The Theatre and the Cinema
Converted 1999 to 2001
The CCBB is not only a gallery. Below the exhibition floors is a theatre with a few hundred seats that stages plays, dance, contemporary music and talks, and alongside the building is a cinema with a single screen devoted to the kind of films that commercial cinemas no longer show. Together they make the centre a place people come to in the evening as well as the afternoon, and on a busy night the atrium fills with theatre audiences waiting to be called down.
The theatre programme favours new Brazilian writing and small touring companies, and productions usually run for a few weeks. Concerts range from experimental jazz, like the performance in the photograph, to chamber music and singer-songwriters. Ticket prices are kept deliberately low, often the cost of a coffee, and there are regular free sessions. The cinema works in seasons: a retrospective of a director, a survey of a national cinema, a festival of restored classics, sometimes in partnership with the Cinemateca Brasileira, whose archive is the largest in Latin America.
The spaces were carved out of the old building during the conversion, and their scale is intimate. You are never far from the stage. For a visitor who does not speak Portuguese, the concerts and the cinema, which screens films with subtitles, are the easiest way in, and the programme is posted on the website and at the entrance. Ask at the information desk on the ground floor; the staff will tell you what is on that evening and whether tickets are still available.
Did You Know? Tickets for the CCBB theatre are deliberately priced at a fraction of the commercial theatres on Avenida Paulista, so seats sell out quickly.
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