From Oríkì to Elinga: Black-Brazilian principles of acting and staging (original) (raw)
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Revista Brasileira de Estudos da Presença, 2021
Anthropology of Performance or Anthropology of Contemporary Theatre?: ethnographic remarks on companhia brasileira de teatro and PROJETO bRASIL-Based on anthropological and ethno-graphical fieldwork research with companhia brasileira de teatro this article points to some limits of a universalist and orthodox anthropology of performance. It sustains, alternatively, one anthropology of contemporary theatre, dealing with concepts such as drama, performance and dramaturgy as research realms, able to express desires, expectancies, and meanings disputes enrolled in the artistic process. This study reveals how performative theatre, metadiscursive and de-dramatizing strategies lead to polysemic and reflexive scenes that provide critical discourses, viewpoints shifts and encourage sensibility for alterity. Keywords: Anthropology of Performance. Anthropology of Theater. Contemporary Dramaturgy. RÉSUMÉ-Anthropologie de la Performance ou Anthropologie du Théâtre contemporain?: considérations sur companhia brasileira de teatro et PROJETO bRASIL-A partir d'une recherche de terrain anthropologique et ethnographique avec companhia brasileira de teatro cet article démontre des limites de l'anthropologie de la performance de façon universaliste et orthodoxe. On propose, autrement, une anthropologie du téâtre contemporain considèrent des notions de drame, de performance et de dramaturgie comme des univers d'investigation capables d'exprimer des désirs, des aspirations et des disputes de sens dans le processus artistique. Cette étude démontre comme l'emploi du théâtre performatif et des stratégies métadiscursives et de dédramatisation ont résulté en des scènes polysémiques, réflexives et capables de soutenir des discours critiques, de changer des points de vue et de sensi-bilizer pour l'altérité. Mots-clés: Anthropologie de la Performance. Anthropologie du Théâtre. Dramaturgie Contemporaine. RESUMO-Antropologia da Performance ou Antropologia do Teatro Contemporâneo?: notas etnográficas a propósito da companhia brasileira de teatro e do PROJETO bRASIL-Tendo por base um trabalho an-tropológico e etnográfico junto à companhia brasileira de teatro, o presente artigo pretende apontar para os limites de uma antropologia da performance ortodoxa e universalizante. Propõe, alternativamente, uma antropologia do teatro contemporâneo tomando as noções de drama, performance e dramaturgia como universos investigativos capazes de apontar para desejos, expectativas e disputas de sentido envolvidas no processo artístico. O estudo demonstra como o uso do teatro performativo, de estratégias metadiscursivas e de desdramatização resultaram em cenas polissêmicas, reflexivas, capazes de promover discursos altamente críticos, suscitar a modificação de pontos de vista e sensibilizar para a alteridade. Palavras-chave: Antropologia da Performance. Antropologia do Teatro. Dramaturgia Contemporânea.
Experiences of Performativity in the Contemporary Brazilian Scene
In relation to research in human sciences, and against the current opinions, Giorgio Agamben argues that the discussion of the method does not precede practice, but it succeeds practice (Agamben, 2008, p. 7). The investigation procedures are generally defined a posteriori as an explanation about the long and continuous habit of researching. The observation is recovered in order to justify some trajectories of research in performing arts that I have followed over the years of investigation in the area and that, in a certain sense, reflect my own path. The recent discovery that several Brazilian researchers have worked with contemporary theater assumptions of genetic criticism is part of this a posteriori methodological recognition, of which, until recently, we had no awareness. It is clear that the methodologies are never pure, and they seem nourish themselves, at least in the case of the performing arts, of an inevitable hybridity resulting from the slippery nature of the object. Th...
THEATRE, NÉGRITUDE AND THE PERFORMATIVE UNMASKING OF BRAZIL'S "BLACKFACE MODERNISM"
Santa Barbar Portuguese Studies, 2022
This article examines the project and production history of the Teatro Experimental do Negro (TEN), founded by Abdias do Nascimento in 1944, in the light of the conspicuous lack of theatrical innovation and an almost complete absence of direct participation and intervention of Afro-Brazilian artists in the Brazilian modernist movement. My central argument is twofold. On the one hand, I propose that the representation or performance of Black identity and subjectivity that defines the bulk of the TEN's productions, and has often been criticized for its elitism and essentialism, was both the product of and a strategic response to a modality of aggressively disavowed racism prevalent in Brazil. Thus, among the specific targets of the TEN's interrogation of the representation of Blackness in Brazilian theatre and drama were the multiple and often unacknowledged effects of branqueamento on cultural and artistic representations of Blackness as well as the aesthetic claim to embody Afro-Brazilian subjectivity and sensibilities by white authors. The second part of my thesis explores the particular ways in which the contradictions arising from the TEN's working definition of Afro-Brazilian identity risked hampering the efficacy of the company's struggles against racial discrimination.
Revista Brasileira de Estudos da Presença, 2019
Theater: the scene of origin -This text presents traces of construction of a Poetics, whose purpose is to develop a Re-Vision of the Brazilian Theater in five key moments. To do so, it is sought to establish a scene of origin, outlined from the encounter -impregnated with attraction and repulsion -that takes place in Colonial Brazil, from the 16 th Century, between Amerindian and European civilizations. Two metaphysics and forms of expression thus form the intensive and pantheatrical basis of a Poetics that projects a notion of Brazilian theater in a constant state of struggles of perspectives, symbolized, in its origins, by two anthropophagic interdevouring mouths: the mercantilist Christian eucharist and the Amerindian cosmopolitics. Keywords: Brazilian Theater. Poetics. Anthropophagy. Perspectivism. Shamanism. RÉSUMÉ -Poétique Anthropophagique-Perspectiviste pour une Re-Vision du Théâtre Brésilien: la scène d'origine -Ce texte présente une ébauche de construction d'une Poétique, dont le but est de faire une Re-vision, en cinq moments clés, du Théâtre Brésilien. Pour ce faire, nous cherchons à établir une scène d'origine, décrite à partir de la rencontre -imprégnée d'attraction et de répulsion -qui se déroule au Brésil, à partir du XVIe siècle, entre les civilisations amérindiennes et européennes. Deux métaphysiques et formes d'expression forment ainsi la base intensive et panteatrale d'une poétique qui projette une notion de théâtre brésilien dans un état constant de luttes de perspectives, symbolisées, à l'origine, par deux bouches anthropophages: l'eucharistie chrétienne mercantiliste et la cosmopolitique amérindiennes. Mots-clés: Théâtre Brésilien. Poétique. Anthropophagie. Perspectivisme. Chamanisme.
Rufino dos Santos, Joel. A história do negro no teatro brasileiro. Novas Direções, 2015
Journal of Lusophone Studies
Joel Rufino dos Santos here provides a much-anticipated contribution to the study of the presence of Afro-Brazilians in the national theater. The author investigates the ways in which Afro-Brazilians are authors, characters, objects, and types—both onstage and off. In addition to offering an overview of the role of race in the history of Afro-Brazilian theater and drama, the book also contains many invaluable images that serve to illustrate as well as add insight to the written pages, filling a much-needed gap in critical studies of Brazilian theater.
Theatricality and performativity in Glauber Rocha’s cinema novo films
Performance dans les Amériques De 1950 à nos jours, 2024
In this article I re-examine the esthetics and poetics of the seminal figure of modern Brazilian cinema Glauber Rocha from the perspective of the theatricality of his Cinema Novo films starting with Barravento from 1962 and finishing with Antonio das Mortes from 1969. Rocha was a founder and theoretical frame giver for the Cinema Novo movement with his manifesto Aesthetics of Hunger in 1965, and it was he who envisioned a new postcolonial context of the Brazilian cinema in the 60’s. Article will provide an insight how Rocha employed theatricality to emphasize the revolutionary and anti-colonial narrative present in his films. In Barravento we witness the rare negative employment of the traditional and ethnographic performative praxis of the Brazilian Bahia region with theatrical representation of the Capoeira and Candomblé rituals. In his seminal Black God, White Devil, the director stages the “black” processions of the pseudo religious movement of the beatos while also using the performatives of the poetical duels known as desafios. Finally, in the closing times of Cinema Novo and Brazilian democracy Rocha presented the film Antonio das Mortes filled with theatricality from the ongoing inner audience witnessing duels, processions, acclamations and desafios. All the strategies that Rocha employed to design a bloody and revolutionary power of the Cinema Novo movement owe a great deal to the theatricality and performativity stamped in the core of these three films.
Manifesto Poetico: Toward New Theatrical Languages
ASAP/journal, 2020
TOWARD NEW THEATRICAL LANGUAGES M ANIFESTO POETICO is an international theater research group and production company that proposes a theater "for and with the people." 1 Their work began twenty-two years ago after artistic leader and founder CARLOS GARCÍA ESTÉVEZ was provoked by his teacher, the renowned theater innovator JACQUES LECOQ, to delve more deeply into the tragic depth of Commedia dell'Arte and masked performance. After years of research and collaborations with such artists as DONATO SARTORI, DARIO FO, TAPA SUDANA, SIMON MCBURNEY, and MIQUEL BARCELÓ, CARLOS became a recognized authority on Contemporary Mask Performance. A contributor to the Routledge Companion to Commedia dell'Arte, 2 CARLOS has taught masked performance all over the world and presented at major conferences and festivals including at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, the International Encounter of Theatre of the Oppressed, and the International Commedia dell'Arte Festival. In 2010-responding to a growing disassociation between the theater and more popular cultural forms-he was inspired to entirely reinvent his practice. What was necessary, he recognized, was not more or different forms of theater-that is, more or different depictions of human experience within a previously established representative mode-but new languages, new ways of communicating experience that could accommodate and employ the techniques and effects of our rapidly changing technologies, social realities, and points of view.
Latin American Theatre Review, 2017
History offered an alternative account of the avantgarde's fate in his essay "The Conservative Avant-Garde." Here, Schechner acknowledged that a contemporary avantgarde was thriving, but that it had become a substantially different animal. Where the traditional avantgarde radically disrupted the status quo, artists of what Schechner termed today's "niche-garde" have focused on perfecting the techniques of the postwar avantgarde and mining their known registers, rather than risking failure. "Many of these artists are on the left personally, but in their artistic practice, in terms of venues, audiences, and effects on the political world, this left is apolitical, a style left rather than a workers' left" (2010:27). The essay, like its predecessor, was a polemic and one that self-consciously spoke from and about the insular-or what Brecht would call "culinary"-downtown New York performance scene. But, it was also a frank glance at the author's past, a provocation to reconsider the politics of conservation and recollection more broadly for artistic production and for scholarship. We might ask: After several decades of radical invention, does the "antidiscipline" of performance studies threaten to become just such a "niche-garde"?