Brazilian Theatre Research Articles

Making it Relevant: Reflections on the Teaching of Brazilian Theatre in the United States

With a focus on the relevance of Brazilian theatre in the United States, this article aims to gauge the diversity of challenges faced by those involved in the teaching of it in US colleges and universities and the staging of scenes or entire plays in those institutions and other venues. Attention is also given to related factors such as the availability of translated texts, the linguistic background and teaching and learning goals of instructors and students, the directorial vision of those in charge of stagings, and the ever present obstacle of a less commonly spoken language, as is the case of Portuguese in the US. Conclusions presented here were made possible by those colleagues who answered my email queries and/or responded to the brief questionnaire sent them, the text of which is reproduced in Appendix I. Appendix II is an account by the co-directors of a specific staging, that of Qorpo Santo’s As Relações Naturais at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the spring of 2008.

MITOS GREGOS NO TEATRO BRASILEIRO DOS ÚLTIMOS 30 ANOS

A experiência exílica é uma tônica em peças brasileiras recentes de tema mítico. Baseado na Trilogia perversa (BENDER, 1986), em Ismene, Princesa de Tebas (SENNA, 2006) e n’ O Olimpo carioca (BRANDÃO, 2012), o artigo mostra que os mitos antigos, enquanto mapeiam problemáticas palpitantes para a época em que eles retornam (o páthos do imigrante, do perseguido político e mesmo da cidade tida como refúgio ideal para problemas “olímpicos”), funcionam como o “tiroir à double entrée” de que fala Espagne (1999, p. 78): não são apenas pontos de passagem entre culturas, mas deflagradores de “itinerários da memória” (ESPAGNE, 1999, p. 138).

A missão italiana

Esta resenha enfoca o livro <em>A missão italiana</em>, de Alessandra Vanucci, dedicado a situar a presença dos diretores italianos no Teatro Brasileiro de Comédia (TBC) e no teatro brasileiro entre as décadas de 1950 e 1960. Além disso, mostra a formação do Grupo dos Onze na Roma ainda ocupada pelos nazistas e suas primeiras atuações profissionais. A autora desenvolve renovadas estratégias analíticas e derruba alguns mitos ainda persistentes em nossa historiografia.

Antunes Filho: Formation of the Brazilian System of Theatrical Art

Antunes Filho: Formation of the Brazilian System of Theatrical Art (by Argus Cecil Nery Monteiro) is devoted to the formation and development of the method of Antunes Filho, a reformer of the modern Brazilian theatre. Resting on Stanislavski’s system, he created his own method based on contemporary psychological and philosophical researches. His method is successfully used in training actors at the Centre of theatre researches founded by him in São Paulo.

Giving Voice to the Past: Nostalgia as an Anti-Postapartheid Syndrome in South Africa

The act of transforming not only transforms the one who acts but also the one who decides to be the change he or she wants to see in the world. The prominent Brazilian theatre director and practitioner Augusto Boal (1979) reinforces this popular axiom when he argued that if the “oppressed” can perform an action, rather than the artist in their place, the performance of that action in theatrical fiction will enable them to activate themselves to perform similar actions in real life. This article focuses on nostalgia as an anti-postapartheid sentiment that appears to be hindering tertiary students from moving toward a truly nonracial and nonxenophobic South Africa. The article draws on illustrations from student narratives emerging from interactive drama and conflict management workshops that were carried out at the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa. As Jonathan Jansen (2009b) has pointed out, students’ narratives carry received knowledge of past oppressions that trigger what he describes as “the clash of martyrological memories.”

Del exilio a la escena internacional: el teatro de Fernando Arrabal en Brasil

This article offers an overview of Fernando Arrabal’s theatre in Brazil. Following the first stagings by Sao Paulo amateur companies in the late fifties, two major performances in Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro took place in 1968 and 1970, which boosted the author’s popularity and brought about a large number of his texts’ stagings across the country. We will also assess the excellent nature of the press reviews on these productions as well as the impact of Arrabal’s work upon Brazilian theatre.

Translating Marina Carr for a Brazilian audience: The interweaving of memories in theatre and translation

In this article, I wish to demonstrate how the theatre translator, when tailoring his/her translation to suit a particular theatre audience, resorts to creative strategies so as to establish dialogues between the exporting and importing cultures s/he is dealing with. Based on both my own translation of By the Bog of Cats… (1998), written by contemporary Irish playwright Marina Carr, and fieldwork carried out with a group of acting students in Florianopolis, Brazil (June 2010), this article shows how the Irish play, when translated into Brazilian Portuguese, creates layers of intertextuality with Brazilian–Azorean folklore and Brazilian theatre tradition, most particularly with Nelson Rodrigues’s modern play Vestido de noiva [The Wedding Dress]. The local language of southern Brazil set in the mystically unsettling space of a bog invited the actors, the director, and the audience members to embark on a hybrid voyage to both familiar and foreign places.

Greek Tragedy for the new millenium: public testimony and restorative justice in yael farber´s molora

This paper examines Molora, an adaptation of the Orestes story by South African playwright Yael Farber set in the context of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. It considers the play’s engagement with restorative justice in relation to the exploration of different forms of justice by Aeschylus in his Oresteia. It also examines Farber’s play in light of the ideas of the influential Brazilian theatre director Augusto Boal, noting how the relationship with the classical past has changed in the three decades between the publication of Boal’s Teatro del oprimido y otras poeticas politicas in 1974 and the premiere of Farber’s Molora in 2003.

José de Alencar e o teatro: um romântico realista

Jose de Alencar (1829-1877) is more known by the public reader by his novels. However, Alencar was also one of the most famous Brazilian playwright of nineteenth century’s second half, with a work marked by successes, failures and controversies. This article intends to study an important part of his work, especially the beginning of his actions towards the still incipient Brazilian theatre in his chronic Ao correr da pena, as well as the analysis of two plays, O demonio familiar (1857), and As asas de um anjo (1857). These works not only show his public’s success and failure, but also his flair for controversy. By using as theoretical basis Joao Roberto Faria and Martin Esslin, as well as other literary and theatre theorists, it will be shown that, although he defended French realism in theatre and used proceedings related to the genre, such realism, on his plays, was mixed with romantic solutions what made his work unique.

Marcas da Violência: vozes insurgentes no Teatro Negro Brasileiro

RESUMO Os estudos da etnocenologia retratam os aspectos relacionados com a teatralidade e espetacularidade tanto no campo dos rituais quanto cênicos. Neste sentido, o teatro é um dos suportes para os campos das pesquisas etnocenológicas, sendo o Teatro Negro o foco deste trabalho. Entre as formas de representação do negro na sociedade brasileira, a violência é uma das marcas simbólicas que vêm sendo ressignificada em textos afro-brasileiros. Este ensaio objetiva retratar alguns ecos da violência em textos dramáticos/espetaculares do Teatro Negro Brasileiro. Interessa-me discutir as instâncias em que a violência é representada cenicamente e como ela interfere na (re)construção das identidades e dos sujeitos negros.

Exploring Professionalism in Undergraduate Medical and Dental Education through Forum Theatre

Author(s): Brett-MacLean, Pamela; Yiu, Verna; Farooq, Ameer | Abstract: Forum Theatre (FT) was created by Brazilian theatre director Augusto Boal (1985) as an approach for promoting dialogue between the audience and those performing on stage for his “Theater for the Oppressed.” FT offers an accessible, interactive approach to exploring challenging topics and situations. In FT, a short scene is performed. It is then replayed again and again with audience members invited to intervene and offer different options for addressing various aspects of the problematic situation. Originally directed to helping people address and transform oppressive conditions that characterized their lives, FT has evolved and found expression in many different communities and contexts, including health professional education. Inspired by David Diamond’s (2008) “Theatre for Living” model (which approaches living communities as a complex, living entities), we introduced FT in the “Introduction to Medicine a Dentistry” (DMED 511) course offered as part of the Undergraduate Medical Education program in the Faculty of Medicine a Dentistry (FoMD). In this article, we describe how we have successfully engaged first year medical and dental students in discussion and critical reflection of professionalism issues relevant to their experiences of small group learning using FT.

Rehearsals for revolution? Theatre of the Oppressed, dominant discourses, and democratic tensions

Theatre of the Oppressed was conceived by Brazilian theatre director and theorist Augusto Boal as a ‘rehearsal for revolution’; it hinges on participants' power to select material for inquiry and frame, shape, script, and perform stories of problems/oppressions in their own lives and communities. In a 12-week-long study I co-facilitated in the drama classroom of an urban charter school in the Autumn of 2007, six girls and two boys framed problems from their lives and communities, scripted and staged anti-model scenes, and performed a wide range of Forum interventions. As a facilitator, I struggled with the tension between my own desire to intervene in discourses in embedded assumptions I found problematic and my fears that by doing so, I would be colonising the workshop with my own privileged agenda. This article is about that struggle, and about the problem that popular positions and ideas are not necessarily progressive, and while Theatre of the Oppressed is usually utilised in support of politically progressive agendas, the work participants initiate and the choices they make do not automatically orient towards social justice.

A brief history of Cia Ludens and its productions of Irish plays in Brazil

This essay intends to give an account of the activities undertaken by Cia Ludens, a professional Brazilian theatre company, since its foundation in 2003 up to present days. With the sole purpose of translating and producing Irish plays in Brazil, mainly by contemporary dramatists, and establishing possible connections with the Brazilian reality, the company has so far produced four plays and three staged readings, designed to show part of its researching process. Interwoven by the concept of play, the reflections presented here reveal how some of Huizinga's ideas influenced the company's artistic choices in its various productions.

Contingent Conditions of Change: An Exploration of Feminist Theatre Practice

This article explores how critical pedagogy and theatre arts can examine difference, change, and transformative possibilities in public spheres of educational practice. This narrative study offers a useful contribution on how theory, research, and practice can contribute to new ways of framing transformative feminist pedagogy in school cultures. I give an overview of critical pedagogy and the intersectionalities between concepts of liberatory pedagogy (Freire, 1970a) and the work of Brazilian theatre activist Augusto Boal (1979, 1992, 1995, 1998). I discuss how Boal’s philosophy and techniques of theatre of the oppressed can intersect in various ways with theatre arts curricula and feminist pedagogy. Using a case study of a young women’s theatre project Realtalk, I propose a postfeminist pedagogy and conditions for a form of radical education that offers a particular understanding of the complexities of how power is negotiated in schools across difference.

Flash and Crash Days: Brazilian Theatre in the Post-Dictatorship (review)

Reviewed by: Flash and Crash Days: Brazilian Theatre in the Post-Dictatorship Cláudia Tatinge Nascimento Flash and Crash Days: Brazilian Theatre in the Post-Dictatorship. By David George. New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 2000; pp. xviii + 177. $25.95 paper. English-language publications about Brazilian theatre are few and far between. The majority of books dedicated to the subject came out during the 1970s, and since then only two major titles have been published: Augusto Boal's Hamlet and the Baker's Son: My Life in Theatre and Politics (Routledge, 2000) and Severino Albuquerque's Tentative Transgressions: Homosexuality, AIDS, and the Theatre in Brazil (University of Wisconsin Press, 2003). David George's Flash and Crash Days: Brazilian Theatre in the Post-Dictatorship Period picks up where the earlier scholarship left off—with a major focus on the relationship between the stage and the military regime in Brazil—and provides the English-speaking reader with information about postdictatorship theatre. But while George considers the lack of recent works about the topic to reflect "an unstated assumption that theatre in Brazil thrives only under repression and dictatorship" (xv), I blame scholars and publishers who often overlook the artistic contribution of that major part of Latin America that is not Hispanic. After all, even in the seventies and during the worst years of the dictatorship, there were never as many books on Brazilian theatre for the American reader as on playwrights and directors from Spanish-speaking countries. Flash and Crash Days serves as a reminder that the Brazilian stage continues to thrive and produce vibrant theatre even though it remains as an almost unexplored field of scholarship and research. George's book offers an exposition of different aspects or fields of Brazilian theatre today and introduces a number of theatre practitioners to the North American readers. Chapter 1, "Gerald Thomas and the Postmodernist Theatre in Brazil," discusses the emergence of the postmodern director in Brazil. George uses Robert Wilson as the prime example of an encenador, the term he uses to describe a director who assumes the authority of auteur of the performance text by fulfilling a tripartite role of director-playwright-designer. The main problem is that the chapter, which constitutes roughly one half of the book, focuses exclusively on the performances of Gerald Thomas. Thomas was brought up in Rio de Janeiro, Berlin, and New York, and received his professional training in the United States and Europe. It is very true that his performances created heated polemic in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, effectively contributing to revitalize the audience's engagement with the stage. But Thomas makes a point of presenting himself as highly individualistic and self-made encenador, and is often condescending to other Brazilian artists and to critics, so it is no surprise that many consider him to be an outsider who returned to Rio to demonstrate postmodernist performance to the less-enlightened. George himself seems to support this view of Thomas as an artist greatly detached from the Brazilian cultural and artistic context when he locates Thomas's work exclusively via European and American directors—Pina Bausch, Tadeusz Kantor, Peter Sellars, and Robert Wilson. A more balanced introduction to the Brazilian encenador as a creative artist who emerges not only from a formalistic concept but also from financial limitation (which has not been the case of Thomas's productions) and with emphasis on group theatre should include other reputable names. I consider that encenadores Antonio Araújo, Bia Lessa, Moacyr Góes, Gabriel Villela, and Ulysses Cruz, who are mentioned only in passing, are more distinctly national artistic voices, since they pointedly reflect and engage in performance the many issues that inhabit the collective unconscious of contemporary Brazilian society. Chapter 2 introduces the reader to the less visible and at times neglected work of Brazilian women playwrights. George discusses in depth the works of two playwrights: Maria Adelaide Amaral's Querida Mamãe (Dear Mom) and Edla van Steen's O Último Encontro (The Last Encounter). The chapter [End Page 525] serves to spark curiosity about these two women's writing, as very little of it has been translated to English. Amaral and van Steen...

Rising to Demands: Argentine and Brazilian Theatre

Rising to Demands: Argentine and Brazilian Theatre

A Brazilian theatre model meets Zulu performance conventions Westville prison ‐ the case in point1

In July 2002, Christopher Hurst supervised Mbongiseni Buthelezi, a postgraduate student in Drama and Performance Studies, who conducted a Prison Theatre project at the Medium B Prison (a men's maximum security prison) at Westville Prison in Durban. Buthelezi used theatre workshop techniques to create a play that addressed expressions of prejudice towards inmates who are living with HIV/AIDS in the prison. The play re‐imagined and utilised Zulu military conventions and combined them with the Brazilian Forum Theatre methods of Augusto Boal. This combination made it possible for the inmate audiences to articulate criticisms about the behaviour of prison staff and other inmates that would otherwise have been difficult in the prison context. The performance form was recognised as something altogether new by the Zulu male participants, particularly because of the negotiations of power occasioned by the performance.

Ora, direis ouvir estrelas: historiografia e história do teatro brasileiro

This study emphasizes that Brazilian theatre history has been written following a pattern inherited from the 19th century. This statement implies that the most important works in this area were conceived according to historical concepts that are inadequate for analyzing modern theatre or even for working with contemporary theatre, because the 20th century represents a decline in aspects of mise-en-scene, performance and mimesis. One might ask if the authors considered are not dealing with a conception of history absolutely foreign to this cultural field. I propose that history has to be rethought in order to achieve another kind of theatre history, different from the old model seen in traditional books. (TB, in Portuguese)

Quando o teatro tece a trama: apontamentos históricos na dramaturgia de Jorge Andrade

Este artigo discute, a partir da relação história e teatro, o lugar do dramaturgo paulista Jorge Andrade (1922-1984) no centro do teatro brasileiro. Para isso, toma-se como ponto de partida a peça A Moratória, escrita em 1954, que é considerada uma das principais obras do autor e apresenta aspectos da decadência das elites cafeeiras em torno de 1930. Produzida e encenada nos anos 50, trata-se de um importante documento sobre a necessidade de se representar o "homem brasileiro" naquele contexto.

In the Jungle of the "Antropöfagos"

When dealing with the reception of literature outside its land of origin, it is natural to reflect on how the text is read and understood by an audience of a different culture, living in a different time zone, with a different climate, and speaking a language diffe rent from that of the author. What changes in this transfer of literature between cultures? How is the reader affected when exposed to a text from an alien culture? What role does the previous experience of the reader play in his understanding and interpreting of the text? There are many questions. and even more answers. While what follows will inevitably touch upon such questions, I shall for the most part leave the discussion of reception theory to the experts in the field, concentrating rather on a practical summary of Bertolt Brecht's reception in the Brazilian theatre, with special attention to indigenous theories of anthropophagy — what might be called cultural cannibalism.