Journal of Graduate Program in Performing Arts - University of São Paulo
Universidade de São Paulo. Escola de Comunicações e Artes
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Trans[cena]: registrar para vislumbrarmos o que sempre esteve
Isto é um homem de verdade (2024), Homem Mato (2025), Mato Mastec (2025), Testostileno (2025)
The sea-body writing as a queer form of drift in the performing arts
The intricacies of research in the performing arts raise questions about traditional ways of doing things in academia; in turn transvestites, lesbians, butchs, trans, non‑binary and all of queer people bring questions to the ways of create and researching performing arts. This text, which was part of my undergraduate thesis in Theatre Education, makes some of these questions present in an unsettled and estranged writing. What can my queer body say about doing research in the performing arts? Possibly nothing. However, there is what can be invented by us.
Can a monster be translated? Visual dialogues on the more-than-human
Can a monster be translated? This question marks the beginning of this brief essay, not in the hope of answering it, but rather of imagining it. By claiming her right to be a monster, sudaka trans poet Susy Shock seems to question an ideal of humanity promulgated by humanism and the ideals of evolutionary anthropology, which establishes the figure of the Human as the pinnacle of civilization. Translating a monster, then, would not be possible. While human language strives for totality – translating everything – can monstrous, or more-than-human, languages be translatable?
Trávicas: travesti bodies, greek tragedy, and a classic-devouring travecamethodology
This article seeks to trace, document, traverse, and elaborate the creative process behind the performance Volúpia II. Three travesti actresses lead the piece, moving through different figures from Greek mythology in order to recount the story of Helen of Troy. The performance places tragic Greek language in tension with the travesti and Latin bodies of the actresses. What possible unfoldings emerge from this encounter? Is a decolonial approach to a language that has become hegemonic possible? Can new meanings be found in myth when it is enunciated through corporealities unthreaded from the dominant strands of history?
The collective force of travestis termites: conversation with Anastasia María Benavente
A cross-border conversation between two travestis about survival strategies and future-building. As travesti termites, the tactic is to act from within. From language to archives. Like spiders, we weave new networks, invent codes and languages, build collective memories and affective alliances. Our strength lies in collective action as the only possible future.
Gender choreographies and subversive practices: notes on non-binarity and dance improvisation
This article approaches cisnormativity through the concept of choreography, understood as a logic for organizing bodies and subjectivities. Drawing on Judith Butler’s contributions to gender performativity and articulating them with contemporary discussions in the field of dance, it proposes understanding cisnormativity as a choreographic social regime that produces intelligible genders through normative reiteration. Grounded in the epistemology of Practice as Research and bringing together experiences of dance improvisation and lived non-binarity, the article approaches improvisation and non-binarity as practices that subvert this order. Finally, it argues that the notion of choreography can materially describe the normative processes through which gender is produced, highlighting the analytical potential of dance practices for understanding the contemporary constitution of subjectivities.
We do not sugarcoat the pill, we contaminate spaces: a dialogue with Dance With Me, by Élle de Bernardini
This essay engages with the performance Dance With Me, by Élle de Bernardini, through the notion of “mechanisms of acceptance and rejection” formulated by the artist herself. By examining how the work negotiates its insertion into artistic institutions, I argue that the performance operates as a multiple agent, critically mobilizing strategies of passability and whiteness, as well as dynamics of transplay, in order to tension the conditions of institutional hospitality. In doing so, the work intervenes in the distribution of the sensible, not only through a redistribution of identities, but also through a redistribution of violence. This article forms part of a broader research project on artistic practices by Brazilian trans* individuals since the 2010s, that disrupt norms of spatiality and contaminate institutional spaces.
One character, two actors: the construction of the Fanon character from travesti ontology in the show Black Skin, white masks
This article examines the performativity of the Black and/or racialized Travesti body – marked by the phenomenon of anti-Blackness – to develop a contemporary racial-political perspective for analyzing and understanding the racial dynamics of the current world. Drawing on autoethnography as a method of both academic and artistic research, the object of analysis is my experience creating the character Fanon in the theatrical production Black Skin, white masks (2019) – based on Frantz Fanon’s book of the same name, and directed by Onisajé. Thus, this article presents a study centered on an artistic-political investigation through the lens of travestilidade (a specific Latin American identity category involving gender dissidence) to understand the movements of racialized, gender-dissident individuals within the arts field. It also aims to generate new discourses regarding performance practices in which trans and Travesti bodies are mobilized to create alternative, unconventional aesthetic experiences in the performing arts.
Aberracirco: trans freak dramaturgies in the construction of (im)possible worlds
Is it possible to construct alternative imaginaries without being crushed by the historical, economic, and social ballast of colonization? Grounded in this question, I discuss the dramaturgical productions of Brazilian trans circus artists through what I have termed aberracirco – that is, contemporary freak circus practices. Specifically, I analyze Cabaret Delirium, a variety stage show conceived by Lua Marques, a non-binary artist, and performed in Desterro between 2025 and 2026. In dialogue with Jota Mombaça, Donna Haraway, Isadora Ravena, Lucas Dilacerda and Frantz Fanon, I examine how these aberrant fabulations challenge notions of humanity, civilization, and the limits of the possible.
The name as passage: queering language in performance
This article investigates the practice of queering language as an aesthetic and political operation in contemporary performance. Starting from the notion of naming as a historical technology of separation and hierarchization, it proposes a shift toward the idea of traversal, where signifier and signified no longer coincide in a stable way. Through a theoretical-practical approach that articulates conceptual reflection and artistic experimentation, it analyzes tactics such as improvisation, repetition, and détournement. It argues that performance can operate as a laboratory of semantic instability, in which the body tensions and reinscribes regimes of intelligibility.
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
Trans-themonization: creating in mutation, caring in permanence
This article posits trans-themonization as a creation method that both alters the creative process and sustains a space of care for trans bodies in Amazonian performance. Using autoethnography, practice-as-research, and public documentation, I outline procedures (agreements, timing, shared authorship, language and mediation protocols) that reorganize rehearsal, (un)dressing, curatorship, and circulation. A dedicated section proposes decentralization criteria (territory, circulation, governance) to evidence vanguard without folklorization, with methodological rigor and ethical commitment.
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