Os Sertões : a terra = Os Sertões : the Earth

In A Terra, the first impact is the geography of the sertão. Euclides da Cunha describes each part of the sertão in the first part of his book, revealing to the reader an x-ray of the region. In the play, a carnival opera, an epic Brazilian musical, the actors are the earth, the vegetation, the wind, the animals, the rivers, the drought. It reveals the most intimate secrets of nature, that also vibrate in the human and trans-human arteries. When this work returned as a musical overture to the whole pentalogy, enriched by the experience that the subsequent works brought to the creators and to the audience, it gained an updated insight into the human interference in the environment. Destructive power is proportional to financial power, and the discussion about the way space gets occupied was brought to the forefront, including the real-estate boom that surrounds today not only Teatro Oficina, but the whole world, now hotter and more arid.

From 2000 to 2007, Teat(r)o Oficina Uzyna Uzona worked on the staging of Euclides da Cunha's epic book, Os Sertões, which describes the 19th Century War of Canudos in the Brazilian 'sertão,' lead by Antônio Conselheiro. The final result was a pentalogy, formed by the plays A Terra (2002), O Homem I (2003), O Homem II (2003), A Luta I (2005), and A Luta II (2006), totalizing 27 hours of theater. Os Sertões reads the episodes of the war in light of past and present Brazilian history, and in relation to the struggle of the group against media mogul Sílvio Santos, who wanted to tear down the historic theater.