What Your Naked Bodies Told Me

Twelve actors were seated on a game board, staring intently at us. I entered and took a seat in a chair in the corner. Spectators were scattered across the board, clustered in small groups of five or six around each actor. In front of me on the floor sat actor Daniel Tonsig, who looked deep into our eyes for long, silent seconds. The audience was being watched by the performers as the last arrivals wandered the board, looking for a place to settle. Once everyone was finally seated, filling the Teatro Manás Laboratório once again, Musician-actor Flávio Pacato stood up with his accordion and launched O que meu corpo nu te conta? (What does my naked body tell you?), one of the most vital works to grace the São Paulo cultural scene in recent years.

I won’t describe the play in detail, as that would betray the vibrant, visceral experience of those 75 minutes. It would also be pointless to describe a performance designed to be a unique, individual journey for every person in the audience. And I don’t use the word “unique” loosely—I know it’s generally reserved for snowflakes or fingerprints. The journey here is, in fact, programmatically unique. Each scene lasts about four minutes. Afterward, every audience member must move, choosing their own non-obvious, non-linear path. Just when you think you understand the dynamic, everything is upended, and the actors themselves move. This means you might watch the same scene more than once, and it also means that seeing every scene in a single sitting is impossible. On September 20, for instance, I saw Eduardo Godoy’s scene twice. On the 21st, I saw Daniel Tonsig’s twice.

As if that weren’t enough, the cast changes from one performance to the next. I attended the 6 p.m. show on September 20 and, having decided to write about it, returned for the 8 p.m. show on the 21st. The first day’s cast included Agmar Beirigo, Ana Bahia, Bruno Rods, Creão, Daniel Tonsig, Eduardo Godoy, Flavio Pacato, Letícia Alves, Renan Rezende, Silvia Suzy, Thiene Okumura and Vini Hideki. On the 21st, Creão and Silvia Suzy were replaced by João Ricken and Julia Leite. Both nights featured a special appearance by guest actor Bruno Ferian.

The play is an exercise in autofiction that shatters audience expectations at every turn. The scenes, performed by an entirely nude cast, unfold simultaneously, most carrying a confessional tone. These bodies, stripped of all protection, lay bare their secrets, sharing the most diverse experiences: sexual initiation, old age, fatphobia, race relations, motherhood, pedophilia, rape and homophobia. But the themes alone don’t capture the stories. While the scenes deal with these topics, they also cast a shadow back onto the audience. Every laugh or tear from us becomes a confession of our own impulses to the actors. The scenes, constructed with a rare poetic finesse, feature twists that can leave you horrified by a laugh you let out just moments before. The darkness in their revealed secrets meets our own shadow, which begins to watch us intently. I must admit, without giving anything away, that a laugh that escaped me in the first moments of a scene by Renan Rezende came back to haunt me several times later on.

During the scenes, other actors shout lines from their own texts, causing their colleagues to pause and look up, reminding us of the larger performance unfolding all around. We are constantly confronted with the idea that the secret being shared with us is just one of many, and that we can never grasp the whole of the board that surrounds us. In these moments that break the dramatic illusion, we are reminded that we are in a theater. And then we immediately forget again.

The transition between scenes effectively turns the spectator into a performer. We get up and proceed to the next spot on the board as if nothing happened, as if we were unaffected and ready for the next story. We continue our performance of normality while the actors look us in the eyes, metaphorically undressing us in the process. They see our reactions, perceive our discomforts and excitements… perhaps even better than we do ourselves.

The play is interspersed with moments that expose the dramatic artifice through music and textual interventions, producing the illusion that the plot (if one can even use that word) is a flow of confessions mixed with artistic interruptions. I was seduced by this idea a few times, only to have the rug pulled out from under me again by the actors, finding myself lost in the narrative once more. At one point, while watching a scene, I heard another actor perform a text I had witnessed from an actress just minutes earlier. Whose body, then, does the confession belong to? It was then I realized that the moments of explicit artifice—when the actors make us sing, “But it’s not everything I can control,” while mimicking their hand movements—are actually the moments of greatest honesty. They are interventions that explain (while intending to confuse) what is happening before our eyes.

But calling it all artifice doesn’t resolve the dilemma of the confessional tone created by Coletivo Impermanente under Marcelo Várzea’s direction. We know the actors are the authors of the texts presented. And there are indeed autobiographical elements that are not easy to digest. The traumas and intense experiences they portray were lived, to some degree, by one of those bodies that stands naked before us. There is a complex confidentiality in this confession. The secret is told, but we don’t know whose it is. The naked body telling the story simultaneously protects and exposes its author. Nothing prevents the actors from performing scenes they wrote themselves—but nothing guarantees it, either. The performance’s verisimilitude rests entirely on our assumptions and, at times, our prejudices. We cannot judge it without facing an ethical crisis. How can we judge whether a performance about rape is plausible without inevitably confessing that we are judging whether we believe the naked body before us is “rapable”? To believe or to doubt the scene’s truth is an act of confession from the audience—a confession that forces us to look our own shadow in the eye, before a body that may have already suffered the consequences of a similar shadow’s actions.

The dilemma of the confessions’ truthfulness is rooted in the play’s origin. During the pandemic, Marcelo Várzea presented a show on Zoom called “Inconfessáveis” (“Unconfessables”) with an even larger group of actors. At the end of each performance, spectators voted on whether the confession was true or false, creating a competition to see who could get the most “true” votes. The audience believed the winner was the one who had been most convincing. Among the actors, however, the goal was to get as close as possible to a 50/50 split—to confuse the audience so thoroughly that half believed it was a personal confession and half judged it to be fiction. After this experience, Várzea invited some of the actors to rewrite their texts for a new show, this time intertwining confession with nudity. The pandemic had shown us how fragile and impermanent our bodies were. Merging the impermanence of the body with that of memory, Várzea formed the Coletivo Impermanente (Impermanent Collective) and premiered O que meu corpo nu te conta? in 2021.

The play is now in its tenth season, which ends on September 28. There’s a chance it could be the last, due to a complete lack of sponsorship. I wanted to end this text, however, not with a complaint about funding or a plea for donations, but with an attempt at an answer. What does my naked body tell you? the actors of Impermanente ask. I can whisper what your bodies told me—or rather, what they made me experience. For a short time, amidst the aridity of life, your bodies made me breathe art again. They reminded me of the almost indescribable pleasure of seeing an artifice so well employed that it is present even in its feigned absence, wresting my own actions from my control. I remember in college reading a text by Kant on the sublime and spending days trying to understand that feeling. If memory serves me right, he defined the terrible sublime as the feeling we have when, faced with something that could annihilate our material existence, we realize the infinite capacity of our reason to comprehend that danger. Years later, at the top of a castle tower on a trip, I felt it. I saw the terrifying nature and the abyss at my feet; I perceived my own smallness before the landscape that surrounded me; and I felt a kind of indescribable pleasure in being able to observe that which could destroy me in a blink, and to grasp, in a single instant, that immensity. On September 20, when the play ended, I remained seated for a few moments, stunned by the fact that I had, for the second time in my life, encountered that feeling.

In short, your naked bodies told me of the abyss—but whose abyss was it?

The collective Impermanente is currently supported by the Rouanet Law and is seeking companies and individuals interested in allocating part of their taxes to the play. I would be more than happy to help connect interested parties with them to ensure the project’s future (contact me via email: caio.esteves.souza@gmail.com). This is the kind of project that fills us with pride and deserves to be seen in every major city in Brazil.