My Theater Fix

I'm still hyperventilating with the Cohen New Works Festival, the biennial theater festival held by UT's department of Theater and Dance to showcase new plays, many by the department's graduate students. This year, it was held between March 30th and April 4th.

The peak of the cultural calendar in my native city of Porto Alegre is with no doubt Porto Alegre em Cena, our own annual theater festival that always presents some fifty or sixty plays, including local, national and international acts. The first performances to sell out are always the international ones, which over the years have included household names such as Peter Brook, Philip Glass, Pina Bausch, Stephen Berkoff, Laurie Anderson, Sascha Walts, La La La Human Steps, La Fura Dels Baus, Goran Bregovich, Sankai Juku and many others. It's a great opportunity to see bold, innovative works from around the globe. For a bargain, too: because the festival is funded by the City Hall and big corporate sponsors, tickets for individual plays cost less than ten dollars.



I haven't missed a single edition of Porto Alegre Em Cena since 1999 -- except for last year, because I was in Austin. It's really a shame I couldn't do both, but all is well that ends well: the Cohen New Works Festival filled that gap for me. While it did not include the impressive roster of worldwide artists and or as many plays (a total of 30), this year's NWF owed nothing to the degree of sophistication, innovation and variety that we are used to seeing during Em Cena. Many of the plays had a very ambitious experimental focus -- and I don't mean that in the sense of brainy, self-indulgent intellectual snoozefests for the sole enjoyment of the artists themselves: the plays I saw were fun. Exciting. Captivating. Just like the best theater always is.


Legendary Japanese dance-performance group Sankai Juku performed at Em Cena in 2007

(Ok, not all of them. But that's a good thing. Both festivals have had their share of hits and misses, but that's a good thing too: it shows that people are taking risks, instead of playing it safe with proven formulas. Personally, I don't mind bad plays, films, songs, fiction or any other work of art. They help you put the good ones in perspective.)

NWF highlights included The Psyche Project, a modern reading of the story of Eros and Psyche where Eros upgraded his bow and arrows into an automatic pistol and Hell is a shopping mall; Funky Snowman, a short play for children where a girl who cannot succed in her ballet classes learns the groove of pop music from a talking snowman; The Edge of Peace, a dramatic reading of Susan Zeder's last installment in her award-winning "Taste" trilogy; and, last but not least, the tongue-in-cheek examination of women's magazines in the collaborative, comically-titled 101 Ways To Get The Perfect Look, Have Hotter Sex, Love Your Body, Dress A Whole Lot Cooler, Make Your Boobs Pop, Be More Adventurous, Be More Cautious, Smell Better, Feel Less Guilty, Read His Mind, Make Him Notice You, Make Yourself Over, Spend Money Better, Get Smarter By Tomorrow, Connect With Your Kids, Be A Hipper Dancer, Have More Fun, Share Your Deepest Darkest Secrets, Recycle!, Find Your Inner Self And Do Anything Better.

Rounding up the roster of bold, intriguing performances was a selection of short films from UT's RTF students with a variety of styles, tones and even languages.

I'll eventually go back home and enjoy Porto Alegre Em Cena again. But now I'm gonna miss the Cohen New Works Festival, too. Perhaps I can get some discounted air tickets for non-profit drama events or something.

The Stand-Up About Nothing

Only in Austin you can find out Jerry Seinfeld is performing later in the day and still get tickets to see it. That's just what I did.

His performance tonight at UT's Bass Hall was very much what you see him do in the opening vignettes from his homonymous sitcom: pointing a deadpan, sardonic finger at the irrational and the banal in the lives of Americans, targetting everything from marriage and children to iPhones and public restrooms. For what it's worth, it's as funny as. And if you've followed his series as long as I have, you get the extra fun of listening to people as they throng out of the theater and realizing where Seinfeld gets his inspiration for. For instance, you hear people saying things like "see you" and "take care," and remember that episode in Season 2 where his end joke went like this:

"Take care now." Did you ever say that to somebody? "Take care now. Take care, now. Because, I'm not going to be taking care of you. So, you should take care, now." "Take care. Take care." What does this mean? "Take off!" Isn't that what you really want to say?

Just for the record, I googled this quote. I'm not that nerdy (or I am, but have a bad memory).

Favorite joke from tonight's performance: "Now walkers have wheels, and even brakes in the handles. How fast are these people going? If you're going fast enough to need brakes, perhaps you've been misdiagnosed."

PS: Kind of a Hebrew week we're having here in Austin, aren't we? Mazeltov!

“I didn’t come all the way down here to Austin just to fool ya”

So said Leonard Cohen in the middle of his timeless hit “Hallelujah” tonight at the Long Center. He’s touring the US for the first time in fifteen years, and I’ll tell you, it was worth the wait.

The whole gig lasted close to three hours – with six encores. Six piece band (including Austin-born Roscoe Beck, bassist and musical director of the tour), plus three backing vocals (including Sharon Robinson, Cohen’s composition partner for more than twenty years). It was lively, unpredictable and intense. A concert to remember.

Cohen’s voice sounds exactly like his records. Being a huge fan for a couple of years now, my first thought when I heard him thanking the audience and coming up with playful banter in between songs was “it speaks, too!” If you watch the Live in London DVD that was released just now, on March 31st, rest assured that that is the sound you hear live. No tricks.

Other than “Hallelujah,” the highlights of the show were “Who By Fire” and “The Partisan,” with much more complex and lively instrumentation than the studio versions; “Democracy,” fleshed out with verve and enthusiasm into a live anthem; and “First We Take Manhattan,” which prompted everyone to clap along and yell as Cohen adlibbed his famous chorus into a playful “then we take Beijing.” Two unexpected songs from his early years made their way into the setlist: “Hey, That’s No Way To Say Goodbye” and “Famous Blue Raincoat” (this one a little over the top – the six-piece-band treatment overshadowed the intimist melancholy of the song).

Believe the hype. This concert is as good as the press is making it out to be.

SXSW - Juliette and the Kicks

Now this doesn't happen every day in Brazil: I got kicked by Juliette Lewis. If you remember that her biggest film roles were in Cape Fear and Natural Born Killers, you know the danger I was in.

This time I barely made out alive. My luck was that she was only stage-diving. That's right, stage-diving. You might hear other people commenting about her gig on the first night of SXSW, with her new act called Juliette and the New Romantiques (whatever happened to "Juliette and the Licks"?), and how, in the middle of the last song of their set, she dove into the crowd and was carried some two or three yards away from the stage, then back. I got to help carry the weight of Ms. Lewis. That was when she kicked me, the ungrateful shrew.



The gig was amazing. I've heard some people compare her to Iggy Pop, and the parallel is plain to see: she doesn't stop moving. Her energy onstage is unbelievable. She's also got a knack for banter, exacting laughter and shouts from the crowd with considerable ease. With that, plus the great songs (I've got to find out the name of a bluesier one, which owes nothing to Janis Joplin), it was a great gig.

I'm still suing, though.

There ain't no party like a Rebirth party

'Cause a Rebirth party don't stop. Or so sings the Rebirth Brass Band, a New Orleans ensemble that graced the indoors stage at Stubb's tonight. Haven't seen Americans dance like that since the White Ghost Shivers gig at the Continental Club last January.

If you don't know them, perhaps the line-up will tell you everything you need to know: bass drum, snare drum, three trumpets, tuba, sax and trombone. It's one of those gigs where you can't help dancing. Like much of modern New Orleans jazz, it has a strong Caribbean syncopated beat. Very groovy.

High point of the show: their meddley of Michael Jackson's "Don't Stop Till You Get Enough" and Cab Calloway's "Minnie the Moocher." If that's not eclectic, then nothing is.

Bilingual Austin

Shortly before arriving in Austin, I came across a book called Handbook of the World, published by Oxford University Press. It had entries for every country in the world, ranging from one to eight pages and giving objective information: government, currency, languages, main industries, recent history et cetera. I was surprised to find the USA listed as a bilingual country. I did know about the masses of people who speak Spanish at home and the whole history of cultural ghettos in America, but seeing it officially acknowledged like that felt a little exaggerated. I no longer feel like that.

It’s not just the bilingual signs and warnings on the buses, but also the countless stores with bilingual billboards – or even billboards just in Spanish – that multiply the further you get from downtown. Even in central areas like Congress Avenue you can find Spanish-language newspapers like Buena Suerte, ¡Ahora Sí! and El Mundo. But of course, the strongest evidence of US bilingualism is the number of actual people speaking Spanish on the streets. Not a day goes by when I don’t walk by someone speaking it on the phone or with a friend.




America has a remarkable history of different cultures pressed together in limited spaces, and Texas is especially significant in its Tejano constituency. The acknowledgement and indulgence of linguistic differences is a testimony of the respectful attitude Americans have developed throughout their (granted, turbulent) history. Perhaps because of the tension from all the wars, territorial disputes and immigration, cultural differences seem to be more obvious in the USA than in other countries.

By comparison, Brazil is much less articulate in its regard for different languages. We do have communities that don’t speak Portuguese – there are Polish and Ukrainian towns in the countryside of Santa Catarina, and many people throughout the South who speak Italian or German at home, in addition to bilingual communities along the borders with Argentina and Uruguay. But the country would never consider itself bilingual. There’s an attitude of adherence to official policy in cultural matters that seems to be absent from the US (and England, too, judging from what I saw there). Brazilian culture has a widespread discourse that Brazilians are all the same, which on one hand makes for a very friendly climate of integration, but also downplays strong and important cultural differences.

Living in Austin certainly gives you the opportunity to rethink your views on cultural differences. After a while, Canada’s bilingual laws and money bills don’t seem so exotic anymore.

The Pretenders @ Stubb's

The Pretenders still got brass in pocket -- my brass, that is; $41.50 to be precise. But it was a great show. Not only the band was in great shape, but Chrissie Hynde was very talkative, joking all the time -- like this moment when she smelled...something funny from the stage and asked how far Willie Nelson's house was from there. My favorite banter moment from the gig, however, was when she said Austin might be the first vegetarian city in the US, and asked people to stop killing cows "because change is possible." I'm sure the owners of the venue, Stubb's B-B-Q, were among the people applauding her. I didn't know they had so many fast songs. The last thing I'd expect from them was a show for jumping and pogoing, but a sizeable part of the gig was exactly that. They did a great job with classics like "Brass in Pocket", "Don't Get Me Wrong" and "Back on the Chain Gang", the best song on the set. Their new song, "Breaking the Concrete", was also very catchy (it's the name of their current tour, by the way). It's only a pitty they didn't play "I'll Stand By You". That's the single greatest, barest, most truthful love song ever written. If you ever felt love was too complex to be put into words, listen to the song and think again. (And by the way, pay attention to the photo: there's some sort of see-through shield in front of the drum kit. I wonder if it's bullet-proof or something. In Austin, that would be the height of paranoia.)