A pioneering group of multimedia artists
are taking HIV awareness to never-before reached parts of London’s Portuguese
community. Maurice Ord saw them in action
Main photo Irena Dragic
Jorge
Balça and Sónia Rodrigues are the beating heart of multimedia
performance partnership +logo, a group working to raise awareness of HIV among
London’s Portuguese community through drama, dance and film.
Last month +logo broke new ground by staging extracts from Tango Finale, a
moving play about living with HIV, to Lambeth’s Portuguese community.
Jorge and Sónia first hit upon the idea of taking messages about HIV
stigma and disclosure to Portuguese Londoners in 2004 when they responded
to the Oval House Theatre’s appeal for help in attracting more theatre-goers
from the local community.
Jorge, himself Portuguese, said: “HIV ignores the culture of the people.
The Portuguese community is not as permeable as the rest of the caucasian
British communities, so it’s hard to get some messages across.
“Because we don’t fall into a racial differentiation it’s
quite easy to assume that a particular community has been targeted. It’s
often overlooked that Portuguese is the third most spoken language in Lambeth.
“I completely fell in love with the text because of the heterosexual,
serodiscordant couple. We saw quite a few issue-based plays mainly in the
fringe theatre but quite often they don’t have specific communities
in mind. So that was our aim: to get the message across to communities without
alienating them.”
Critics
in the house
When I was invited along to review the second of two performances for PN,
I was impressed by the passion gripping all those taking part. At an earlier
‘research’ performance, a predominantly Portuguese audience was
invited to comment on and shape the play. They asked about using video and
pre-recorded footage in live performance and using English and Portuguese.
Feedback from this early performance helped the team shape the final two half-hour
extracts.
Originally written for eight actors, +logo stripped the cast of Tango Finale
down to the two lovers (main picture, left) played by Maria Carson and André
Maia, a well-known face in Portuguese theatre, film and television. The aim
of using a well-established Portuguese actor was to draw in the community.
The group also used an innovative and heady mix of dance, music and pre-recorded
video to bring the play alive for a culturally diverse audience.
Emotional claustrophobia
The acting shifts between moments of pure stylisation and high octane emotion.
Two nameless characters, ‘his girlfriend’ and ‘her boyfriend’
are caught in a murky world trying to express their emotions. Neither can
actually state what they want from each other. The tango becomes a metaphor
for revealing this frustration. In this dance there is little potential space
or room existing between the two of them.
Subdued lighting makes this emotionally claustrophobic world all the more
real. The turning point comes a few minutes before her boyfriend dies. In
a moment of quiet stillness he asks: “What is there left for me to do
that I haven’t already tried? I want you to leave me.”
These words beautifully sum up the boyfriend’s feelings of guilt and
fear around exposing his girlfriend to the virus. At this point the true impact
of what is actually happening hits home. This is also the most poignant moment
as it raised the question of what we do after we lose someone close to us.
How do we inhabit the space which they once filled for us?
Inner voices
At the end ‘his girlfriend’ is left only with her memories which
she explores through her images and a vocal soundtrack. She mirrors her boyfriend’s
movements, laughing when he laughs, smiling when he smiles. This communicates
the searing painful beauty of a couple trying to see the story from the other’s
point of view.
Some dialogue felt a little outdated but there is plenty of powerful imagery
to compensate. The idea of using audiovisual equipment as a character is somewhat
lost in this performance and certainly not new; Beckett often used this device
to represent the inner voice of a character on stage.
Language
no barrier
I thought that using two languages would make the play hard to follow, but
in the end it didn’t matter. Jorge and Sónia were right to explore
this idea and trust their instincts. Once you become used to the constant
leaping back and forth between cultures something quite magical happens. Your
ear attunes to the rhythm of both languages.
It’s the underlying emotions of fear, ignorance and understanding that
drive this play. The synthesis of dance and
spoken word forces you to feel more than to think. In the ‘feeling’
function, all the connections are made.
Meanwhile, +logo has camaraderie vital for dealing with such emotional content.
Together they create a sense of shared ownership. This is important for delivering
the message of HIV into the community, but also to enable that community to
feel represented in local theatre. It would be well worth catching the full-length
version which is hopefully on the cards soon.
“We’ve now completed two stages of this three-stage project,”
said Jorge. “The first two were about research and development. Now
we want to take a full length production to a bigger audience.”
Let’s hope this is the case as this dance presentation is an original
and moving way of raising HIV awareness, something that can only be a good
thing.
