Cicely Berry has had a long and fruitful collaboration with several theatre groups or companies in Brazil during the last twenty five years or so. She has also worked with prominent theatre director, writer, theorist and founder of Forum Theatre, Augusto Boal (Berry 2001:55). She mentions three companies which have been a special source of inspiration to her (Berry 2001:55). The first was a mainstream one that focused on classical texts and here she employed many of the methods that she used in Britain, working on Shakespeare and heightened language. It is interesting that many of these actors apparently also had very successful careers in television, working for El Globo soap operas. However, they found value in her workshops to maintain their vocal and verbal skills as theatre actors, alongside the more naturalistic technique needed for the camera (Berry 2001:55).
The second association was with Boal and his group or company. She has great admiration for the processes he embarked on, with his idea of theatre for ordinary citizens, often referred to as ‘Theatre for the Oppressed’ and ‘Image Theatre’, (Boal 1992:xix) and the aim of showing the possibility for social change:
The purpose is to heighten the awareness of the audience to specific social problems which surround their lives and give them a sense of their own right to challenge, argue and speak. (Berry 2001:55)
She invited Boal and his company to the UK in 1997 (Paterson 2014:6) to lead workshops with the Royal Shakespeare Company. Berry and the actors were particularly inspired by his innovative work on the text of Hamlet and how he encouraged them to make new connections to understanding the characters and language. Boal has a very physical approach and used different and stimulating methods of getting actors to unlock their responses to a text, such as “communicating the text through different parts of themselves i.e. the eyes, then faces, then bodies, before speaking the words” (Berry 2001:56). In this way the actors reflected the inner desires and motives of the characters. Boal also has great respect for Berry as a person and teacher and verbalises this in his warm, enthusiastic way in the dvd Where Words Prevail (2005). He says that she recognises the people from the Rio slums whom she works with, first as fellow human beings, and that she teaches from that perspective, not merely as a professional who has all the skills and answers. This personal and direct contact, with whatever group she teaches, combined with a sense of clarity and discipline in the vocal and textual content, is what he and others admire about her approach. It is possible that Berry was influenced by some of his games and exercises and may have adapted or used some aspects of these improvisations in her own methods. In the theatre
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world, especially among voice writers, trainers and directors who enjoy collaboration, ideas seem to be traded and developed all the time. Once they have been put onto paper in books they are used! I have not undertaken a detailed study of Boal and his potential influence is not a focus in my study, but it could be interesting to note their possible, mutual exchanges of workshop exercises on text. As Adrian Jackson, translator of Boal’s book Games for Actors and Non-Actors (1992:xxii, xiii) rather humorously says:
Boal continues to invent new exercises and adapt old exercises with the vigour of a 20 year-old…magpie-like, he raids traditional games in whatever country he finds them, changes them if necessary to suit his particular goals, and then brings them back to his Paris and Rio centres like a hunter bringing back trophies…coupled with an immense and warm humanity, which I fear no translation could entirely convey.
Sadly, Augusto Boal died in 2009 after a long battle with leukemia (Paterson 2014:10).
The theatre group that Berry has had the longest association with in Rio de Janeiro is the Nos do Morro (Us from the Hillside) company and school, situated in one of the largest favelas or slum areas of this well-known city. The company of young performers was started in 1986 by journalist and actor, Guti Fraga, who believed in the power of art to transform people’s lives and to give them a purpose beyond crime and drugs as a way to make a living. He wanted to bring the young people off the streets and to experience theatre work in all its facets (Berry 1992:57). Indeed, today the company has over 350 participants, owns its own premises and a small theatre and has been very successful in its combination of doing vibrant work of quality, promoting culture and uplifting the community (Busato Smith 2013:1). They have achieved international recognition for some of their touring theatre productions and audio-visual works. The recognised film City of God (2002) used forty-two actors from Nos do Morro.
Berry first visited Vidigal, name of the notorious area, in 1996 and she has been collaborating with the company on a regular basis since then. She acknowledges her joy and satisfaction in this continued interaction: “I am amazed by their hunger for work on language, and their measure of understanding” (Berry 1992:57). She works with them on Shakespearean text, in Portuguese, often local dialects too and follows a similar working method to her workshops conducted in other parts of the world. Language and class are not seen as cultural barriers and she encourages the groups to explore the words from their own point of view and background. Like Fraga, she feels that if the working/performing space is safe and the atmosphere positive, then the young actors can express themselves freely and be empowered by their creative work on the text. There is one scene towards the end of the dvd Where Words Prevail (2005) where the group is working on Romeo and Juliet and one of the
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girls playing Juliet is being rejected by the other performers each time she turns to them and addresses her line or comment to them. One can see the genuine reaction of desperation and involvement from this young actress and the effect on her as she is alienated from the group as a whole. It brought across Juliet’s sense of loneliness in a very tangible way. There was a lovely sense of understanding from the group in the discussion afterwards and Berry was among them, and not physically removed from the group. One could sense this exercise really helped the actors bring the characters off the page and into their realm of experience.
Her teaching in Vidigal aimed to support the sense of discipline and excellence in performance, established by Fraga over so many years (Berry 1992:57). This work is a continuation of the educational workshops Berry initiated in the 1980s at the RSC and the outreach programmes the Company has become known and respected for.