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ORAL HYSTORY A Source
for the Creation of a Performance Installation
"Alice
Street 75: Rooms for Rent" is an oral history/artistic
project to be developed in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, from July 1st
to December 15, 2001. It will culminate in December 2001, with a
Performance Installation using the spaces of the building designated
by the title.
Its historic
purpose is to collect and present the ordinary lives of the people
of Laranjeiras, a old neighborhood located in the south zone of
the City of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, through the history of the people
who lived and currently live in Rua Alice, using the building located
at number 75 to represent the several tenement buildings situated
in the area.
Its artistic
purpose is to use oral history as a source for re-creating/re-inventing
the history of the old tenement building located at this address,
which is today the home for the Regina Miranda Actors/Dancers Company.
The building,
constructed at the end of the 19th Century in the old neighborhood
of Laranjeiras, is representative of the history of most tenement
buildings in Rio de Janeiro and around the world. Both in Rio, as
well as in NY or in Paris, they usually share a history of starting
as a beautiful family house and turning into a tenement building
that, over the years, tend to become more and more decadent. Rua
Alice 75, following the same career, after the expulsion of the
multiple families that were living in it, was vacant for a great
number of years, becoming a shelter for the homeless, until it was
recently purchased and renovated by this Dance Company.
During its
renovation, the company tried to preserve as much as possible of
its original architecture and ornamental features. Dialoguing with
these architectural memories, and interacting with our neighbors
we decided to preserve and project, re-enact and re-invent a performance
based on interviews and collected personal stories researched among
the people who live in the street, at the local schools, city archives,
police department and local social associations. These technical
procedures will be part of the creative process and, as so, will
be conducted by the actors-dancers of my company and myself.
"Rua Alice"
(Alice Street) became famous in Rio de Janeiro in the beginning
of the 20th century, mainly because of the "Casa Rosa" (Pink House),
one of the most famous brothels of the city, situated at the end
of the street, where artists and intellectuals used to go. If from
one side the Casa Rosa was a city spot for sexual pleasures, its
noisy parties and night fights pushed the rents of the street down.
The owners of the houses moved away and the street became an inexpensive
living space in a good neighborhood, attracting artists and working
class people. After a long period of continuous decadence,
Rua Alice is
now being revitalized, and the "sobrados" ( the name given in Rio
for a type of house from the turn of the 20th century, with 2 floors
and several small bedrooms connected by a long corridor) are becoming
again a place for artists (this time successful ones), arts studios,
important arts institutions, as well as home for social projects
such as the - "If this Street was mine", and "One Step Ahead", some
of the most successful projects for social integration of street
kids of the city of Rio.
The name "Rua
Alice" is not only a name of a street of Rio de Janeiro, it designates
more than a geographical point: it evokes memories of beauty and
pleasure, and it is emblematic of a process of decadence and resurrection.
The neighborhood
of Laranjeiras, where the building is located, is one of the few
communities in the south zone of Rio de Janeiro that still keeps
an old-time atmosphere: in its few active "sobrados", older people
still share the space with multiple families, talk to each other
through connected backyards, share small businesses, sit in the
streets at the end of the afternoon to drink a beer and remember
old stories, many of them about events that happened in the Alice
Street.
In the "Rua
Alice Project" we intend to give voice to this group of anonymous
people who live in Laranjeiras: a kind of people that, in our western
tradition, is not associated with the "important" people, - kings,
priests, politicians and warriors, who "make history". We intend
to interview as much people as we can, and make their accounts our
primary source of creative investigation. We will try to document
the ordinary lives of this working class and homeless community,
and artistically celebrate their everyday life.
Using an ethnographic
method of composition, we intend to document the emotional/functional
everyday lives of the neighborhood, extracting significant traits
from their original context, confronting them with others, either
from the same or from associated contexts, such as, for example,
the lives of immigrants who lived in the tenement houses of the
Low East Side of Manhattan in the same period.
In this way,
as new members of this community, we will be positioning ourselves
in relation to this group of people and their circumstances. Knowing
that any event can be seen from different points of view, and can
only be "true" in a limited point of view, we will be observing,
interpreting and rearticulating our environment through an embodied
dialogue with the remembered texts, reinventing our urban context,
and artistically re-writing the "real past".
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