The Garden of a Former House Turned Museum

With The Garden of a Former House Turned Museum, Lum and Desranleau stage a sung and danced correspondence between an anonymous contemporary interlocutor and the Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector (1920-1977), an important figure in 20th century literature. Punctuated by the epistolary call of “Dear Clarice”, the prose guides us through the city of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, here covered with lush nature as if human activities had been suspended there. Personified by different performers, the protagonist addresses Lispector in the afterlife, even if the whispers of the orchids that filter from the urban jungle turn out to be her only answers. In this materialistic hymn, the performers interact with inanimate collaborators, objects that look as strange as they are familiar. Addressing the themes of language, nature, urbanity and disease — which the protagonist and the writer have in common — the work probes the porosity of the borders between humans and the material world. The Garden of a Former House Turned Museum explores the gestural, sound, and narrative potentials of bodies and objects by highlighting the alienation experienced when the first becomes a shell or the second comes to life. In this musical taking place between the world of the living and that of the dead, words, bodies, and objects intoxicate with their sensuality, tender and dark at the same time, like the stifling heat of a tropical city.