O SALÃO DE BAILE ELÉTRICO - 2012

THE NEW ELECTRIC BALLROOM

by Enda Walsh

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Tragicomedy in the tone of a fable written by Irish playwright Enda Walsh. He debuted in 2012 at Teatro Cultura Inglesa de Pinheiros, following a season at SESC Pinheiros and another at ECUM, continuing on trips throughout the interior of the state.

Two sexagenarian sisters remain confined in their youth, in the 50s, embarking on a game of humor, cruelty and nostalgia. The youngest acts like a sadistic director, forcing them to relive those memories and dress up in gaudy prom clothes. They are constantly visited by a fishmonger, in charge of bringing news about the city, and who says he isn't of much use. The assembly was part of the Cultura Inglesa Festival.

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“The Electric Ballroom” is a fable filled with humor, cruelty and nostalgia, written by the Irishman Enda Walsh, an author who has been awarded several times and celebrated for his radical wordplay and the universality of his work, and for the absolutely visceral power of interpretation that your parts allow.

Breda and Clara are two sixty-year-old ladies, sisters who have been confined since the memorable days of the “Electric Ballroom”, the remote possibility of happiness in their youth in the 1950s.

Obsessed with reconstructing those obscure memories, they take turns dressing each other in the surreal and gaudy outfit of their seventeenth birthday party, bringing different perspectives of the night in which their hope of love was destroyed by an extremely seductive singer a la Elvis. Presley.

Almost 20 years younger, Ada was unable to escape the effects of the tragic story of her elders and acts like a sadistic stage master. Giving stern instructions, she carefully controls the soundtrack of the past with a reel-to-reel tape recorder.

The sisters' Beckettian cloistered existence is broken by the entry of Patsy, the fishmonger, who longs for an invitation to participate, but who is strictly prohibited from crossing the entry barrier.

He calls himself “a man who is good for nothing,” but he has the potential to bring Ada into the present moment. His initially comical soliloquies capture a sense of abysmal loneliness, which echoes in the dissertation in which Breda says that “we don’t want to be alone but we are alone”.

As the bizarre performances repeat themselves, there is the possibility of consolation, not just in the tea and cake that Clara begs for, but in the silent acceptance that “we all have our roles”, and this is how we live.

"The long soliloquies, full of details, which are shot at a rhythm that only preserves space for the breathing necessary for the actors of "O Salão de Baile Elétrico", which is only shown on Fridays and Saturdays at the SESC Auditorium, can cause some vertigo. Pinheiros, manage to clearly convey the words created by Enda Walsh. By directing with the simplicity desired to give birth to the poetry of the text interpreted with undeniable talent, Cristina Cavalcanti reveals the anxious despair of the uncertain future.

There are three sisters who share the same roof, the two eldest – Breda (Angela Barros) and Clara (Lilian Blanc), both in visceral interpretations, flying between the drama, the pathetic, the voluptuousness, among other passions, with vigor and talent share the trauma of the frustration of an unsuccessful love relationship. Fear or cowardice causes both of them to remain confined in the house, reliving the events that occurred at the electric dance that led to their exclusion from the real time they share with Ada (Andréa Tedesco, in an excellent performance).

This imprisonment on the plane of memory, which is evident, is the daily game of the two - counting and retelling the last moments that led to the trauma of not consummating their sexual and love initiations -, the way of evoking their memories, from enjoyment to conviction that banning himself from the possibility of placing himself at the mercy of possible rejection justifies his exclusion from social life, is broken by the frequent visits of Patsy (the impeccable Edu Guimarães), a talkative and also anxious fishmonger.

What was the task of the 20 years younger sister, Ada, the informative report of the outside world, takes on less formal contours with Patsy's interference and breaks the dreamlike atmosphere of the evocative representation of Brenda and Clara, at first they bother the sisters, but, later , ends up being the hope of redemption, with the romantic rapprochement between Ada and the fishmonger. Will the ending be happy? I leave it to the reader of this text to check out this thought-provoking The Electric Ballroom. I can only say that there is more than the nostalgia of a time: the piece seems like a snapshot of our days, where the cold and dreamlike reality of virtual relationships that, apparently. It deprives us of future disappointments, makes us self-exiled from real desires."

Michel Fernandes , for Aplauso Brasil