. After all, the majority of the few foreigners that go to FLIP do so without great purpose. They just happen to be in the interesting and beautiful town of Paraty during the days of the event. The other visitors are journalists; FLIP is almost like a matchmaking network. One out of five people you see on the street displays a press badge – people who are or want to be part of the publishing industry -, there are true lovers of literature and also the residents of Paraty taking advantage of the opportunity to make some money selling anything to the wealthy visitors. After all, everyone who goes to FLIP wants exactly this: profits, be them financial or intellectual.

By Morena Madureira

The latest edition of Tapas: Simple Combinations, Striking Flavours may have a new cover, but the thinking behind it (albeit subconsciously) began about 20 years ago. That’s because its authors, Carlos Horrillo and Patrick Morcas, are the owners of El Parador (elparadorlondon.com), a Camdnen restaurant specialised in the famous small servings.
Since opening its doors in 1988, the restaurant has worked to reintroduce and reinvent the traditional dishes of Spanish cuisine, and the resulting recipes in this book are a greatest hits selection.

The authors moto have always been ‘’simplify tapas”, which proved extremely useful for the book. Nothing is very difficult to make, apart from one or two dishes that need a little more effort. In truth, the real challenge lies in finding good quality produce on the market, like exotic seafood. The authors make it easy to prepare the dishes, but if you prefer the actual eating to the cooking, then you can simply go and enjoy some of the recipes at El Parador!

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Tapas
RRP £14.99
kylecathie.co.uk

Clebson’s been in London since 2004, but has been working as a chef for 13 years now, all along with Japanese cuisine. To produce the ‘Brazil Menu’ he added mangoes to the sushi and salad, as traditionally prepared in Brasil (usually with avocados here), and created four treats: the Mango & Papaya Salad, with Brasil nuts, coriander and lime juice (£5.50); a plate of paperthin salmon and seabass; and our favourites, the São Paulo Ceviche, with cucumber, tomatoes, salmon and hamachi (£8.50); and the Sushi Samba Selection, serving two varieties of sushi plus the hot roll. To die for.

What’s more, three summer cocktails were created (£5.50 each). We tried the Sake Sangria, made with cucumbers, and the Strawberry Caipirinha – delicious. All very refreshing and perfect for the summer currently upon the city. There’s an outside seating area as well and if that’s not enough, the restaurant also launched ‘The Feng Sushi Brazil Picnic Box’ (£44 or £56 with drinks), though not including the special menu dishes.

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Feng Shushi
Unit 9
Royal Festival Hall – SE1 8XX
Waterloo
020 7261 0001
fengsushi.co.uk

Two years has passed from when the Tate Modern’s walls were layered with the bright colours of 6 graffiti artists/collectives, with Brazil’s Nunca and the duo Os Gêmeos playing their part. The stage, or canvas, couldn’t have been much larger. And this April, the artistic prowess of Brazil has been invited for another chance to shine, as it takes its place alongside Russia, India and China, comprising the BRIC nations, in a project realised by Phillips de Pury & Company.

The current exhibition and auction of the same name, taking place at the opulent setting of the Saatchi Gallery, runs for a week and culminates in two days of auction (23^rd & 24^th April), and whilst it draws inspiration from the acronym usually understood for the economic prowess and booming of the 4 countries, the BRIC exhibition and auction sets out to showcase their fast emerging cultural and artistic output, and as outlined by Simon de Pury himself, the aim is to capitalise on this momentum, and hail the shift from westernisation to the easternisation of art, spanning its creation, sale and purchase.

The gallery space is vast and the amount of work on show is abundant, the catalogue a hand/armful in itself and the estimated bidding prices will raise eyebrows too, naturally. And this will prove an interesting checkup on the current state of the confidence of the art world, which has suffered dips and troughs in tandem with the economic crisis, with many fine pieces failing to raise a single bid in some instances, let alone come near their asking price, but De Pury remains as optimistic as ever that this show will be a success.

Amid the other nations’ artwork, Brazil has a modest collection to represent it, and space and attention is hard-fought for, with a piece each from Os Gêmeos, Lygia Clark and Helio Oiticica sharing a room with a rather dazzling set of shiny silver dogs with red digital timers on them, and words scrolling along at their feet, aptly named Countdown. Yet the three pieces are estimated to sell well, with the upper range pitched at £35k, £220k and £80k respectively.

Strolling around the many rooms of BRIC you’ll find all sorts of mediums and scales of work, with striking large sculptures and statues such as Shi Jianmin’s Love me do, a huge figure of a boy with what look like houses for shoes. There is heavy referencing to the USA in places, with Xue Song’s Twin Towers, a triptych painted flag depicting the attack, with cut up images and newspaper cuttings in English and Chinese. And there’s plenty of room for the tongue-in-cheek, with Frank Kozile’s Mao bearing Mickey Mouse-esque ears, Alexander Kosolapov’s Molotov Cocktail of a bomb using a Coke bottle, and a delicate portrait of Roman Abramovich holding gently onto a Silver Birch Tree.

Speaking of which, aside from the various lashings out at drinks brands and capitalistic values (such as by Wang Quingsong, with coke cans as weapons, or the evocative compositions Last Riot and The Bridge by AES+F, with somewhat biblical or classical montaged scenes of military-clad youths), there’s a great deal of sensitivity and sentimentality explored, from riverside life photographed in India, a Mumbai shanty town which could easily be a Brazilian favela, to the societal and often personal, and undeniably iconic portraits by Alexander Rodchenko.

At the very top of the gallery there’s a room dominated by works of Brazilian artists, with some sofas and chairs in the centre by the likes of Celina Decoracoes and Sergio Rodrigues, a carrara marble sculpture by Sergio Camargo, Mulatas by Emiliano di Cavalcanti (estimated to reach between £220-280k), and woodwork with stained glass by Joaquim Tenreiro. And helping you to not accidentally take a seat on one such piece of artwork, there photos from Cuba by Miguel Rio Branco, an image depicting dust by Vik Muniz, and the large atmospheric photos of Caio Reisenitz, close to a kinetic image by Bruno Barbey of black bodies leaping into a river, and works in coloured pencil and ink by Jose Leonilson.

But a real gem amid the masses here, thriving in itself as well as in the throng of BRIC representatives, is the powerful black & white photography of Sebastiao Salgado, with seathing, sweaty, dirty bodies of workers scaling ladders, somewhat like wilderbeasts braving a river, climbing out of the gold mines of Serra Pelada in which they worked, and moody shots of the Amazon and Xingu rivers. Historical images, they’re ironically at the more affordable end of the scale, deemed to be due to fetch between £2.5-4.5k each.

Seminal works and a seminal exhibition, the success of which has everything to play for and prove when all the works go under the hammer between Friday and Saturday, 23^rd & 24^th April, BRIC offers a comprehensive preview of what the world can anticipate a great deal more of, bringing you the here and now of tomorrow’s rising art and economic world powers.

By Milo Steelefox

BRIC
FREE, April 18^th – 24^th, Brazil sale at 5pm, 24^th April 2010
Open 7 days a week from 10am-6pm daily, last entry 5.30pm
Saatchi Gallery, Duke of York Headquarters – SW3 4SQ
phillipsdepury.com • 020 7318 4010

If you’re itching to get in world-cup-fever mode, or just fancy showing off your trendy-and-green credentials, then Nike have some extra good news for you; they’ve just launched the new football kits to be worn by nine teams competing in this year’s World Cup in South Africa, including Brasil – and they had a rather large trump card up their sleeve; they’ve managed to make each shirt from up to 8 recycled bottles. When you tot it all up, they’ve saved 13 million plastic bottles from going to waste in Japan and Taiwan, which is enough to cover almost 30 footy pitches!

Then they melted them down and made a yarn which is incorporated in the shirts. Apparently they’re still all hi-tech, dry, comfortable and all that. So everybody’s happy.

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Where to find it
At your nearest Nike store for just £50