Montechios, Capuletos and Us: When Adaptation Expands the Notion of

Community
Erika Vieira UFMG, Brazil.
Montechios, Capuletos and Us is more about us than properly Shakespeares Romeo
and Juliet. This adaptation emerged from a marginalized community whose primary
goal was to provide high school students of a public school with theatrical reflection and
practice that could articulate aesthetics and politics. Their theatre, a combination of
cultural intervention with social protest, aims at culturally empowering these students
and, for extension, the community where they belong. The community, one the most
violent shantytowns of Rio de Janeiro at the time, yearned to transform their image as a
negative site of violence into a positive place of human potential. By studying Romeo
and Juliet and adapting the text to their context, twenty five students regained their self-
confidence. The aim of this paper is to discuss the articulations in which the adaptation
of a canonical play imprinted potential of social transformation in a marginalized
community and reflects on their concept of community. The analysis of their
performance will be illuminated by Paulo Freires Pedagogy of Autonomy (1996)
besides using Agambens notion of community (1993) opposed to that as it is commonly
used in Brazil to refer to the shantytowns.
Adaptation can be many things as it a broad concept. Whenever addressing to
this issue here, adaptation will be considered as theatrical adaptation, thus narrowing
the scope of this term as much as possible, even though theatrical adaptation can be
misread as theatrical production (see Kidnie, 7). Margaret Kidnie (2009) questions the
validity and the authenticity that theater goers look for in Shakespearean productions.
According to her, it is difficult to distinguish adaptation from theatrical production
because the work of adaptation in theatrical production is situated in the intersection
between text and performance, in a battle between something that supposedly lasts (the
text) and something that is provisory (the production). And the performance, as a result,
is the outcome of a particular interpretative process that takes into account the culture
and the geographical region from where it sprung up. In these terms, every production
is an adaptation in the same way that every adaptation enjoys a temporary potential that
implies an unstable canonical work in an ongoing development, where the text modifies
over time without necessarily changing itself.
The adaptation in question is the work of a school teacher, Antonio Verissimo
Santos Jr., with critical potential. His work started in 1999, as he precisely reports in his
MA thesis
1
in which he recounts his experience and the challenges he faced in the
beginning of the project, when students started to have theatre classes as part of their
mandatory curriculum at the Leonor Coelho Pereira Public School. This school is
located at the entrance of Favela Villa Cruzeiro. Thus, as it is expected, the young
public of this school faced many different challenges that limited their school experience
and shrank the possibilities of educational success, being among them poverty, racial
and gender discrimination, access to cultural life, and the violence of drug trafficking. It
was necessary to shaken those students, and respond with critical awareness to that
reality. His students were unmotivated in the beginning, but as it developed, they
expressed intense desire to participate. This scenario was aggravated when, in June
2002, the journalist Tim Lopes was brutally assassinated and the whole community of
Villa Cruzeiro bore the stigma of shame for living there, as it shocked the whole world.
At the time, many inhabitants of Villa Cruzeiro lied about their own addresses when
applying for a job or credit. People were afraid of those who lived there and people who
lived there feared retaliation from drug factions. It urged a new project in which that
community could figure no longer in the criminal section of the newspaper but for its art
and cultural life. Positive visibility of that community was the starting point of the project.
A theatrical troupe was formed as a consequence of these theatre classes.
Verissimo can be seen as a catalytic facilitator and mediator of the whole
process when he guided the first steps of the whole project that led to the emergence of
the group Teatro da Laje or Theatre on the Slab
2
. His student production was invested
with specific contextual instances which hinders the love story inside Romeo and Juliet

1 Verissimos experience was reported in his MA thesis presented at the Post Graduate Program in Education from
Universidade Federal Fluminense (UFF) where he obtained his degree. In June 2006 his theatrical group won the
Prize Cultura Viva from the Ministry of Cultural Affairs, sponsored by Petrobras. In December 2005, it received the
recognition from Reperiphery Project for its cultural initiative in marginalized communities in Rio de Janeiro.

2
Check their website for more information: http://www.grupoteatrodalaje.com.br/principal.htm
and prompts the violence inherent in the rivalry between the two houses. Influenced by
Peter Brook, who mentioned that Romeo and Juliet was more than a pedantic and
sentimental love story, Verissimos approach wanted to recover the violence, passion,
effervescence of the poor, intrigue and, by doing so, discover the beauty and poetry that
emerge from Shakespeares Verona, in which the tragic ending of the young lovers is
merely an incident (cf. Brook, 1988).
This said, the theatrical group Theatre on the Slab was created with the effective
participation of twenty-five high school students in 2003. The name refers to the places
where they used to meet for rehearsals, usually in a slab ground of one of the shed
houses of the community. Shakespeare was appropriated by this marginalized
community and reinvented as a means of social and cultural intervention that combines
drama with social action, aesthetics with pragmatism. From Shakespeare, they studied
and performed Romeo and Juliet, Othelo, and Macbeth from 2001 to 2003 at the
school. The basic premise of the group lies in artistic research where their daily
problems and challenges encounter basis for reflection. After four years of existence,
the group was able to broaden the horizon of possibilities of its members and
disentangle the chain of drug trafficking violence and cultural isolation that prevented its
youth to empower themselves. This project won many prizes, being one of them a
national prize from the Ministry of Cultural Affairs. Now, they exist as non-profit
organization offering workshops and tutoring for Villa Cruzeiro community, besides
performing their own scripts.
One of Verissimos questions was related to the use of classics. He has run the
risk of impoverishing Shakespeare by allowing his students to adapt it. However, he
admits that his wish was exactly not to reproduce Shakespeares texts, but allow his
students to reflect upon the themes of some of his plays and imprint their reading in the
subsequent performances. Although Verissimo does not mention Freires Pedagogy of
Autonomy (1996), his praxis is highly grounded on the valorization of his students
background knowledge. In the end, his movement away from an ascetic aestheticism
paradoxically produced enriched political interpretations of the plays, in which his
students were able to connect with their own reality.
Besides, in each of their adaptations it has been produced a provisional theatrical
text where Shakespeares authentic site gave way to a radical political voice. The
adaptive process engaged students in the construction of a voice of their own and
fostered their own view of Shakepeares stories. It can be said that Verissimos students
are engaged in a dynamics of dialectical and political view of the canon as a form of
locating their own Shakespeare. This view of the canon was possible, due to
Verissimos influence from Boals theatre of the oppressed, Brechts epic theatre, and
Grotowiskis poor theatre, as he mentions in his report having contact with these texts.
The tragic dimension of Shakespeares love story gives way to a critical
reflection of violence when in 2001 Verissimo proposed his students to work with this
play to introduce basic theatrical principles. To present Shakespeare for them, he used
films, soap operas, cartoons, animated movies. When suggesting the play, Verissimo
proposed to substitute the rival families for rival drug factions: Montechioss Hill against
Capuletoss Hill. The students approved and the result was a hybrid performance,
mixing the politicized language of RAP to Prokofievs ballet music. The students chose
the sequence of the text to perform, which was rather fragmentary, and introduced
elements of their daily life to the stage, whose direction was by the student Katiucha
Cristina. At the end of the presentation, Verissimo invited his audience for a debate,
inquiring them what they would change in the presentation and why. Depending on the
answers of those students, Verissimo would invite him/her to perform that part. With so
many changes, their Romeo and Juliet was transformed into a theatrical experiment
where there was action and reflection.
One of their last, official versions of Romeo and Juliet is the one called
Montechios, Capuletos and Us, which lasts around half an hour and was video
recorded. Romeo and Juliet are teenagers who live in rival favelas: Capuletos Favela
and Montechios Favela, controlled by rival drug factions. The means of communication
is the local radio station where news, entertainment, and publicity are offered to each
community. However, a Capuleto was not allowed to talk to a Montechio. As it develops,
when a Montechio girl calls the wrong number to ask for a song in the radio station of
the Capuletos, she is threatened and a tension emerges. Capuletos want to retaliate
by graffiting one of Montechios walls. As a result, Montechios and Capuletos
threatening messages are misread as signs of defiance and there are shoot outs. The
end is a story that we already know: there is no happy ending.
The pedagogical practice behind this experience has many similarities with Paulo
Freires conception of autonomy, whose pedagogy is based on the defense of ethics,
dignity and autonomy of its students, even though Verissimo does not openly address to
it. Freire adverts against practices of denial and dehumanization, which must be
affronted and changed. Freire is also against adaptation to a reality that cannot be
changed. In this case, reality means the gratuitous violence promoted by drug traffic in
Rio that alienates the inhabitants in the hilltops and silences them. Verissimo engaged
his students in a practiced in which they had to strive with Shakespeares text on their
own, adapt it critically, and commit themselves to experimentations with different
theatrical languages and improvise. These students were provoked to assume
themselves as socio-historical-cultural subjects with a problem: the excess of violence
provoked by drug traffic. This is expressed through the use of language on stage, which
is not Shakespeares at all, but that of a community oppressed by drug traffic.
Another thing they questioned was their cultural isolation while in a favela. To
see a play in Rio, they had to cross the city and go to the downtown area, the centre, to
a site dominated by middle class. Their adaptation of Shakespeare challenges class
division in Rio de Janeiro where the access to cultural life is meant to be democratic,
but there is this invisible line that segregates those who live in the shantytowns and
those who live in central areas. This pedagogical experience thus brings Shakespeare
to the periphery with a critical reflection. If those at downtown Rio want to see a
Shakespearean play, they should head themselves to the periphery, to the favela, Villa
Cruzeiro, where they will be more than delighted to present their version.
Community in Rio de Janeiro means the peripheral place where the poor ones
belong to. It usually refers to the shantytowns where its residents rely on each other to
survive. With this conception in mind they run the risk of romanticizing the periphery
because of the essentialism in the politics of othering so present in discourses that tend
to identity affirmation. Verissimos pedagogical intervention is still attached to a certain
tendency of reaffirming the community as a sheltering place, which students should
reproduce its way of being as an expression of pride. However, their theatrical practice
goes beyond the limits of the shantytowns by denouncing alienation and isolation. By
reconsidering their notion of community, how it is constituted and the implications of
representing that notion in their theatrical adaptations, Verissimos direction has now the
challenge to foster and engender a notion of community that is not tied to identity.
Agambens conceives community as an idea that try to avoid essencialisms (1993, p.
1). He asks: what does it mean community? Does that mean a concept, for example:
being red, being French, being Muslim? For Agamben in this conception, such and
such being is reclaimed from its having this or that property, which identifies it as
belonging to this or that set, to this or that class () and it is reclaimed not for another
class nor for the simple generic absence of any belonging, but for its being such, for
belonging itself (p. 1). In this respect, this notion of community that reproduces a
collectivity must be challenged, as it fosters a sense of closure, unity, and continuity.
Verissimos political intention, so present in the subtext of his adaption,
addresses to the fact that it is time for the voice of the community to move beyond the
hilltops of Rio: for the whole world we are from Villa Cruzeiro, so it says their motto.
However, it is still necessary to break down complex relations of power that confines
people in the shantytowns, at peripheral places of culture, silencing differences, and
reproducing a misleading idea that a community is or should be a harmonious, non-
conflictual shelter. A community is an active idea that somehow refuses a synonym like
that of collectivity. For now, Verissimo and his students seem to have succeeded in
their first step.

Works cited
Agamben, Giorgio. The Coming Community. Transl. by Michael Hardt. Minneapolis/
London: University of Minnesota Press, 1993.
Brook, Peter. The Shifting Point: Forty Years of Theatrical. Exploration, 1946-1987.
London: Methuen, 1988.
Freire, Paulo. Pedagogia da Autonomia: Saberes Necessrios Prtica Educativa. Sao
Paulo: Paz e Terra, 1996.
Kidnie, Margaret. Shakespeare and the Problem of Adaptation. New York: Routledge,
2009.
Santos Jr., Antonio Verssimo. Shakespeare e a Reinveno da Escola ou a Escola e a
Reinveno de Shakespeare. 2004. 130f. Dissertao (Mestrado em Educao)
Faculdade de Educao, Universidade Federal Fluminense, Niteri, 2004.