Taking the notions of archipelago and shoreline to frame the question "what is the chorus. chorus”, posed by the American writer Gertrude Stein in her play The Question of Identity, we began this work with BCSP. The shoreline—a contact zone that ebbs and flows, bringing heterogeneous elements together—sea, sky, and land. The archipelago—a world of many worlds, or, as the Martinican poet Édouard Glissant puts it, "a passage, not a wall." These ideas opened a path for us to imagine the hall of Theatro Municipal de São Paulo as an archipelago composed of three islands: the stage, the pit, and the audience, which, with its noble, simple, and gallery balconies, invited us to rethink verticality in a horizontal way. How can we unfix these heights? Extend shoreline-like bands between up and down, side to side, in a dramaturgy interwoven with the dimensions of memory—an archive of an absent, fragmented, nonlinear, simultaneous time—where visuality and sound intertwine in anachronistic ways, through visual landscapes intersected with soundscapes that carry a different temporality, in a continuous process of assembling, disassembling, and reassembling.

"600 BC" or "1000 AD" means nothing in the space-time continuum of the Americas. In truth, we already have a circular, spiraling, chaotic conception of recovering a possible time."
— Édouard Glissant

Concept, direction and sound design: Marcela Levi & Lucía Russo
Choreography assistant: Lucas Fonseca
Sound design co-creation and invited pianist: Martim Gueller
Light design: Laura Salerno
Cenography: Camila Schmidt
Costumes: Levi & Russo in collaboration with João Victor Cavalcante
Sound engineer: André Omote

Acknowledgments: Ícaro dos Passos Gaya and all the artists who are or have been part of Improvável Produções, Bruno Ruviaro, Bruno Rezende, and the Choreographic Center of the City of Rio de Janeiro.

Performance and co-creation

Alyne Mach, Ana Beatriz Nunes, Ariany Dâmaso, Bruno Rodrigues, Camila Ribeiro, Carolina Martinelli, Cleber Fantinatti, Erika Ishimaru, Fabiana Ikehara, Fabio Pinheiro, Grecia Catarina, Harry Gavlar, Isabela Maylart, Jessica Fadul, Leonardo Hoehne Polato, Leonardo Muniz, Leonardo Silveira, Luiz Crepaldi, Luiz Oliveira, Manuel Gomes, Marcel Anselmé, Márcio Filho, Marina Giunti, Marisa Bucoff, Odu Ofá, Rebeca Ferreira, Renata Bardazzi, Reneé Weinstrof, Victor Hugo Vila Nova, Victoria Oggiam, Yasser Díaz