Brodja-Miseri. A play in seven acts, day 2
Buracas do Casmilo, a limestone cave system in the Portuguese interior.
Act IV: Waiting for Brodja-Miseri
The script asks for a state of Brodja-Miseri *. One flaw: not one of the six players knows what the word means. So they wait for it to set in. An hour. Two. The cave breathes its cold breath; nothing arrives. The only line spoken in all that time falls between two of them:
— Jan! Another wine?
— No!
One by one the collective drifts apart, each player falling back into silence. In a corner, bored, one player starts folding paper aeroplanes. Only a month later does the word come, unannounced, in a dream where it is the most ordinary thing in the world and everyone has always known it. On waking, it is gone again.
* Brodja-Miseri = the faint vertigo of being six and one at the same time. The word, it turns out, had been there from the start, hidden in their own names, two letters apiece.
Act V: Six Throws, Six Portraits
While six separate sheets of paper are painted, another process unfolds. Over each sheet a rope is held, dropped, and photographed where it lands. Six sheets, six throws, six images. Later, their true nature emerges: six portraits, one of each player.
Act VI: Intermission: a smaller drama
At the mouth of the cave, a tiny crab spider sits motionless over a bee she has caught. The bee is already dead, slowly drained while work continues nearby. Her patience is rewarded, which is more than can be said for the six players inside.
Act VII: The Magic Carpet Ride
A final sheet of cardboard has been painted. A last gesture steps in: one of the players picks daisies at the mouth of the cave and fixes them to the board with wet acrylic, before the rope falls onto it one final time. Once dry, the board is carried to the edge of the cave. Earlier that day, paper aeroplanes have been filmed flying into the depths; now it is the cardboard's turn. Launched into the void, the flying carpet goes down like one more paper aeroplane, until it comes to rest on the rocks below.
The rope that dropped six times over paper lies coiled in a studio in Amsterdam.
Like a snake, waiting to be continued.