Have you been overhearing people speaking Portuguese around campus? If so, you might be hearing members of the visiting theater company from Curitiba, Brazil, spending a few weeks at Loyola. The troupe, Ave Lola, came to the school in partnership with Professor Daniel Pinha, MFA, an associate professor of theater, to produce a play written and directed by Ana Rosa Genari Tezza, the company’s founder.
The play is called “Tchekhov”, and the first show will be on Feb. 20 at 7 p.m. at the Black Box Theatre. Essentially it is a story about how theater can overcome challenges.
Loyola students will be performing and the Brazilians have been working behind the scenes teaching and directing. Some would think the language would be a problem and would make this journey more complicated, but it is exactly the opposite.
Mari Fofana is a junior at Loyola who is acting in the play. She said that helping the director think of a word in English feels more collaborative.
“I don’t want to call it a language barrier because I feel like there is a difference there, but I don’t think it makes it any harder to do things if anything, I think it makes it more real, like getting to hear her own original idea and then getting to help build that up,” Fofana said about the whole process and preparation.
She added that she likes how they work together to come up with something new.
“It’s kind of unconventional. It feels a lot more genuine getting to try out so many new things. I’m not necessarily being set in Stone right from the beginning, there’s a lot more room for everyone to be themselves,” Fofana said.
The director, Ana Rosa, started acting when she was 18 and has been a director for 16 years. She has traveled the world acting, from Chile to Denmark, and she even has a play that is circulating in New York right now. Still, she is really excited to be in Baltimore.
She and other members of Ave Lola arrived at Loyola on Jan. 29 and were very well received by the students and staff they have met.
“It’s a beautiful college, and we were very well received. The young people are very willing, eager to work, and curious, and these encounters between two different cultures are very enriching for everyone,” Rosa said.
The experience will be short, intense, and challenging because they only have less than a month to prepare the play, but she is excited and liking the experience so far.
Pinha, the professor who organized their coming to Baltimore, is also from Brazil and talked about how he met Ave Lola in a previous production he made and what it represents to him.
“I think about Brazil, but I think exclusively about Ave Lola because I had the chance to work with them on ‘Noite, O Sonho de Verão’ and there I understood a bit of the best of Brazil. So, being able to bring them here as a representation of a cultural force in Brazil is very powerful not only because of the artistic work but because of the people they are,” Pinha said.
This is the second time Pinha invited Brazilian artists to Loyola. The first time was back in 2021 when he brought the internationally acclaimed Brazilian actress Fernanda Montenegro to speak about her creative work. As a Brazilian, he has the desire to talk about his home country and get people to know its culture, music, and literature.
“It’s about being able to talk about Brazil as a Brazilian, right? I’ve lived here for 20 years, so the idea of being able to talk about where I come from also gives me a feeling of explaining who I am to my students, of being able to understand what I bring in my baggage. But beyond that, it’s more than a personal thing, it’s the desire to talk about Brazil in this country,” Pinha said.
He was thrilled to welcome the Brazilian troup to Loyola.
“I think my big idea is to bring people closer together, to look at human beings at their best and worst and understand the differences, that we are all on the same planet,” Pinha said.
Tickets for this weekend’s performances of “Tchekhov” are available on loyolaevents.universitytickets.com for Thursday, Feb. 20 at 7 p.m., Friday, Feb. 21 at 8 p.m., and two showings at 6 p.m. and 8 p.m. on Saturday, Feb. 22.
