Gazes from the South - The Tchiloli and the Work of René Tavares

At a Glance

Metadata	Details
Publication Date	2020-01-01
Journal	African Arts
Authors	Ana Nolasco
Institutions	Universidade Europeia

Abstract

all photos courtesy of the artist, except where otherwise notedIn a series of drawings published in 2011 (Figs. 1-4), René Tavares expresses his experience of the Tchiloli, a drama endemic to São Tomé and Príncipe which is intertwined with his own artistic development. In this work, paintings and drawings exchange roles in a continued masquerade spread across blank white pages where, like erratic thoughts, gestures interrupt each other, wander and digress into diluted stains of colour.In one of these images, we can see a figure on the left, possibly the emperor Charlemagne,1 wearing a crown and a red cloak, whose face blends with a dark stain in the background (Fig. 1). In the foreground, slightly to the right, stands the count de Ganelon, the empress’s brother, heading somewhere to the right of the observer. Where his face should be, we find a lightly sketched mask, the eyes of which are set on a point invisible to us, beyond the limits of the blank white page, towards which the count makes his way. Despite the dark and dusky impression created by the diluted lines and blotches, the eccentricity of the scene is striking. We can distinguish different elements belonging to distinct time periods: a feathered crown, military insignia and commendations, an obvious disguise of modern sunglasses, and a fake white beard on a dark face with African features. The whole scene is permeated by costumes that recall those worn in the royal courts of Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.What meaning is behind this arrangement of discrepant timelines? In what way does this incongruence represent a “creative selection and cultural struggle,” to use the terms chosen by Michel-Rolph Trouillot (cited in Crichlow and Northover 2009: ix, xiv)? To further explore the latent aspects of the gesture of the Tchiloli, I will take as my starting point two specific works in which this dynamic appears to me to be the most pronounced: Two Lives (2012), and Cards of Tchiloli (2014).São Tomé and Príncipe was colonized by the Portuguese from 1470, when they discovered the uninhabited archipelago, up until its independence in 1975. After local sugar cane production—introduced to the islands in 1493—was outcompeted by Brazilian exports in the seventeenth century, the islands subsisted mainly on sugar and cacao production and as a commercial hub for the slave trade. From the outset, labor was ensured by enslaved people of various ethnicities brought from the Gulf of Guinea, Gabon, and Angola. This made communication difficult due to the lack of a common language. The enslaved people were usually kept away from their compatriots as a way of preventing rebellious uprisings. This led to the birth of Creole as the archipelago’s lingua franca.Part translocation of the African metaphorical rite of the dead, part theatrical drama of European heritage inspired by the Carolingian cycle and adapted to the idiosyncrasies of São Tomé and Príncipe, the Tchiloli is a kind of multimedia performance (Kalewska 2005), made up of textual narrative, music, dance, and acting where, as in medieval European theater, all characters, both male and female, are played by male actors.Tchiloli is considered by some to be a “costume drama,” and wardrobe is an essential element in the creation of its distancing effect, as noted by anthropologist Paulo Valverde (2000: 51) (Figs. 5-6). Generally bringing together a range of different elements—military uniforms, Napoleonic-era costumes, opulent seventeenth- and eighteenth-century court clothes, contemporary trinkets—this creative costuming is ruled, in Valverde’s words, by a logic of bricolage … where significant individual creativity is permitted … [leading to the combination of] dark or mirrored glasses of different colors, a badge from Portuguese airline TAP, a statue of the Virgin Mary balanced on the Marquis of Mantua’s hat, the use of pistols that are more realistic than the simple plastic replicas often seen during Carnival by the Dukes Aimão and Beltrão, a fan attached to the elaborate hat of a Captain Montalvão (Valverde 2000: 52-53).The textual part of the drama is mostly based on the religious play by the blind playwright Baltasar Dias, The Tragedy of the Marquis of Mantua, written in 1540, which has roots in the Carolingian theatrical tradition. In brief, the play tells the story of the aspirations to power of the emperor’s brother-in-law Ganelon, which are stymied by the existence of the royal heir, the legitimate son of the emperor Charlemagne. Learning of his nephew’s love for Sybil, wife of Valdevinos, nephew of the marquis of Mantua, Ganelon finds the ideal opportunity to frame his nephew for murder. He proceeds to convince his nephew that this is the only way to attain his heart’s desire. The core of the play takes place after the murder and deals with the marquis’s struggle to avenge his nephew and Charlemagne’s difficult choice between the fulfilment of his duty as head of state and his feelings towards his son. In the end, the emperor’s sense of patriotic duty conquers his paternal instincts and he condemns his own son to death.The history of the introduction of the play to São Tomé and Príncipe is controversial and adds to the mysterious nature of the performance. While some researchers, including Fernando Reis and Françoise Gründ, trace its introduction back to the sixteenth or possibly seventeenth century, when it may have been brought to the archipelago by master sugar growers from Madeira—a hypothesis which is the most generally accepted position—others, such as Paulo Alves Pereira or António Ambrósio, indicate the São Toméan elite—the so-called forros or “sons of the earth,” descendants of freedmen and Europeans—as the drama’s likely importers (Seibert 2009). This elite would have come into contact with the Baltasarian play during their travels, likely in the form incorporated in the Romanceiro (1851) by Almeida Garrett during his studies in Europe.While the most explicitly political component of the play is carried in its traditional European format, the dramatic adaptation—its symbolic and ritualistic character—has its roots in Africa, bringing together the traditions of the various peoples gathered on the islands. Thus we find in the Tchiloli the influence of the “Djidiu,” a bard-like figure and storyteller belonging to a caste of professional actors from the then kingdom of Mali and the “Mandigas,” dating to the twelfth century (Seibert 2009: 74). The complex game of dance steps and jerky movements that follows the monologue is reminiscent of the motion of the statuettes and puppets used in some African rituals, like the curiously named Togolese thitchili puppets which represent the spirits of ancestors (Guillemin 2012, Zimmer 1996), to guard the frontier between the world of the living and that of the dead2—as, for example in the initiation ceremony melan, practiced by the people of Beti, Cameroon (Thé 1985: 245-48). We also find the danço congo, an exorcism ritual forbidden by the colonizers (Gründ 1996: 170), brought back to life in the character Captain Montauban3; black faces painted white, which is considered to be the color of the “in-accessibles” or spirits4 in West African countries like Gabon; the ritualized offering of libations of palm wine to local saints; and musical instruments such as the bombos, the drums, and especially the bamboo flute or pitus.Because any manifestation of African culture—such as the danço-congo, the D’Jambi ritual, or African funeral rites—was forbidden among the enslaved, whom the Portuguese forcibly baptised (Mata 1993), the Tchiloli was a way of perpetuating these prohibited practices in the context of colonialism. In this manner, the art form was a kind of political resistance and also served a therapeutic purpose (Seibert 2005: 683). Indeed, as Paulo Alvares Pereira notes, it is easy for the people of São Tomé and Príncipe to “find in the property owned by the marquis of Mantua, a parcel of Charlemagne’s empire, a parallel with their own country, exploited and humiliated—whereby the election of the marquis as their champion in the fight for justice, an expression of their legitimate desire to build a nation free of colonial oppression” (2008: 71).In this context the Tchiloli gradually became a political gesture that created bonds of resistance and self-affirmation spanning generations. Here, I understand “gesture” as defined by Vilém Flusser: a means of expression that is symbolic in nature (2014: 253-54). Symbolic, I am tempted to add, as Rancière saw it: “not the figurative expression of an abstract thought, but the isolated fragment which bears the potency of the whole” (2011: 98). Part of this gesture of resistance was the hidden preservation of African traditions until the country’s independence in 1975, and the gesture has continued to the present day through the creation of new forms of epistemological decolonizsation. Today, with no further need for subterfuge, the Tchiloli can give voice to comments on current political realities and abuses of power. In this way, I argue, this creative expression is no longer working against colonialism but against the growing trend towards homogenization that has accompanied the age of globalization.Within the visual gesture that unites color and light, René Tavares (b. 1983) makes the African framework contemporary, updating the alliance between African and European cultures in a reflection of the artist’s own paradigm, which he sees mirrored in the Tchiloli. As the artist points out, in the TchiloliA native of São Tomé and Príncipe, Tavares possesses a visceral link to the Tchiloli, an integral part of the daily life of most islanders: in an interview5 he mentions that, as a child, he believed the characters from the play would visit him at night. It is therefore natural that such an experience would leave a mark in his later artistic work, which demonstrates an underlying vein of research into the Tchiloli, purposefully open ended but only ever momentarily interrupted. This investigation has been a latent companion in the course of the artist’s travels, be it during his stay in Dakar, Senegal, or even Rennes, France, where he completed his studies, as well as throughout his travels across Europe and Africa. He is currently embarked on a project aiming to update the latest text to serve as a basis for the performance, one published by Fernando Reis in the 1960s, in order to, in his words, “invest it with more strength.” The influence of the Tchiloli in his work does not always appear in the most obvious fashion, but remains inherent to the impulse of his gesture, as a state of mind.In mapping explicit references to the Tchiloli in Tavares’s work, we discern a body of images, some of them fragmented, spanning multiple works. A queen reminiscent of the Tchiloli, for example, can be seen next to the statue of liberty in Behind the Mask Project I (2011), a Pitú player trying to bring Valdevino’s life, while in Sukida vs. Tchiloli, part of the triptych Folklore Day (2011) (Fig. 6), Tavares superimposes a marquis and a princess, suggestive of Valdevinos and Sybil—the marquis of Mantua’s nephew and his wife—onto the image of a Japanese motorcycle against a yellow striped background that could depict a boxing ring.In Dança na Sanzala com Sobas de Angola, part of the triptych Old Colony People I (2012) (Fig. 7), the orange and crimson colors of the clothing; the white that cuts into the green of the dark central figure, appearing to melt into a runoff of liquid paint; as well as the sharply contoured figures emerging in the night of Sanguês de Branco from the same triptych (Fig. 8), can be regarded as pictorial translations of African costumes and rhythms into a contemporary language.Tavares’s means of expression cycle through drawing, photography, video, and performance, depending on the message that he seeks to convey. However, common to all of the methods he adopts is an artistic gesture that is dramatic and physical, be it in the intensity of the gestures etched out on paper or canvas, their obvious weight or levity, or the implication of physical movement, as seen in performances like Repúblika, where the artist asks passers-by permission to take their picture holding a sign with the message “I am the Republic,” only actually photographing those who commit to the message, implying in their movements or stances an affirmation of political emancipation.In my opinion, it is in this performativity of the work’s unfinished and indefinite character that we can see the presence of the Tchiloli, which is transversal to Tavares’s work. This presence is not limited to visual expression but is also part of the creative process itself, zigzagging intermittently to the rhythm of a hybridization of times, places, and materials that flows indiscriminately across their supposedly watertight boundaries. Tavares’s artistic practice can thus be considered a continuous multimedia work in progress, just like the Tchiloli in the sense that it is never fixed into a single form of expression. As Valverde notes, the Tchiloli is “through the performative relevance of its movement—which is incapable of being completely reconstituted by language … an unfinished story, the ending of which, although important, is allusive” (2000: 11). In this way, it never has a definitive ending. Although, textually, the story ends with the execution of Prince Dom Carloto, this conclusion is open to various interpretations from the audience. For some, for example, the prince flees, while for others, the high court simulates his execution—two of many possible interpretations (Valverde 2000: 26). The very incompleteness and indetermination of Tavares’s artistic gesture is therefore a transposition of the Tchiloli’s incompleteness and indetermination into another language. In this sense, the artist’s gesture is a movement that—like the characters in the Tchiloli—must always be performed.In a different way, some of the artist’s other works attempt to explore those interstitial regions escaping classification or any attempt at a coherent narrative that would systematize their elements into an organic whole. 40 Cards of Tchiloli (Figs. 1-4), for example, and Two Lives (2012) (Fig. 9) are, in my opinion, two works where the artistic gesture of the Tchiloli is most evident. In the first of these works, it can be seen in the camouflaged way in which it suggests movements, gestures, and fragments of a narrative, while in the second, it is present the flagrant absence of that same line of separation where the metamorphosis of disguise occurs, presenting us with two images that question the notion of essence, which is situated neither in the actor nor character they play, but in their interchangeability In the next section, I will analyze these two works, reflecting on the gesture of the Tchiloli as something which must be continually replayed, perpetuating itself through its metamorphosis into different forms of expression.40 Cards of Tchiloli (Figs. 1-4) was exhibited for the first time at the 6th Biennale of Art and Culture of São Tomé and Príncipe in 2011. It consists of a series of A3-sized drawings, which are dominated by black interspersed with monochromatic spots of blue, green, red, and occasionally purple. Here Tavares illustrates an intertwining of facts, histories, and fiction through the image of a deck of cards, with each king represented by a historical figure. The King of Spades is represented by King David of Israel, the King of Clubs by Alexander the Great, the King of Diamonds by Julius Caesar, while Charlemagne takes on the role of the King of Hearts.On the lower left side of one of 40 Cards of Tchiloli’s painted can see the of Valdevinos that his remains in the performance, to the of a (Fig. In the Tchiloli, after the symbolic of the murder of Valdevinos in the all of the this which, through its visual to the separation between the high court of the are with palm to represent the the court of the marquis of and his represented by a made of green Paulo Alvares points this way, the central role of the the of the symbolic exchange between the world of the living and the world of the that is present in many African This symbolic exchange is also in the way in which, the spirits of the are the spirits of those who played roles in the of or such as wine and local even which are common in African are spread out on the to the are also made to the where actors of the Tchiloli been to that the of the are also present during the performance and that when one of the as they are well it is he has been the of the who played the role For the of the textual story with presence of the tempted to by the music, the the of … is one of the of the … of this story by traditional São Toméan (2000: In this cultural the between life and and are and in the body can of of which are or distinct … from their individual (Valverde 2000: of the is in this (Fig. through the of and the between the black it and the of the paper which, to the it and it from the the impression that it is in the The of this scene by Tavares on the between and in a modern context and the of that it As Paulo Alvares Pereira notes, symbolic that the of a to the to the cycle of (2008: and is thus of on modern political the of has never been central to the on the for example, which was incorporated into the of by Brazilian that, from the very of their the Portuguese were to a of and This was by after when the its to take towards the independence of their It was used to Portuguese with a from to This continued after the of in as the of a of and However, as a and its people to project the of the something that in the that the country’s In this colonial was in São Tomé and Príncipe after the archipelago’s the people living in the of the which, to the most accepted of is from enslaved who were on the as other, more a in their as and the they and against which the elite itself This figure of the from is by the that São Tomé and Príncipe is an archipelago, isolated by the from the African this the African elements of the Tchiloli, such as the of the and music, and the dance, in to the text in and (Seibert 2005: an which the between the European and the in an and manner, this process a not as an of but as a cultural of elements that can be a distinct a context of and this way, one can an between and as is no to play, is to both are that meaning through practice in a therefore different elements in different with each new a new form of as what them from one another is of their As in play, on with a in are often on of and the through which their own are the means of through not by or from the of multiple in the various drawings that 40 Cards of Tchiloli different through the of spots of color on in the rhythms of gestures between the of black and white and the of In this way, the images the and the of the canvas, which itself to the in a in reflection on the between and images, the to the of its … not to distinguish form as to discern … the presence of the from other forms of sense and (2000: The image is by an incompleteness that the and his sense of in which image and 2000: to anthropologist it is the of visual the towards as the in with the of is the behind the of and the of the between which the other its of This is one that only the of the distancing itself from In the by Tavares’s works to the of what is seen as well as the set of of classification and to the into that from in the of its own in the between itself and the Crichlow and Northover in their of line of the that to in the have their by that it does not Crichlow and Northover that while it remains to and to take into the history that these to and it is more to on living in this by means of new realities of and time from the of and local limits by its narrative and the political at the time of each performance, the drama is of the Tchiloli existence has its own (Seibert 2005: The most of São Tomé and Príncipe of the historical figures that appear in the medieval play them to a that is neither nor but an a this new is not or but and always to only in the of its The actors with the characters of the Tchiloli that they to to be and that the other and the during this way, the of the game in 40 Cards of Tchiloli can be as a kind of in any game a to the other that does not to any physical It on the of the implying a between those escaping the of time and for the to the world is a of with possible The world that we through language is like the language we from the is limited by the other, with no possible points of of no or language at its the of a the artist the Tchiloli in the of where with order and each being We can the and order as the of existence and as the with In the current context of on that are to with the reflection on power by 40 Cards of Tchiloli a kind of that than a between and and it these and the of which is by the of the Two Lives (2012) series (Fig. 9) is of in In these the is always the slightly The background is white on the left, where the is in on the right, where the same is as a character from the Tchiloli. The being at The of a more not a that the other, preventing the of the in the In some of the is very that could to the of the on the left and the one in on the right as the same The and of the in Two Lives a an two realities side by with São Toméan is no of the For example, people have a to them at and another by which they are a so-called or A is generally not by other as it is considered to be the most part of a being when used in (Valverde 2000: In the body of an individual can also be by a of as in D’Jambi during which can be by a of a different or time In this way, the body is also a of a that can various is no and of The of between the and the it with a of in which no longer has (Valverde 2000: the context of this the roles by the are not roles in the sense of the something to an that can be and at Tchiloli characters the and are from to as which, until very were only to of the same The between the and the with the between of the even being in when the Tchiloli is the can only be at after his work and the noted the of

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Original Source

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1162/afar_a_00537

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