Calixto, welcome back to Moving in November with you latest work Il Faux. In 2022 we opened the festival with your performance Feijoada and in 2020 we saw you in Luiz Abreu’s piece O Samba do Crioulo Doido. How do you situate Il Faux in relation to these two pieces?
First of all, thanks for having me back. It’s been a pleasure to develop this connection with Moving in November and get to know a bit more of Helsinki every year.
From a chronological point of view, Il Faux is a piece that began to be dreamed of and even worked on long ago, back in 2019, even before the invitation to reenact O Samba do Crioulo Doido. At that point, I was thinking about what to do next after oh!rage (2018) when a friend introduced me to Ta-Nehisi Coates and his amazing work, Between the World and Me.
This plan was interrupted by the invitation to reenact O Samba (2020). Right after that, in 2021, I was invited to create a piece in collaboration with choreographer Lia Rodrigues for Kunstenfestivaldesarts in Brussels, and then to be part of Lia’s portrait at Festival d’Automne in Paris, where I created Feijoada (2021). Especially for Feijoada, which was created during the COVID time, I didn’t want to invest in a solo project again; I needed to be surrounded by people.
Everything went kind of fast and hectic during those couple of years. After this period of agitation, going back to the idea of creating Il Faux seemed coherent to me: the questions that animated me at that point resonated with the questions raised in the preceding pieces.
However, in 2019, I would have certainly created a different piece, especially because of the working conditions I could bring to the project in 2022/23, having experienced three other projects in between. In this sense, I had the pleasure of having a bigger team with me. I could invite Luiz de Abreu to be an artistic advisor in the project (which is a luxury!) and I had the time to establish a nice collaboration with Rachel, Clay, and Eduardo to think together about the space, sound, and lights. All that meant a lot to me.
It’s also nice to think that in O Samba, the audience saw me in a very vulnerable position, naked and playing with the Brazilian flag in a way that might even be considered dangerous. In Feijoada, I felt that I could start an actual conversation with the audience in a very simple and informal way, which explored another layer of vulnerability for me.
We could never know how the piece could have been if it was created in 2019, but having done it after experiencing so many things in three years gave me some confidence, comfort, and desire to explore other possibilities and other vulnerabilities.
Your performance is inspired by the book Between the World and Me by African-American writer Ta-Nehisi Coates. How did you move further from this source creating Il Faux and working with subjects like invisible bodies, bodies at risk and bodies in danger?
The experience of reading Ta-Nehisi Coates was a delightful surprise! This book was recommended to me by my friend and inspirational artist Ghyslaine Gau. She thought I would connect with his writing, which has a Baldwin-like mood—kind of melancholic in my opinion. But it is also vividly wise and consistently accurate in its point of view on North American society. I read it as though I was revisiting a perspective on the history of a country that is, in a way, part of my life because we are very influenced by North American culture in Brazil.
What is also interesting is that he is a Black man talking about his experiences and those of his community, so the book offers much about the United States from a Black perspective. There is a Brazilian photographer and activist who once wrote, “There is a history of Black people without Brazil. What doesn’t exist is a history of Brazil without Black people.” It seems we can say the same about the United States.
This Black perspective is where I connected with him, especially because he comes from a precarious background, where poverty and violence were very close to him—and the fear. This fear was transmitted to him, and he, in turn, transmitted it to his son (even when he is talking about courage and empowerment). The fear that his kid could, at any moment, lose his body.
This is the point where the book resonated with me. I could connect with that experience, that transmission, that fear, because I lived that at home. This is printed on my skin.
For me, it was never a matter of reproducing the book itself but of allowing it to give me a ground on which to build some reflections and some delirious suppositions. I thought that out of fear, one could build capes, masks, other personas—a character we invent to cope with the dangers of the world. All those ideas of doubling oneself, mask games, and creating a persona became interesting notions to explore in creating the piece. Practices of dissociation, manipulation, isolation of parts, and ventriloquism seemed like fertile ground to explore.
Finally, throughout the creation process, I realized that Il Faux is not about fear, just as Ta-Nehisi’s book is not about fear. It is about what we create out of fear and oppression, and the act of creation—in a book, in dance—is already a rebellion against that.
Could you speak a little more about the paper ‘kraft’ that you are using in this performance and the puppets that you are building with it?
The “Kraft” element that I use in the piece—and which holds a quite central place in it—is an amalgamation of many references that are integral to the work. At the beginning of each new creation, I create a universe of references—photos, films, quotations, etc. This helps me build a dialogue with works that inspire me and influence my thinking. It aids in considering body practices and the imagistic universe of the work. These references come from diverse sources, and this collection follows an intuitive logic. At some point, I stumbled upon an image of a man “talking” to a human-sized puppet made out of what we call in Europe “kraft paper.” That intrigued me, I wanted to invest on that strange situation.
Another reference for me in Il Faux is the Brazilian visual artist Maxwell Alexandre and his series of paintings called “Pardo é papel” (an approximate translation would be “kraft is paper”). Pardo, besides being a type of ordinary paper used as a support for Alexandre’s paintings, is also an ethno-racial classification according to the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics. The term is used to describe a large portion of the Brazilian population that is not white or black but is between the two. Of course, as we all know, this has a direct impact on how close one is to privileges: the darker your skin color, the further away you are from them. Alexandre comes from the largest favela in Rio de Janeiro, Rocinha, where around 70% of the population is considered Black.
In Portuguese, you can translate “black” in two different ways: preto and negro (equivalent to “black” and “negro” in English, though in French it is impossible to differentiate). So, in a very smart political move, the Black movement back in the nineties included the pardo population in the negro classification, which makes the negro population (Blacks and Pardos) the largest demographic in Brazil. The violence rates against the negro population in Brazil are akin to war statistics. So, all this idea of miscegenation in my country is about violence, from the colonial period to the present day.
It seems like a harsh story, but I soften it by sharing this information in a very informal atmosphere, exploring the confusions that translations between languages can create, but also using it as material to provoke the audience and invite them to come with me on my trip. The Kraft/Pardo paper is also the material I use to make the puppet, which plays an important role in the piece, as it is all about transmission and manipulation. The dance for me becomes this strange situation where I talk to the audience, sharing some harmless (or not) information, while building a puppet from the paper on the floor. There is an identification between me and the puppet(s). The Kraft paper is also present as the element that gives shape and depth to the space. It’s an “overkraft” space. Thus, Kraft paper is both a scenographic and dramaturgical element in Il Faux.