The (un)correct distance

Abstract

“Ele escreveu uma peça sobre negros” was the explosive title of the original project of the playwright and director Alexandre Dal Farra that gave rise to the long journey of the spectacle that is the theme of this text. But unlike what one might take in an overly reactive initial approach, the title intentionally put its own project under suspicion. Who is this “he” who claims such a position? Certainly it is a “he” that distinguishes himself from his “object” – that generic and authoritarian “blacks” that ends the sentence. In a way, without our having any idea where the project would take us, we were already on the trail of this “white” that would appear in the definitive title of the show that premiered in March 2017 in São Paulo: Branco: o cheiro do lírio e do formol. This article tries to return to some threads of the process relating them to the idea of “correct distance” proposed by Hal Foster in his text “The artist as ethnographer”.