Língua Brasileira

Língua Brasileira [Brazilian Language] is a joint creation of stage director Felipe Hirsch and singer-songwriter Tom Zé. The title of this musical-scenic production evokes one of the latter’s songs, where language is declensed as a repository of tensions and contradictions: “Fair and cultured lady/ language of Aviz/ a fado of daggers/ misfortunes of Inez/ as you sit and sew/ a multitude of woes/ honey and bitterness.” On the stage, six actors and four musicians bring to our eyes and ears the epic prose and poetry of the peoples who formed the written and spoken Portuguese of Brazil, their myths and cosmogonies, from its remote Iberian sources, through Romans, Barbarians and Arabs, Africa and Latin America. A poetic tour of a “Babel of languages in full rut”, a splendour not lacking in miseries: in Brazil today, roughly 200 languages are nearing extinction, in result of the annihilation of indigenous peoples. In the words of critic Noemi Jaffe, Língua Brasileira is a “drift through times and spaces”, the “orgasmic explosion of a language that is as adept at oppressing as at liberating”.