[RESUMO] Hyperactive since her childhood in Parnamirim, Greater Natal, Alice Carvalho mobilized her earlier artistic explorations and intensively physically prepared to play Dinorah, the most outstanding work of her career to date. In “Cangaço Novo” the actress shows herself adept at channeling her inner whirlwind and, starting from revolt, expressing the personality of a survivor of poverty, abandonment and abuse.
When Alice Carvalho saw her performance in “Cangaço Novo” for the first time, she was amazed and picked up the phone and called director Aly Muritiba. “My God, are you crazy? How did you let me do that?”
She was impressed by his voice. His body was large. The performance was “extended, above the tone”. He hit Thainá Duarte, who plays Dilvânia, his mute and harmless sister, in the face. He spit in the food of Ubaldo, his other brother, played by Allan Souza Lima. “People are going to hate me, Aly.”
Alice was confused when she saw herself, because the main emotion that guided the development of her character was anger, and anger brings with it a certain lack of control. She could have been a caricature With so much hatred, aggression and insults, the 27yearold Rio de Janeiro native proved to be a dramatic hurricane in the most outstanding role of her career to date, capable of moving even the most apathetic audience.
In “Cangaço Novo,” which premiered in August on Prime Video and directed by Muritiba and Fábio Mendonça, Dinorah Vaqueiro is the only woman in a gang of bank robbers in inland Ceará (the series was filmed elsewhere in the northeast). .
In the early episodes, no criminal looks like a good guy, with gruesome scenes aimed at individual pleasure, such as when they invade and take over a poor workingclass family’s home for days, killing the only dairy goat for barbecue. Amid the bonds of cruelty, Dinorah experiences her first rebellion. He beats up one of his allies when he realizes that he raped the girl in the house.
From then on, the gradations of her personality emerge, a survivor of various types of aggression: poverty, abandonment, abuse. In the middle of the season, she lets her friend Lino persuade her to take a playful trip to the pond. To the sounds of “Espumas ao Vento,” in Fagner’s voice, they flirt, play, she swims in the water. After all, they are places of peace. Until they enter the enemy route later.
The next paragraphs contain spoilers.
Dinorah’s partner is shot in a shootout and dies in her lap while driving a truck through the backcountry through tears. “Espumas ao Vento” plays again and, like in a soap opera, becomes the title song of the novel. The voice no longer belongs to Fagner, but to Alice Carvalho.
(The scene is an homage to Walter Salles’ “Terra Estrangeira” (1995), in which Fernando Alves Pinto dies on Fernanda Torres’ lap. It was also Alice’s last shot in the hinterland, so the crying contained a double farewell.)
Alice is a multiartist. He acts, sings, plays the accordion, writes scripts, chronicles, directs, produces and even does product marketing when necessary. He wrote the books “Do Amor e Duas Crônicas” (2015) and “A Princesa Empoderou” (2018), a series of short stories and chronicles published in Christmas magazines. He directed music videos for BaianaSystem. She studied fine arts at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte and describes herself as a kamikaze, a fan of the immersive interpretation method. Her diverse artistic explorations always converge to perfect her final work as an actress, which she has dreamed of since her childhood in Parnamirim, Greater Natal.
The series was shown for the first time at the Gramado Festival (where Alice also debuted in “Angela”, about the murder of Ângela Diniz by Doca Street, in which she plays a minor but not insignificant role). After being positively received by the public and critics, he began to convince himself that his character was neither hated nor awkward, which was his greatest fear.
“I think I generally spend the first half of a series, film or play very unsure. From the middle to the end, I turn off my little general’s voice and the mannerisms come out naturally,” he says. “I criticize myself a lot and there are some mild sabotages, but I don’t have the energy to give myself so much importance that I can’t allow myself to get upset.”
“Cangaço Novo” is a country “Mad Max” and Alice, who had not carried out any action until then, had to carry out, according to her will, an intensive preparation that began six months before the official date. The script said something like “Appearance from behind; Dinorah, 25, shoulders carved from solid wood.”
In Parnamirim he divided the week into different types of exercises. “I started lifting weights, I thought: ‘This will give me quick results, I will have the resistance, I don’t know, to hold the weapon as big as I need, to hold a body, that’s me. ‘ “I’m going to hold this wave,” he remembers.
In addition to strength training, he took part in Nogi (NoGi JiuJitsu), horseback riding, shooting and motorcycle classes. “I have a cousin who is a Muay Thai champion and so I said, ‘Oh, it’s over, I’m going to pay you some money and you’re not going to teach anyone else, you’re just going to work with him.’ “Me and we will train four or five times a week'”. She even fell into a niche of YouTube videos, spending nights watching sports professionals and nutritionists comment on the training of superhero movie actors. “I hardly used a stunt double,” he says proudly.
Alice could be the opposite of Dinorah, like her next character, a shy and introspective accordion player in the soap opera “Guerreiros do Sol,” scheduled to debut in 2024 on Globoplay. That’s not the case.
Their reactions are explicit and lively. He gives long answers, like someone who really enjoys sharing. “Homosexuality has a lot more to do with me.” She made jokes on the show, such as when, in front of a long line of people waiting under the sun to be seen at a registry office, she said, “Oh, damn it There’s not even water for the guy to drink.”
Growing up with ten siblings (including cousins who grew up with her), Alice enjoys living in a group and lived that way even while recording during the pandemic, which included 105 nights together with brothers Vaqueiro, Thainá Duarte and Allan Souza in Lima , between the towns of Cabaceiras, in Cariri in Paraíba and Parelhas, in Seridó in Rio Grande do Norte.
The vaqueiros formed a pact of brotherhood behind the camera and forced themselves to live as brothers. During casting preparation, they also agreed to “never fight” as Dinorah and Ubaldo are in direct conflict until the third episode.
“When we had these very difficult arguments during filming, we didn’t even talk in the morning. ‘Fuck yourself and don’t talk to me because I love you and I won’t say a word to you or I’ll win’. I can’t hate you, so get away from me. ‘” said Alice to Allan or Dinorah to Ubaldo.
Ubaldo is the firstborn of the late Cangaço leader’s three children. As a child, he left Ceará after witnessing the death of his parents. He grew up in São Paulo and returned to the country because of an inheritance to finance his foster father’s health care.
He soon becomes involved in a crime, against the wishes of Dinorah, who does not tolerate his presence. Dismissed from the army and a former bank employee, he becomes the head of the gang. The playboy from São Paulo becomes an antihero after a long speech in which he recognizes himself as part of the hinterland and with vaqueiro blood.
“This is a scene that Fabinho [o diretor] loves very much. There’s a strong feeling for him because it was finally this guy’s arrival in the hinterland, the recognition. But there was something that didn’t make sense and I was afraid to say it. So I said: ‘Fabinho, don’t you think you’re very Southeast when you explain it?'”
Dinorah intervened and suggested a response to the confrontation with Ubaldo in the script. She combined this with Allan, a trait of her good sisterly character. “If I were to improvise without combining it in this scene, which was his scene, it would seem like I was trying to shock the actor. It wouldn’t be the sister talking to the brother.”
Ubaldo talks emotionally for almost two minutes, convincing his allies that he is now a bandit like them, and only receives a deep spit from Dinorah, accompanied by a loud “Fuck you!”
The production tried to avoid some obvious clichés associated with the Northeast, from the search for rocky and rocky landscapes against the orange landscape to the care with accents. “They also wrestled with the idea of the ‘Northeastern accent’ that people speak. They took advantage of it by bringing actors from different places, from Bahia, from Pernambuco, because ‘Northeastern accent’ is not a homogeneous thing, several people live together,” says the actress.
Historian Durval Muniz de Albuquerque, author of “The Invention of the Northeast” (1994), opposed the attempt. In a review in the newspaper Diário do Nordeste, he wrote that the product shows the past and that it reinforces “the idea of backwardness, rusticity and violence associated with the Northeast,” which, according to the series, is still devoted to “the patriarchal , stately and aristocratic logic of blood, of the mysterious and timeless bonds created by inheritance, all this in contrast to São Paulo, the place of true contemporaneity”.
“Of course I knew Durval wouldn’t like it, that was clear,” says Alice with a smile. “I think this kind of debate is very important to strengthen critical thinking, but I would never stop playing a role and thinking about what they would say. Of course, this series was a risk, but I had great faith in the power of history, and there is something very beautiful about history that reflects the origins of the country of one of the creators [ Eduardo Melo, autor da série em parceria com Mariana Bardan]whose family emigrated to São Paulo.”
Alice lives in Rio de Janeiro to record the Globoplay soap opera. The daughter of a single mother and raised by her grandparents, a teacher and a hairdresser, she grew up surrounded by uncles and cousins in a public housing complex for government employees. In addition to her three uncles by blood, she has a fourth uncle staying at her grandparents’ house, the maestro and multiinstrumentalist Antônio de Pádua Carvalho.
“He was one of my biggest supporters. I was very hyperactive, I did a lot of sports, and one day he came home and heard that I had to work a lot and that I wouldn’t sit still at school. To which he replied, “Perhaps my problem was a strong need for expression. “Buy this girl a recorder, let her play the guitar…”
Another mentor for her artistic initiation was Neemias Damasceno, the school’s art teacher (she is grateful that he saved her from expulsion). For Damasceno, now 51, Alice has “simply grown up, she is still the same today.” She was known to her teachers for her electricity: “She always arrived sweaty, she was always running.” In his opinion, the theater would become such “Dissolve” dynamics in this body.
Damasceno directed Alice’s first performance when she was about 10 years old. It wasn’t a theater workshop, but a regular art class at school, the kind students rehearse for an annual presentation to their parents. It was a play about Chronos and Kairos, a story from Greek mythology about time. Alice played Kairós, “the time of poetry, of freedom, of art as it should be,” the teacher remembers.
“That girl was absurd, guys. At the age of 9 or 10 she had impressive physical maturity. Intuitively, she knew how to leave the tone of her voice in the text, the rhythm, the timing of her body that she conveyed.” Emotion just right. She made a lively character, it was great, I was amazed [caído]”, it says.
In 2021, Alice graduated with a degree in Fine Arts. In his latest work, he pays tribute to family members, orixás, the ancestry of black people from Rio Grande do Norte, and the leftist governments “that gave the Carvalho family the right for another member to graduate from a federal institution.”
He fell in love with performance, contemporary art and video art. He wrote for the theater and wanted to learn screenwriting for the cinema. “I had to make the ball to play, you know? I didn’t or didn’t have, I don’t know, a desired profile based on what I understood about Brazilian audiovisual media.” He did several tests and always hit the post.
Far from the RioSão Paulo axis, the center of national show business, there are spaces of resistance in Natal, particularly in the theater, with longstanding groups such as Facetas e Mutretas and Shakespeare’s Clowns, which were part of Alice’s formation. Clowns has been acting for over 30 years, with shows in several countries and constant promotion of artistic education through acting workshops in which she took part.
Titina Medeiros, 46, an actress who graduated from clown school and is part of “Cangaço Novo” (she is Vaqueiro’s lawyer), is impressed by Alice’s ability to create her own opportunities she knows it requires extra endurance if you weren’t born in São Paulo or Rio.
“She is not a potiguar who was born in Rio Grande do Norte and went to Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo at an early age. She is a Potiguar artist. She was forged here, she made herself an artist here. And what I find most incredible is that Alice builds her land and doesn’t wait to be called upon.
For example, Titina points to “Septo”, a web series available on YouTube that Alice created in 2015 during her studies, also because she needed a portfolio. The youthful, LGBTQIA+themed series won awards in Buenos Aires, Rio de Janeiro and Rio Grande do Norte, as well as nominations at other festivals.
Alice plays Jéssica, a young lesbian in the process of selfdiscovery. The story is intertwined with that of Alice, who struggled to come out at the age of 17. Her grandmother was against it at the time, but today the problem has been overcome.
Another fiction that mixes with his reality is the play “Incubus”, an author’s monologue that deals with physical and psychological violence. Like Dinorah Vaqueiro, Alice was a victim of abuse as a child.
It took her a while to understand which part of her inner self would constitute the cangaceira. Coach Fátima Toledo encouraged them to take off their masks instead of putting them on. “We started the process slowly, I saw my body warming up, my voice came out, it was very strong, I felt like Taz.” [o personagem do desenho do Looney Tunes, um diabo da Tasmânia que devora o que vê pela frente e se move em forma de tornado].”
Alice resolved some of her childhood traumas with art and therapy. Dinorah, with shooting, violence and death. “When I understood what had happened to Dinorah, I found the place of revolt, the place of ‘I don’t want to forgive you, I want you to die!’ I didn’t create this anger, I experienced this anger, it’s within me.”
Just like in Kairós at age 10, Alice channeled her Taz in all the right ways, with all the explosion of rage she and Dinorah deserved.