“The Sacrifice of Cassamba Becker”
Performance Studies Alumni João Victor Toledo (M.A. '22) won the Silver Rabbit Award (Audience Award) for Best Play at the 30th Annual MixBrasil Festival, Latin America’s biggest LGBTQIA+ festival. “The Sacrifice of Cassamba Becker” is the first one person show João has ever written, directed, performed, and produced, and premiered on November 15th as part of the festival's theater programming.
“The Sacrifice of Cassamba Becker” is a monologue written at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. Cassamba Becker is a great impoverished actress and an impeccable sodomite who has finally retired and takes a dump at some lost beach in Brazil as her home. It’s from there she watches the whales’ fluorescent fins and glimpses a more vast, sensual and illuminated world. If today the socio-political-cultural-sanitary crisis is deepening and the future of our ecosystems hangs by a thread, what happens when we seek to transgress times, spaces, purposes, and dreams of our society? Is it still possible to imagine the future? “From dissatisfaction we’ll reach collective potentiality” once accurately said Dercy Gonçalves. Or Gramsci. Never mind. The present is not enough. Only rubbish saves.
Congratulations João!