Teatro De Research Articles

'We Feel Something'

On February 11, 1965, less than one year after the outset of the Brazilian military dictatorship, singer Maria Bethânia assumed one of the principal roles in the musical theater piece Opinião in Rio de Janeiro. Taking over for Nara Leão, who helped conceive the play, Bethânia was celebrated by fans, especially for her performance of co-star João do Vale’s song ‘Carcará.’ The song’s lyrics invoke imagery of the Brazilian northeast, home region of both Vale and Bethânia, and the performance includes a spoken statistical report on the migration of people from the northeast to the southern cities. Although the song’s composer denied that the song was an act of protest or political commentary, General Riograndino Kruel, then head of the Federal Police, identified it as one of the ‘subversive’ elements in the show that needed to be cut. This call to censorship contradicted the censor board’s 1964 approval of the show, during Nara Leão’s run as star. This article analyzes singer Maria Bethânia’s participation in Opinião to consider the potential for musical performance to engender political community by affective means. Drawing on archival materials and interviews conducted with audience members and participants, I argue that Bethânia’s performances were the catalyst for the formation of an oppositional ‘community of feeling,’ a collective predicated the expression of negative emotional energy toward the nascent authoritarian state. I show how audience members’ and critics’ affective response to Bethânia’s performance evidenced a shift in the tenor of the public for Opinião, which subsequently raised the suspicions of the military government. Additionally, I investigate how the dictatorship’s repressive response illustrates the possibilities and limits of a community formed through musical performance. Photo caption: Maria Bethania in the show Opinião, at Teatro de Arena, São Paulo, 1965. (Public domain / Arquivo Nacional Collection)

Women’s Agency in El burlador de Sevilla: Xavier Albertí’s Mise en Scène (2022) in the Wake of #MeToo

Abstract: This article probes a radical co-production of El burlador de Sevilla—with interpolations from Tan largo me lo fiáis and a passage from Tirso’s La dama delOlivar—by the Compañía Nacional de Teatro Clásico (CNTC) and Grec 2022 Festival de Barcelona, as adapted and directed by Xavier Albertí. It examines how, in the context of the 2017 resurgence of the #MeToo movement, this re-creation of El burlador allowed the amorous agendas, social ambitions, or sexual desires of the play’s visible women to be foregrounded rather than pushed to the background. Though these women are hardly models of virtue, they exercise agency: the ability to make choices and then act upon them.

La Liga de la Decencia: Performing 20th Century Mexican History in 21st Century Texas

This article describes the development and public performances of La Liga de la Decencia, a new play presented as part of the 2023 New Works Festival at the University of Texas at Austin. Inspired by the cabaret scene and teatro de revista of the 1940s in Mexico City, La Liga de la Decencia combines live performance and video art to explore how hegemonic gender and social norms shaped by the emergent nationalism of postrevolutionary Mexico continue to oppress femme and queer bodies today across the US–Mexico border. Through satire, parody, and dance, La Liga de la Decencia problematizes the social, class, and gender norms as established by the cultural elite and the state. Following research-based theatre as an inquiry process, this article describes how writing and directing this play allowed for a deeper understanding of the dynamics of a historical period. By mixing facts, fiction, and critical commentary, La Liga de la Decencia investigates history through embodiment.

Shedding light on the Light District : artistic processes in and around the Teatro de Contêiner

This articlepresents interviews with artists from Cia Mungunzá de Teatro and their partnersabout the artistic work carried out in Bairro da Luz in the centre of the cityof São Paulo /Brazil. In 2016, Cia Mungunzá was responsible for creating the Teatro de Conteiner (Theatre of Container), a cultural space established in one of themost impoverished areas of Brazil, where the level of poverty leads many to use crack cocaine and alcohol.The Teatro de Conteiner was installed as a result of an occupation of publicland by Cia Mungunzá de Teatro unknown to andunsupported by the state. Since then, the cultural space has been home tosocial and artistic activities. The possibilities for action by artists in theregion were placed alongside my (Vinicius Torres Machado’s)own experience in order to highlight the difficulties of thework and the achievements of the interviewees. Respondents Lucas and Verônicaare co-founders of the CiaMugunzá and areco-responsible for the occupation of the area. Dona Carmen is a former socialworker who leads a project in the neighbourhood that has moved into the Theatreof Container, teaching impoverished women how to sew. Finally Dentinho is asocial worker and artist in the area. The article seeks to bring the voice ofthese artists to reflect on thepresence of artistic works in places of extreme poverty.

Vestido de Noiva and Nada Aconteceu: The rhizomatic dramaturgy of the Theater Group XIX

This work analyzes the dramaturgy of Nothing happened, everything happens, everything is happening, by Grupo XIX de Teatro and the dramaturg Alexandre Dal Farra, based on Wedding Dress, by Nelson Rodrigues. Seeking to understand the dialogue between the 19th century play and the contemporary proposal, the study investigates how the creation process appropriated adaptation, free inspiration and authorial writing strategies. For that, we dialogue with Salles, Pavis, Zunthor and Desgranges, as well as group members and process notes. Appropriating the concept of “rhizome” by Deleuze and Guattari, this path of analysis allowed us to understand the group's dramaturgy as “rhizomatic”.

Estreno absoluto: Concert Version of Felipe Pedrell’s La Celestina (1902) in Madrid’s Teatro de la Zarzuela (2022)

<i>Estreno absoluto</i>: Concert Version of Felipe Pedrell’s <i>La Celestina</i> (1902) in Madrid’s Teatro de la Zarzuela (2022)

Lope de Vega. Lo fingido verdadero

Lope de Vega. <i>Lo fingido verdadero</i>

Las Hermanas De Manolete by Alicia Montesquiu, and: Entre Sevilla y Triana (review)

Reviewed by: Las Hermanas De Manolete by Alicia Montesquiu, and: Entre Sevilla y Triana Duncan Wheeler LAS HERMANAS DE MANOLETE. By Alicia Montesquiu. Directed by Gabriel Olivares. Teatro Fernán Gómez, Centro Cultural de la Villa, Madrid. January 23, 2022. ENTRE SEVILLA Y TRIANA. Music by Pablo Sorozábal. Libretto by Luis Fernández de Se-villa and Luis Tejedor. Teatro de la Zarzuela, Madrid. January 28, 2022. Historical memory is a hot topic in Spanish theatre and society more generally. The long Franco regime (1939–1975) came to an end only when the dictator died in his bed in November 1975. A relatively peaceful transition was predicated on a tacit agreement by the major players not to weaponize the past, moving forward with the consensus politics enshrined in the 1978 constitution. In the twenty-first century, there is a growing divide between citizens who believe it best to let sleeping dogs lie and those who contend that the existence of mass graves and a denial of the country’s traumatic past is an obstacle to the consolidation of a mature political democracy and broader social wellbeing. Madrid’s “Teatro del barrio” [Neighborhood Theatre], which was established in 2013, has, for example, provided a vibrant forum for practitioners, activists and audiences emotionally and politically invested in disinterring the original sins of the dictatorship and the so-called “regime of 78.” While there is a loyal clientele for such initiatives, attending sold-out productions at this hipster hangout in a multicultural neighborhood is not necessarily representative of where the conversation is heading more broadly. Merely referencing censorship alongside the use of non-traditional framing devices—the zarzuela (light Spanish opera) Doña Francisquita was adapted for television during the dictatorship—prompted catcalls from an older and generally more conservative clientele at Madrid’s Zarzuela Theatre in 2019. In this publically funded space, a 2021–2022 staging of Entre Sevilla y Triana was far less polemical. Understanding how and why a production of this zarzuela did not offend conservative sensibilities—in spite of touching on a number of the same unsettling themes that a recently premiered new play, Las hermanas de Manolete, also did—offers new sociological and theatrical insight into the cultural politics of contemporary Spain. Manuel Laureano Rodríguez Sánchez, known professionally as “Manolete,” was the most important matador of Spain’s post-Civil War years. Beyond his prowess with the sword, he was a national hero because audiences during the so-called “years of hunger,” identified with an idol who had a melancholy countenance and emaciated frame. After Manolete died in 1947, gored in the ring, his mother, Angustias Sánchez, and his inner professional circle ostracized his lover, the actress Lupe Sino. In a previous life, she had been married to a Republican army soldier during the Civil War (1936–1939) and was rumored to have made a living as a sex worker after he was jailed. Much of the cultural production surrounding Manolete—see, for example, the film A Matador’s Mistress (Menno Meyjes, 2008) starring Adrien Brody and Penélope Cruz—hinges on the melodrama of a mythical icon caught between a passionate love affair and an over-protective Bernarda Alba-style mother. The underlying conceit of Las hermanas de Manolete is the making of a documentary film about Lupe Sino, but the play itself is set almost entirely in the home of Manolete’s sisters, the more sympathetic of whom has learning difficulties. They reminisce about the past and dissect their brother’s relationship, which began in the infamous Chicote cocktail bar, the place to score a plethora of drugs from cocaine to penicillin (a game-changer for the life expectancy of matadors). Click for larger view View full resolution Alicia Cabrera and Alicia Montesquiu in a rehearsal for Las hermanas de Manolete, Photo by Kike Parra. The first husband of Manolete’s mother was a bullfighter who died of tuberculosis. She remarried another bullfighter who also died young. Manolete, her only son, was born of this second marriage. The future matador left school at twelve to help provide for his mother and five (half-)sisters. To a large extent, the Spanish Civil...

Idoya Puig and Karl McLaughlin, eds. Spanish Golden Age Texts in the Twenty-First Century: Teaching the Old Through the New; Alba Carmona. Las reescrituras fílmicas de la comedia nueva: Un siglo en la gran pantalla

Idoya Puig and Karl McLaughlin, eds. <i>Spanish Golden Age Texts in the Twenty-First Century: Teaching the Old Through the New</i>; Alba Carmona. <i>Las reescrituras fílmicas de la comedia nueva: Un siglo en la gran pantalla</i>

Contribuições da Pesquisadora Beti Rabetti para o Tema Teatro e Culturas Populares: o estudo dos modos de produção teatral

ABSTRACT This article aims to discuss the contribution of Beti Rabetti (Maria de Lourdes Rabetti) to discussions on the relation between theater and popular cultures. A brief overview of the researcher’s career and discussions on the subject are presented, based on her research work and publications, and on her work as an advisor, focusing on her discussion on the importance of the modes of theatrical production. Popular culture is discussed from authors such as Bakhtin, Burke, Canclini and José Jorge de Carvalho. Aspects of popular comic theater, teatro de revista in Brazil and manifestations of traditional cultures in their relations with the theater of Ariano Suassuna are also discussed.

Reflexões sobre o Popular no Contexto do Grupo Mamulengo de Cheiroso de Teatro de Bonecos

ABSTRACT Reflections on the Popular in the Context of the Grupo Mamulengo de Cheiroso de Teatro de Bonecos – This article presents and discusses the notion of popular culture and theater based on the experience of the Grupo Mamulengo de Cheiroso de Teatro de Bonecos (Aracaju/SE), a popular nucleus with a specific relationship with the academic space. The study is a partial result of a master’s research and makes extensive use of literature review, primary sources, and interviews. Through these discussions, a critical view of popular theater is obtained, which can manifest itself in different places, modes, and contexts, deviating from a stereotyped and largely homogeneous view of these phenomena, resulting from literary production that approaches history from the perspective of lettered culture.

The quest for new values: Carmen Martín Gaite’s Don Duardos (1978)

ABSTRACT This article examines Carmen Martín Gaite’s adaptation of Gil Vicente’s Tragicomedia de Don Duardos (c. 1522), produced in 1978 by the Centro Nacional de Iniciación del Niño y el Adolescente al Teatro (CNINAT). The CNINAT was a branch of the Dirección General de Teatro y Espectáculos and the Ministerio de Cultura. Despite only four years of activity after it was created during the Spanish Transition, the CNINAT had a considerable impact on cultural policies geared toward children’s education, especially through the performing arts. Founded by stage director José María Morera, the Center became a civic engagement initiative committed to promoting theater as an experiential tool for the new generation coming of age during complex political change in their most vulnerable, formative years. Within this context, Martín Gaite's adaptation of Don Duardos represents a paradigmatic experiment for two reasons. On the one hand, the adaptation emphasizes the novelist’s prolonged commitment to developing and nurturing socially engaged children’s literature. On the other, it exemplifies how it was possible to recast early modern Peninsular theater as a progressive, inclusive cultural legacy that guided young audiences to new values and ideals that gradually took hold during the Transition.

‘¡No quiero!’ Staging Alfonso Reyes's Ifigenia cruel in Francoist Spain (1958)

Alfonso Reyes's Ifigenia cruel has long been recognized as a personal hymn of liberation, which adapts Euripides’ Iphigenia in Tauris to the convulsed Mexican shore of the early twentieth century. The dramatic poem Ifigenia cruel by Alfonso Reyes was first performed in Mexico in 1934. The next documented performance, by the company Teatro de Ensayo Escena and directed by Aitor Goiricelaya, took place at the Instituto de Cultura Hispánica in April 1958 − during Franco's regime. The purpose of this article is to put the 1958 production on the map of performances of Reyes's dramatic poem, and thus to fulfil a research niche regarding the scholarly work on this poem, which has traditionally focused on its historical context and literary legacy. Drawing on the Spanish political history of the period, the article reveals a performance history of Ifigenia cruel, which is essential for its reception.

Introduction. Confronting the Challenges of the 21st Century

Introduction. Confronting the Challenges of the 21st Century

Para um 1922 alternativo: cultura popular e modernismo vernacular no Rio de Janeiro

ABSTRACT This article explores cultural innovations taking place in Rio de Janeiro in 1922. The year evidenced numerous changes in the then capital. These have, though, been eclipsed by the dominant focus on avant-garde experimentations by modernist artists in São Paulo. Returning to 1922 and zooming in on Rio, this article explores transformations that altered the space of the city, and its popular cultural landscape. By doing so, the article seeks to widen the landscape of Brazil’s cultural modernity to encompass developments taking place beyond the confines of the modernist movement and the city of São Paulo. It does this by analysing cultural revolutions taking place in 1922 in terms of Rio’s “vernacular modernisms”, to borrow from Miriam Hansen (1999). Specifically it explores changes in urban planning, in popular music and live performance, in the teatro de revista and in popular literature.

En otro reino extraño or, Lope de Vega and the Digital Stage

As a result of the global pandemic, in the spring of 2020 Madrid experienced a restrictive confinement for over three months. While theaters were forced to close, such measures did not put a stop to cultural initiatives in the city. From May through June, the Compañía Nacional de Teatro Clásico (CNTC) developed a pioneering audiovisual piece, En otro reino extraño, built around different texts about love by Lope de Vega (1562–1635). Carrying out this creative endeavor remotely, director David Boceta ushers actors and audience members into a state of disquieting liminality, a no man’s land straddling utopia and dystopia. The piece succeeds in fostering a communal and self-supportive dialogue around the meaning of love but, at the same time, leads performers and spectators to reassess our understanding of the classics when theater was plunged into survival mode.

The Theatre of the Senses: Introductory Words and a Short Conversation for the Symposium

What happens to us when we enter a Teatro de los Sentidos (Theatre of the Senses) experience? Why do we need to play? Where does our need to play come from? Why is sensory theatre relevant today? For what strange reasons do humans like to play getting lost and finding themselves in the dark? I want to share with you the reasons why Teatro de los Sentidos has been significant to me ever since I became aware of inventing myself and inventing it in my childhood games, imagining forbidden labyrinths in Colombian coffee plantations, until today, at my eighty years of age. It is clear that a lot of primal and parallel knowledge has developed over time in all cultures. Myths, celebrations, imagination, poetry, symbolic powers ... resonate differently, each according to historical circumstances. Let us ask ourselves together: what potential does sensorial theatre have today? (Enrique Vargas: Some questions before the symposium.)

The World of Odour in the Slovenian Performing Arts

The article provides an overview of performances on Slovenian stages that have used odour to stimulate the audience’s senses and arouse transformational effects. Representing the first research of this kind into Slovenian culture, the author demonstrates that odour was used as a means of sensory perception, especially in experimental theatre practices since the 1970s. One of the first such works was Cimetova vrata ladje norcev in druge spremembe (The Cinnamon Door of the Ship of Fools and Other Changes), a performance art piece directed by Tomaž Kralj at Glej Theatre in 1975. In the 1990s, the interest in olfactory perceptions grew among theatre-makers who successfully used odour to implement the aesthetics of the real in post-dramatic theatre and achieve the immersion of the spectator. This role of odour in theatre also continues in the 21st century. Barbara Pia Jenič began deliberately and continuously developing the poetics of scent at the Sensorium Theatre, which she founded in 2001 with Gabriel Hernandez. In her creation of sensorial events, Jenič relies on the methodologies of Enrique Vargas, with which she became acquainted as an actress and scent designer in his group Teatro de los Sentidos and creatively developed them at the Sensorium Theatre. As a scent designer, Jenič has collaborated with other Slovenian theatres, among others, on the 2015 operatorium, The Tenth Daughter (Deseta hči) by Svetlana Makarovič (based on the libretto by Milko Lazar, directed by Rocco) at the Slovenian National Theatre – Opera and Ballet Ljubljana.

Citizen Art and Human Rights: Collective Theatre Creation as a Way of Combatting Exclusion

In this article, through the lens of critical theory and collective theatre creation, we will look at how a group of homeless individuals in the city of Seville (Spain) has been able to assert their human rights using art. Through the words of the actors themselves, we will reveal the obstacles they face in accessing the city’s public sphere, and their deconstruction. By creating and producing plays, as well as interacting with the audience, the participants became not just actors, but citizens with rights. Collective theatre creation, as adapted by the authors within the context of their research in the field of social work, provides insights into how art has the power to become a strategy for helping those living on the fringes of mainstream society reclaim their place in it politically and culturally. This research has been made possible thanks to the commitment of the members of Teatro de la Inclusión, a theatre group and socio‐artistic project that ran for twelve years and allowed homeless individuals, tired of being passive subjects, dependent on external assistance and subject to endless bureaucracy, to become amateur actors. In doing so, they created for themselves dignified forums in which to express themselves within their city and put their communicative and artistic skills into practice.

The pursuit of a life less ordinary. The trajectory of afro-brazilian actor Milton Gonçalves.

Milton Gonçalves is one of the most awarded actors in Brazil. He is a descendant of slaves, born in 1933 and, as such, he faced the challenges imposed on Afro-Brazilians during post-abolition: poverty and racial discrimination. This article utilizes interviews, newspapers and other media to examine the trajectory of Milton Gonçalves: his origins, life in São Paulo during the Vargas Era, the Teatro de Arena, the TV Channel Globo. Milton goes from being a shy young man to becoming the face and voice recognized by hundreds of millions in Brazil. He also became engaged in the struggle for racial equality in Brazil.