Journal of Graduate Program in Performing Arts - University of São Paulo
Universidade de São Paulo. Escola de Comunicações e Artes
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As artes da cena e os movimentos abolicionistas: pedagogias libertárias e espaços de imaginação política
Copyright (c) 2025 Nailanita Prette, Murilo Gaulês, Ashley Lucas, Vicente Concíio, Walidah Imarisha https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
O fim da fúria – um Pantera Negra na prisão promove um acerto de contas: a história de Russell Maroon Shoatz
Em 2014, na Pensilvânia, Estados Unidos (EUA), Russell Maroon Shoatz foi transferido de seu confinamento na solitária, após 22 anos consecutivos, para se juntar à população carcerária geral. Isto é 21 anos e 50 semanas a mais do que a duração da pena que os Estados Unidos consideram como tortura. Tendo passado tanto tempo em um espaço pequeno, ele contraiu problemas para caminhar e não podia subir as escadas para acessar a cantina. Ele se sentiu impactado pelas outras pessoas, de cuja presença ele sentiu uma desesperada falta por todos aqueles anos. Conhecido por seus apoiadores dentro e fora da prisão como um líder da liberdade negra, ele agora encontrava dificuldades físicas para ficar de pé. O fato de ele estar vivo era mais do que muitos, que o consideravam um assassino de policiais, queriam: acreditavam que sua punição deveria ter sido a morte.
Copyright (c) 2025 Ashley Lucas; Nícolas de Cordova Dorvalino https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
This essay proposes a poetic-theoretical reflection based on life experience and the aesthetic, political, and epistemological potency of the word capenga (something close to lame, limping, or crooked). Taking artistic practice as its research methodology, this study aims to scrutinize and expand the meanings of the word, making it a field of creation that produces Contemporary Dance — a dance that stumbles, falters, and disconcerts and that confronts the notion of compulsory able-bodiness that prevails within Contemporary Dance. An experiment in capenga writing. An account of how the ordinary can transform itself into a language investigation. An attempt to translate the affection one has for a word.
Copyright (c) 2025 Estela Lapponi https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Cultura DEF e acessibilidade nas artes da cena
Copyright (c) 2025 Amanda Justamante Handel Schmitz, Anna Theresa Kühl, Carlos Alberto Ferreira da Silva, Cintia Alves, João Paulo de Oliveira Lima, Luiza Marcato Camargo de Sousa, Marcia Berselli, Marie Araújo Auip, Rosa Adelina Sampaio Oliveira, Thais Ponzoni dos Santos https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Arte em tempos ruidosos: diálogos entre as artes da cena e a democracia
Copyright (c) 2024 Adriana Perrella Matos, Douglas Ricci Rosa, Maíra do Nascimento https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Aesthetics of the oppressed and pedagogy of liberation: theater as resistance in the socio-educational system
This experience report describes a theatrical intervention with adolescents serving socio-educational measures in a closed regime, focusing on suicide prevention and a critique of punitive systems. The project was grounded in Augusto Boal’s Theater of the Oppressed and Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, combining aesthetic and pedagogical practices rooted in libertarian thought. By staging The Wizard of Oz, generative themes were explored to foster symbolic expressions of suffering, critical reflection, and the valorization of marginalized knowledge. The methodology included weekly meetings with dialogue circles, performances, and collective scene analysis, encouraging youth protagonism and political imagination. This experience positions theater as an abolitionist tool and a form of resistance to incarceration logics.
Copyright (c) 2025 Guadalupe Rodrigues Braga, Janaína Bastos dos Santos, Adriana de Souza Medeiros Batista https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
The construction of an abolitionist poetics via attack as language: the work of CiA dXs TeRrOrIsTaS with trans and travesti women who are survivors of prison
This study was developed from Master’s research in Performing Arts called Theater and Prison: the Public Dimension of the Work of CiA dXs TeRrOrIsTaS, carried out at the School of Music and Performing Arts at the Federal University of Goiás. It aims to reflect, based on Angela Davis’ abolitionist thought and American philosopher Judith Butler’ notion of precariousness, on what characterizes a penal abolitionist company in Brazil in the 21st century, and how the artistic creations of CiA dXs TeRrOrIsTaS embody abolitionist practices, especially in restaging the play Anjos de Cara Suja: o sol é ou deveria ser para todas.
Copyright (c) 2025 Thaisa Schmaedecke https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Performance Negrotério: 25 Years of Carandiru Massacre
This study aims to analyze how performance experience can activate traumatic memories of the episode known as the Carandiru Massacre (1992), which resulted in the death of at least 111 incarcerated men. For this, we draw on Achille Mbembe’s concept of necropolitics and Diana Taylor’s discussion on the transmission of traumatic memory through performance. We then analyze Negrotério: 25th Anniversary of the Carandiru Massacre (2017), created by the Coletiva Preta Performance collective.
Copyright (c) 2025 Rodrigo Severo dos Santos https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Escalating the Prison Walls: A Case Study of There are Women Waiting: The Tragedy of Medea Jackson
Developed by independent research, sparked by a chance encounter with the work of American performer Rhodessa Jones, this essay aims to undertake a case study of the play There Are Women Waiting: The Tragedy of Medea Jackson, presented by the American theater collective The Medea Project: Theater for Incarcerated Women in 1992 under the direction of Rhodessa Jones. The performance was the first in a series of theatrical works created by the collective of amateur artists, all young Black women who, at the time, were serving sentences at the San Francisco County Jail in California. By examining the roots and founding process of The Medea Project, we will explore how this particular performance touches on crucial themes for considering the intersections between art and socio-historical reality, theater as a privileged locus of utopian counterpoint to social mechanisms of surveillance and punishment, and counter-hegemonic theater as a space for critical reflection and positioning on issues of freedom, race, and class.
Copyright (c) 2025 Patricia Freitas dos Santos https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Between walls and acts: the mapping of brazilian dramaturgies to fracture the carceral system
This study examines the intersections of theater and incarceration to find ways to fracture the walls of the carceral regime via art by analyzing four Brazilian dramaturgies. It also proposes using theater as a liberating practice, drawing on Walidah Imarisha’s concept of visionary fiction. It investigates, via a bibliographic analysis, the use of the word as a potent weapon that shatters the system of (in)justice and finds new possibilities of worlds.
Copyright (c) 2025 Pietra Bonet, Ianna Nogueira, Caroline Vetori https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Musical act-spectacle Inútil Canto e Inútil Pranto pelos Anjos Caídos: the State’s genocidal politics, mass incarceration, and social movements on stage
This study aims to explore the themes and dynamics of the creative process behind the theatrical production Inútil Canto e Inútil Pranto pelos Anjos Caídos, directed by Rogério Tarifa, which premiered in 2017 at the Teatro Laboratório of USP. It draws connections with epic theater, Bertolt Brecht’s didactic plays, and Cecilia Almeida Salles’ the proposal of the creative process on a web. Its central theme addresses the prison system and the genocidal policies of the State, directly linked to mass incarceration and the extermination of the Brazilian Black and marginalized populations. The production was carried out at a School of Dramatic Arts with graduating students from Class 66 and featured the active collaboration and participation from members of the social movement Mães em Luto da Zona Leste and the group Mulheres Livres, born from the Voz Própria Project, led by singer and professor Carmina Juarez — a project involving over 200 incarcerated women from the Capital Women’s Penitentiary. This study also seeks to show how the Performing Arts can strengthen actions, discussions, and radical transformations that support individuals who are or have been involved with the criminal justice system and those who have lost loved ones to State violence.
Copyright (c) 2025 Raquel Parras, Walmick de Holanda https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Sketches in the silence: murmurs of mothers deprived of liberty in Pernambuco
This study explores the experience of theater in the Recife Women’s Penal Colony as a pedagogical approach to emancipate the pains of motherhood in prison. Based on semi-structured interviews, participant observation, and document analysis, it describes a case study: the staging of the play Vozes de mães privadas de liberdade. It shows that theater fissures the prison structure, although it requires investment to expand its non-reformist and transformative potential in the Pernambuco prison system.
Allayni Suene de Medeiros Vasconcelos Pires
Copyright (c) 2025 Allayni Suene de Medeiros Vasconcelos Pires, Raquel de Aragão Uchôa Fernandes https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Scholarly examination of carceral arts programming is both limited and selective. Academic research tends to focus on prison-based theater programs, music workshops, and creative writing courses, which are widely embraced and easily implemented. However, carceral arts programmers often face challenges within a correctional culture that is ambivalent toward their work. This study focusses on these programmers and their programs to understand why effective carceral programs, both in Canada and abroad, are not always able to do good.
Copyright (c) 2025 Aimee Copping https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Libertarian pedagogies in incarceration: is it possible to educate for freedom in spaces of deprivation of liberty?
This study analyzes the limits and possibilities of implementing libertarian pedagogical practices in liberty deprivation contexts. Based on a systematic literature review, it investigates how educational and cultural practices within the Brazilian prison system function as strategies of resistance and mechanisms of control. The findings show that emancipatory education in prisons follows its articulation with abolitionist perspectives and the dismantling of the structures that sustain the punitive rationale.
Copyright (c) 2025 Tiago Negrão de Andrade, Maria Cristina Gobbi https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
PwD Playpen: reflections on the inclusion paradox in cultural initiatives
This study explores the paradoxical nature of inclusive practices for disabled individuals within the public initiatives and internal institutional policies governing cultural institutions. Accessibility in this field is often confined to segregated and stereotyped spaces, which we ironically call “Cercadinho PCD” (“PwD Playpen”). The history of disability shows exclusion and dominant societal norms that reinforce stereotypes, hindering full participation in various social contexts. Cultural accessibility asks for the deconstruction of normative narratives and the validation and celebration of the experiences and contributions of disabled people in the arts, fostering a critical understanding of inclusion models.
Copyright (c) 2025 Claudio Rubino https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Broken mirrors and stages of resistance: scenic art, subjectivity, and the critique of the penal system based on O Espelho by Machado de Assis
This study explores the intricate relationship between identity, the penal system, and the transformative potential of scenic arts, drawing from Machado de Assis’ short story O Espelho: Esboço de uma nova teoria da alma humana. Jacobina’s theory of “two souls” — an inner one and an outer one validated by social recognition — serves as a metaphor to understand how subjectivity is constructed and can be dismantled, particularly within the penal context. Prisons, often acting as a deforming mirror, systematically negates individuality and fragments the self. In contrast, this study argues that scenic arts (theater and performance) in correctional facilities can function as “critical mirrors” and “stages of (re)existence.” By analyzing artistic projects in Brazil and internationally and dialoguing with theorists such as Foucault, Mbembe, Ben-Moshe, Freire, hooks, Lucas, and Nascimento, this study investigates how these practices enable incarcerated individuals to challenge stigmatizing narratives, rewrite their own stories, and reconstruct their subjectivities. The core objective is to show that scenic arts, when imbued with liberatory pedagogies, can transcend pastime, becoming a political and existential act of resistance, humanization, and social critique and fostering the decolonization of the gaze and the claim for full humanity within and beyond prison walls. This study ends by emphasizing the importance of investing in artistic and pedagogical practices that aim at “rehabilitation” and at a fundamental transformation of the criminal justice system toward a more just and less punitive society.
Copyright (c) 2025 Felipe Barnabé Batista, Armando Soares de Castro Formiga, Jéssica Painkow Rosa Cavalcante https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Routes of a drifting boat: the ethics of care in the performance of pain
Based on the experience of a body that, when moving, is interrupted by pain, this study investigates how contemporary theater engages with the vulnerability of the body on stage and the effects triggered by its spectatorship. For this, it uses the allegory of the Ship of Fools, as recounted in Book VI of Plato’s Republic, as a metaphor for reflecting on the stage. Given that shock is a sensibility rooted in contemporary sensory experience, this study questions how the fascination with the performance of the body in pain on stage risks turning pain into spectacle, which may lead to apathy in spectators. To address this dilemma, this study proposes an ethics of care that transforms the experience of spectatorship beyond shock.
Copyright (c) 2025 Giovanna Galisi Paiva https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
The invisual knowledge of plasticity: for a pedagogy of excess
This study reflects on the teaching of visualities in theater based on a pedagogical experience with Anchieta de Carvalho, a blind student. His presence challenges hegemonic visual paradigms in the arts, evincing the potential of blindness as a creative and critical force. This study questions the centrality of vision in theater pedagogy, proposing the concept of plasticity as a sensitive, multisensory, and inclusive alternative to visuality. It understands plasticity as a corporeal, tactile, and situational form of knowledge that manifests itself in the relationship between body, space, and spectator. This study critiques the institutional rigidity of traditional definitions of visual arts and defends a pedagogy of excess toward the sensorial. The relationship between the teaching of scenography and Anchieta de Carvalho embodies this expanded plasticity as methodology. This study proposes a blind look, involving perception beyond vision. Ultimately, it defends inclusive and excessive pedagogies as an aesthetic and epistemological potential.
Copyright (c) 2025 Diego Landin, Anchieta de Carvalho https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
The Assembly and Disassembly of Cultural Policies in Brazil
This study belongs to my PhD research, which I defended in 2019. It aims to historically and critically analyze the panorama of public policies for Culture in Brazil from the Vargas era (1934-1945) to the present day. Thus, I dialogue with Albino Rubim to reflect on the instability of cultural policies, the absence of the State, and authoritarianism. I also include Isaura Botelho, Fábio Monteiro, and Carlos Eduardo Oliveira do Carmo to broaden the conversation and provoke other perspectives on cultural policies in Brazil.
Dossiê: Artes Cênicas e Democracia: atuando outros mundos de direitos e políticas do viver
Copyright (c) 2024 Lucas Valentim Rocha https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Critical narratives: DEF bodies and sexualities in a Brazilian audiovisual production
This study explores the intersection between sexuality and disability in audiovisual media, focusing on the Brazilian documentary Assexybilidade (2023). Based on crip theory, this study questions structural ableism and highlights how art can implement critical narratives, creating new perceptions about sexualities, the right to pleasure, and accessibility for DEF bodies. This study highlights the importance of crippling artistic theories and practices as a contribution to the promotion and defense of rights.
Copyright (c) 2025 Louise Lima Storni Rocha, Giovanna Marafon https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Weaving webs and roots: between fissures of DEF culture
A creature that is born and able to live amongst all different ancestries but without being able to fit in any place, what is it capable of? This embroidery study pretentiously searches for a dialogue between the culture of the people with disabilities and their ancestry, discussing possible ways to think about the ancestry of a marginal group, that, in its majority, possesses no family tree that is compatible with their own identity, and elaborates deformed pieces of thoughts about these people’s culture. On an even more pretentious side, it also aims to talk about affection toward bodies with disabilities via the audio descriptive language of an embroidery.
Copyright (c) 2025 Isadora do Prado Ifanger https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Caterpillar methodology: disability as a knowledge construction in dance
This study describes, via the lens of the embodied researcher, methodological strategies that were developed in the show “Judith wants to cry, but can’t!,” which encompasses the unique ways of disability as a possibility for building knowledge in dance. I draw on my PhD thesis, reproducing and reworking parts of its text to reflect on the production of artists with disabilities from what we now call inclusive dance to the evolution of the relationship between dance and disability via the concept of compulsory bipedalism.
Copyright (c) 2025 Carlos Eduardo Oliveira do Carmo https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Bending the tongue: the dramaturgy of Rotation and accessibility as an encounter
Based on the analysis of the dramaturgy of the piece Rotação (2024), this study aims to articulate the notion of poetic and aesthetic accessibility proposed by Carlos Silva and Gislana Vale with Camila Alves’s notion of doingWITH as a way to expand the perception of artistic creation nourished by a thought of cultural accessibility. Using a metaphorical suggestion about “bending the tongue” as an exercise that generates new perspectives in the production of knowledge, the experience of encountering differences will be interwoven throughout this study to discuss the power of artistic creation based on this perspective. Understanding the analysis of dramaturgy as a research methodology, this study investigates how the process of artistic creation can propose other ways of thinking about accessibility and how the culture of accessibility can propose interventions and resignifications in creative processes.
Copyright (c) 2025 Lívea Castro, Manoel Negraes https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Cultural accessibility and inclusive costume design: a case study of the play Mig Meg Mug
This study analyzes the creative process behind the play Mig Meg Mug based on a perspective of cultural accessibility and inclusive costume design. Directed by Maria Alice Possani with costumes by Anna Kühl, the production integrates accessibility elements such as audio description embedded in the dramaturgy and the creation of tactile costumes in line with the concepts of the show. During the pandemic, its collaborative creative process adapted itself to restrictions by using remote tools to ensure smooth communication and costume development. This study highlights how accessibility can be integrated as an innovative artistic language, transforming theater into a shared experience for all audiences.
Copyright (c) 2025 Juliana Schmidt Tomazini https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Non-binarity as a principle of the performative program: the perception of the world’s scenic power through gender transition
In an auto-ethnographic approach, I explore my gender transition as a perceptual and epistemological turning point, and the way its outcomes relate to the foundations of what Eleonora Fabião describes as a performative program. The aim is to explore a form of contact with such notion that is transcentred, empirical, and a priori of what is conventionally called a space of artistic creation. Furthermore, it’s also discussed the way in which this paradigm, not only trans, but specifically non-binary, is crucial to such analysis.
Oliver Olívia Lagua de Oliveira Bellas Fernandes
Copyright (c) 2024 Revista Aspas https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Considerations on some research methodologies in the Performing Arts and their textual production in academia
The article briefly presents the institutional context of Brazilian universities from the creation of the Arts area at CNPq (National Council for Scientific and Technological Development) in the 1980s, as well as some methodologies of Research in Living Arts present in the performative texts of the special volume in revista DAPesquisa, published in October 2020. Among the methodologies brought are arts-based research (ABR), practice as Research (PaR), performative research, mythotodology, cartography, etnography, autoetnography, research-creation, presenting its main exponents as a theoretical framework. Based on reflections on research methodologies, the aim is to highlight the possibilities and variety of production in the area also in its written production. It is believed that reflecting on the writings of research in Performing Arts is extremely important for us to understand their practices.
Creation-Research, Philosophy of Theatrical Praxis and knowledge production: actor and spectator as subjects of Artistic Research
We expose basic coordinates of theatrical artistic research in the line of research-creation or creation-research, based on the distinction of four subjects of knowledge production: artist-researcher, researcher-artist, participatory researcher and collective collaboration team formed by artist-researcher and participatory researcher. The theoretical-methodological framework is provided by the Philosophy of Theater in one of its main lines: the Philosophy of Scenic Praxis. We focus specifically on the actor-researcher and spectator-researcher subjects. We are interested in promoting these figures of artistic research through education (teaching and learning), “docenteatrar” and “estudianteatrar” by actors and spectators, starting from initial training.
Making-with Practice as Research: weaving collective experiences of knowledge production in the performing arts
The text addresses Practice as Research (PaR) in the performing arts in dialogue with the experience of the Group Practice as Research: production processes in the contemporary scene, a permanent nucleus of investigation officially created in 2014 at the Arts Institute of Unicamp. Therefore, it focuses on the relationship between practice and research in the epistemology of PaR, comparing it with ways of doing/knowing with which the group has been questioning it throughout its ten years of existence. Making-with Practice as Research has been an invitation to weave (im)possible paths in a sympoietic collaboration, producing embodied knowledge in a collective and situated way in the presence arts.
Performance Ethnography as a research methodology in performing arts
This article presents a historical and conceptual delineation of Performance Ethnography as a methodological approach that proposes, at the intersection of ethnography with performance, specific forms of ethical and aesthetic engagement for conducting research in performing arts. Drawing from a state of the art of research on the subject, in Brazil and abroad, the article explores approaches such as “ethnographic surrealism” and “ethnotheater” to support this proposal, which calls for a radicalization of the classical participant observation, through the sharing of artistic-pedagogical practices (performatives) that are simultaneously process and product, creation and reflection.
Practice as research: provocations from a dark and afromatized place
This article seeks to share notes on the context of artistic practice as research. It is based on the assumption that the body of african and indigenous descent expresses a field of poetic resistance through the production of gestures that combat historical violence. It highlights the interest in practice as dance research, guided by an afromatized perspective, as a phenomenon that challenges colonial heritages. To this end, the discussion revolves around rest as a strategy for creation and deceleration as an aesthetic proposition for research. In addition, the artistic practice Refluxo is presented as a project linked to the reimagining of the world.