UMA LUZ CORDIAL marks the end of your Trilogia Cadela Força. How does this new play connect to the previous two, Chapter I: A Noiva e o Boa Noite Cinderela (2023) and Chapter II: The Brotherhood (2025)?
This show is a fictional, spiritual, and sexual immersion into the process of writing—this particular writing, the writing of all these chapters, of an entire life up to this point. The trilogy begins with A Noiva e o Boa Noite Cinderela, where performance erupts within the play itself, disrupting the theatrical structure and revealing its consequences: the problem of repeating this act, the journey into unconsciousness, the erasure of memory, the necessity of dealing with this sleeping body in the middle of the stage. Everything already pointed to the body being at the center of it all.
In The Brotherhood, the body takes on a ghostly dimension: it is the awakening after A Noiva e o Boa Noite Cinderela. This second chapter explores the closed circles of “great geniuses” and the way this body, “returned from hell,” fits into that system, along with the paradoxes of adoration and repulsion that such a dynamic generates. Then we arrive at the third play: the dark heart of the trilogy. This is where the most personal material of the three resides. In an extremely fictional way, this piece is a descent into “the dark forest” of creation, to quote Dante. An immersion into what makes us miserable, vulnerable, furious: writing itself, the moment of creation, of giving artistic form to a nightmare through writing.
In this creative process, returning to the question of the fragmented subject, the experience of writing reveals itself only through an Other, an alter ego. This alter ego is a writer, a poet. At the beginning of the performance, I evoke this dynamic that will unfold, this necessity of fragmenting myself within this new experience that is this third play. What I do is summon another author: Hilda Hilst, the immense Brazilian writer and poet. A long excerpt is read from one of her novels, O Caderno Rosa de Lori Lamby, a pornographic book that also speaks profoundly about writing, about discovering writing as a sexual discovery.
Hilda appears in this piece as a writerly alter ego. Because from the moment my subject is completely fragmented, dispossessed, gone, I can no longer write alone. This disappearance of myself is an integral part of the trilogy, as we have already seen in the previous chapters.
This intimate relationship with other women writers runs through all my work. In The Brotherhood, there were Sarah Kane and Emily Brontë, companions to this writing. Here, they are Hilda Hilst and Emily Dickinson.
Another question we explore more deeply in this work is the inexhaustible question of sexuality. In fact, the entire play revolves around different ways of understanding a process of writing connected to sexuality.
To return to the link with the other plays: here, the question of sexual violence no longer needs to be addressed in such an empirical or even didactic way, as it may have been before. Each play in the trilogy possesses its own vocabulary, as though each time both the audience and we ourselves had to reinvent our bearings, agree to lose ourselves a little, and allow new, unprecedented relationships to emerge… UMA LUZ CORDIAL was born from an immense desire to go ever further into fiction. Writing keeps me alive, and perhaps this final act is my deepest reverence to literature.
You evoke the process of dissolution that runs throughout the entire trilogy. Is the encounter with writing, with these alter egos, a way of resisting that dissolution?
No. I think they are rather ways of observing that dissolution, of observing this subject that has been partly destroyed, partly fragmented, struggling to survive. There is something in the trilogy, which I actually evoke in the text of The Brotherhood, that has to do with this desperate act of wanting to give shape, a contour, to something that precisely has none: violence. There is something impossible about that task.
I believe this final play is the moment when I devote myself entirely to fiction. It is a fictional journey, particularly because I believe that when one writes, one is working with a form of reality, an intention toward the real. Fiction is not about distancing oneself from reality. Quite the opposite.
In the other parts of the trilogy, I speak a great deal about the place from which I write: a kind of wasteland crossed by a devastating force, accumulating fragments of things and sensations. I truly feel that this is the experience of someone trying to live with the consequences of looking very closely at themselves, but also at a certain way in which things, like History and the world, are arranged. And I think that at a certain point, it becomes a kind of auto-ethnography. One speaks about oneself from an intimate point of view, from the particular experience of the author that I am, but it also opens onto a much broader cartography, one that is present throughout all three plays. In this third part, that broader dimension appears above all through the context of literature.
How did the artistic process for this play unfold? What kinds of research, materials, and experiences nourished it?
I think this process had a great deal to do with reading. For me, the experience of reading and that of writing are inseparable. This process became a great vertigo of reading. Reading turned into a way of hearing the voices of these dead writers; and writing, in a sense, now consists of writing alongside them. For me, it almost took on a mediumistic dimension.
Another important aspect of this process was returning, together with the actors, to practices that seek to place the body in a sensual relationship with history. As though the sexuality of these bodies on stage developed through their contact with time and with literary and historical events. That does not mean that sex needs to be made explicit on stage. It is already constantly present, because writing is, for me, my deepest connection to sex. The way this manifests on stage belongs much more to a form of mythology than to a search for the dynamics of the “real.”
Would you say there is an energy that runs through bodies and creation?
More than an energy, I think it is an experience. That sense is very strong for me. It is something that is lived through and that possesses an almost ceremonial dimension—these bodies, what we experience together, there. For example, at the beginning of the second part of A Noiva e o Boa Noite Cinderela, just before everyone begins to dance, there is a moment when the actors form a circle around my mattress, on which I am lying. For me, that is the manifestation of something. Then they pour entire bottles of tequila over their bodies, rub lemons on their faces and skin… It becomes ceremonial, a ritual space where I shift into another logic, one made of presence and mystery. The body makes visible an attempt: that of a wandering form trying to come to terms with a disorganised sexuality.
In a way, it is about opening up the experience, freeing it from modes of representation, from prescribed ways of being…
And without assigning it a moralising function, without claiming that it would be better than other possibilities. Above all, it is a search that has a great deal to do with literature. I always begin from the idea that sexuality is an expression born from a form of disorganisation, from chaos, from anguish, and from the pleasure that can emerge out of that. The bodies on stage in my shows are constantly confronted with that tension. And the forms this can take vary enormously.
I’d like to talk about the title, UMA LUZ CORDIAL. How did you find it?
The title comes from a poem by Emily Dickinson, “My Life had stood – a Loaded Gun”, written from the point of view of a weapon. The voice speaking in the poem is that of a gun which, at one point, says: “And do I smile, such cordial light.” When she writes that, it affects me deeply, because she compares the poetess, and the act of writing, to a loaded gun that spends its life firing, condemned to kill without ever being able to die itself. Emily Dickinson is one of the greatest poets ever to walk this earth; her poetry reaches a brutal beauty in the way it confronts the violence of feelings, death, and sex.
You see the audience as readers. What would you want them to take away from the play?
In this work, the audience is addressed as readers. Reading is not a passive task. Reading is not about remaining still in front of something: it is about activating a very vivid imagination, as in literature. It is the space in which one gives an image, a face, to things that are not directly visible in front of us. The limits of literature are not those of theatre. And yet, it is in UMA LUZ CORDIAL that the audience finds itself—quite literally—closest to us, and to theatre itself. For now, I think that is all I can say. (Laughs.)
Interview conducted by Liliana Coutinho in March 2026