Antunes Filho: in search of a national identity.

• Author: Tubert, Susana
• Position: Brazilian theater director

To be around theater director

Antunes Filho is to find oneself in the presence of a piercing, intense artist who prefers the search for "pre-mythical language" to the sound of "polished, empty talk." In 1988, Filho's artistic trajectory was recognized by the Association of Theatre Critics who honored him with the International Trophy for Revealing Brazilian Theatre to the World. The Award was a long deserved recognition. Since 1978, Filho's stunning production, Macunaima, had become an anticipated, highly successful staple at most international theater festivals in countries as widespread as France, Italy, West Germany, Belgium, Australia, Spain, Mexico, Venezuela, England, The Netherlands, Switzerland and the USA, among others.

The original tale of Macunaima was written by Mario de Andrade, a member of a polemical modernist group composed of Brazilian poets, artists and writers whose aim, between 1920 and 1922, was to denounce the stagnant quality of art that reinforced the myths of the past and the imposition of values from abroad. Andrade was one of the few writers in this artistic vanguard with an extraordinary social consciousness. He adopted a posture of resistance to Brazil's self-image as a dependent, colonized country and through humor and irony, poetry and popular traditions rediscovered the potentiality of a nation rich in cultural individuality.

Antunes Filho's own quest for the recognition of Brazil's identity through theater gave birth to the four-hour-long stage version of the novel. The episodic montage follows the fantastical adventures of the young Macunaima, a member of the Tapanhumas tribe who refuses, out of laziness, to understand himself and to assume an identity as a man of the Americas, the son of Vei, the Sun Goddess. After a series of trials that involve battles with dragons and encounters with snakes that turn into the moon, the "hero-anti-hero" falls into the demands of Sao Paulo's "civilization" where primitive values meet the urban world and clash. By the end of his journey, all that is left for the now mature Macunaima is to turn into the guiding star of the Great Bear constellation, shining over the chosen Amazonia. In the epic dramatization conceived by Filho, the stage became a wondrous environment for mysterious transformations, apparitions of mythological figures, and symbolic objects which transport us through time and space. The genuineness of the director's own connection to magical realism turned the...