Singer, songwriter, actress, novelist, illustrator and percussionist Karina Buhr lives her own multiverse amidst all her versions. The first appeared in his childhood, in Salvador in 1980, when he saw his mother and grandfather play the piano, his grandmother sang in church and groups like Banda Reflexu and Bandamel occupied radio stations.
In the following decade, musical momentum unfolded in passages through afoxé blocks, the maracatus Piaba de Ouro and Estrela Brilhante, and in groups such as Comadre Fulozinha and Mundo Livre S/A in the capital of Pernambuco, where he began living. At one of her performances, Karina accidentally received an invitation to play in the theater. your emissary? Playwright Zé Celso from the Teatro Oficina.
Accompanied by a friend, she left Recife for São Paulo and, without knowing what she was going to do, she began “Bacchae”, a play inspired by the Greek tragedy of Euripides. “We both arrived at the airport workshop with our suitcases in the middle of the play’s long rehearsal,” he recalls.
“We didn’t even take off our shoes because we were so tense. There are photos [desse dia], and it’s hilarious: The Bacchae are all naked, beautiful, and Isa and I are in sneakers, fully dressed,” he says, laughing. “We learned there by doing it. All.”
Since the early 2000s, Karina Buhr has released four albums, toured the world, won and competed for awards including one alongside Gal Costa and Marisa Monte published a book of poetry, featured in the feature film “Meu Nome É Bagdá” played along. and that month he published his first novel, Mainá (published by However).
The work bears the name of the protagonist of the plot, a child seer steeped in tales of oral tradition, strings and kingdoms. Myna was first conceived when Karina Buhr was just 15 years old, back then as a character for a play.
“It’s a timeless fictional story, it doesn’t necessarily take place now, before or after, it can happen at any time. But it turns out that in all fiction we use elements of reality. She uses people’s lives, uses people’s lives neighbors. Life changes.”
“Is it over there [a história] It had the same characters it has today, but it had little text and lots of scenarios. The idea for the book came from Andréa Del Fuego,” he says, citing the writer with whom he took classes during the Covid19 pandemic. “I had never done a creative writing workshop before, I was afraid of the name. I’ve always been more of a crazy writer.”
“There’s one thing about consistency that you write more, think more, put the postits on the wall. There was a key change in writing, more sharpening. [seu primeiro livro, de poesias] was spat more.”
The writing courses and the book idea came about as a kind of relief in the midst of the health crisis. “I spent two years really locked in, it was very difficult. With very little work and very little motivation to create anything, I was completely unwilling, just sad. I’ve been through a lot of grief, as have we all. But this writing of’ Mainá’ got me. I managed to exist.”
Karina also publicly expressed her displeasure in January of this year because of the lack of incentives for the cultural sector. “I wanted to receive invites to play, even though I had to decline due to the pandemic. I haven’t received an invite since 2020,” he wrote on his Twitter profile. “Have I failed, ended everything? [sic]”, he said. The publication collected about 4,500 likes.
“It’s not crying, there are a lot of people in this situation, it’s an outburst, real sadness, for me and everyone who is unemployed. Above all, everyone has to pretend everything is fine because contractors and brands are doing it Not.” I don’t like sad people,” he wrote.
“Actually, it was a dissatisfaction beyond ‘ah, I’m not getting invites,'” he tells the column. “It is a sadness that you see once again another champion of the standard bearer of a wonderful block requiring crowdfunding to pay for medical treatment.”
“I’ve seen that all pandemic and it’s still happening. Every week you have to crowdfund one person who knows everything about a certain thing and doesn’t have the money to take care of themselves in their old age. It’s a feeling of sadness, of abandonment,” he says.
After the outbreak, with the advancement of vaccination and the resumption of festivals and concert halls, Karina was finally able to return to the stage. “Every show is great to do, always has been. But now there’s this feeling of ‘Jeez, we’re still working with that, we can still do that,'” he says. “It’s been so long that the body got used to it too. It’s one thing for the body to calm down. It was wonderful.”
Karina Buhr, 48, says she doesn’t know if she lives in Recife, where her family lives, or in São Paulo. “I think there’s more of my clothes here again than there,” she says, who chatted with the column via video from Pernambuco state.
The artist remembers the time she was “discovered” by the Southeast in 2010 with the release of her first album “Eu Menti Pra Você”. “It was seen as my beginning because there’s this colonial thing that São Paulo has yet to ‘discover’. It was like I started there, I gave interviews as the initiator of the ‘new scene’. Guys, that was me, a new scene in 1994,” he says, laughing.
“‘He came to the big city, he did rock ‘n’ roll’. But I wasn’t in the country, quiet, and I got into the chaos of São Paulo. I’ve been going from one mess to the next mess a lot like ‘ah you released this record pretty crazy now before you did something very calm.’ No, I’ve always been nervous,” she continues, laughing.
“There is still a lot of ignorance in Brazil about Brazil itself. When I want to talk about things here in Pernambuco, it’s difficult to speak naturally. I have to explain it first because most people won’t know even a cliché about Maracatu.”
She says she’s planning a new album for now but says she doesn’t have a recording date yet because she wants to enjoy her moment as a writer with the release of “Mainá.” And on her horizon she sees the desire to devote herself more to cinema as an actress.
“It pushed me to do more, to explore more and to understand this language,” she says of her experience as Micheline in Caru Alves de Souza’s Meu Nome É Bagdá.
“Cinema is more regulated, but very quiet,” he explains, comparing it to his theater experience. “There is a time to eat, there is a time to stop. There is a set day! [risos] Maybe if it rains plan for another day but I found it very quiet. Theater, especially at Oficina, is something that doesn’t have time to end: neither the play nor the rehearsal or anything like that,” he continues, laughing.
When asked about this year’s election, she dismissed the possibility of Jair Bolsonaro (PL) being reelected. “For him to stay that far is a very absurd thing. It was a huge dismantling of many things. The first step, of course, is that he leaves [da Presidência] so there is a lot of work to do. It’s a lot of destruction on all levels.”
“I think increasingly the solution is everyone looking to the side because the solution is collective. In fact, it’s a lesson we could have learned from the pandemic but didn’t. And it’s not like it has to be cohesive because the collective is really different. It’s about dealing with differences.”