Sala Preta is a journal published quarterly by the Postgraduate Programme in Performing Arts at the School of Communications and Arts at the University of São Paulo. The journal was founded in 2001 and it is one of the first Brazilian journals to specialise in the Performing Arts. It is also currently one of the journals in the field to be ranked "A1" by QUALIS/CAPES. After publishing in paper for 10 years, the journal inaugurated its electronic version in 2011. Since the issue number 11 from 2011, the journal has only been published digitally.
Universidade de São Paulo, Escola de Comunicações e Artes
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Presentation of the Editorial Board of Vol. 25, No. 1 of Revista Sala Preta – the editors responsible for the thematic dossier, executive and associate editors, technical team, scientific advisory board, and the reviewers who contributed to this issue. We also present the institutional support and funding that made the publication of the journal possible.
Copyright (c) 2026 Corpo Editorial da Revista Sala Preta https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Performance as a field in higher education in performing arts in Brazil: Marcos Bulhões interviews Lucio Agra and Naira Ciotti
In order to discuss the relevance of Performance as a significant field within higher education in Performing Arts in Brazil, Marcos Bulhões interviewed Naira Ciotti and Lucio Agra, members of the team led by Renato Cohen that created the Artes do Corpo program at the Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo (PUC-SP). Reflection on this pioneering curricular experiment serves as the starting point for a conversation about the individual developments arising from this methodological approach, which integrates creation, learning, and critical reflection.
Copyright (c) 2026 Marcos Bulhões, Lucio Agra, Naira Ciotti https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Copyright (c) 2026 Alessandra Montagner, Lucio Agra, Mara Leal, Marcos Bulhões Martins, Naira Ciotti, Vanja Poty https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Panorama of the relations between performance art, performance studies, and the Brazilian university
This issue features a transcript of Bia Medeiros’s remarks at the panel discussion “Panorama of the Relationship Between Performance Art and Performance Studies and Brazilian Universities,” held at the opening of the 1st Interinstitutional Colloquium “Performance as a Field” on May 5, 2022. In this issue of Sala Preta magazine, dedicated to the topic of Performance as a Field in Brazil, we publish this lecture as a posthumous tribute to the artist, professor, and researcher—who passed away on November 28, 2024—and in recognition of her immense contribution to the consolidation of the field and the art of performance in our country.
Copyright (c) 2026 Maria Beatriz de Medeiros (in memoriam) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
From teaching to transmission: three pedagogical-performative practices for performance experiences in teaching and learning spaces
This article analyzes three pedagogical-performative practices for teaching performance, repeating, listening, and elaborating, experienced in the course ‘Teaching Practice in Contemporary Art and Expanded Scene’, within the Performing Arts program at Universidade de Brasília. The analysis highlights the processual, collective, and openness-to-the-unexpected character of performative practices. It argues that performance entails the transmission of knowledge, transforming the class into a program and guiding teaching through an ethics of creation and experience.
In this text, American theorist Jon McKenzie presents what he calls the embedded structure that underlies Performance Studies. McKenzie organises this structure based on an analysis of comments made and perceptions expressed by researchers and artists who are outside of the US/UK axis—which sustains the canon, the dominant trends and the language in the field. The central question investigated in this text, which is already posed in its title, reflects perceptions that are also common in Brazil, regarding the imperialism of Performance Studies. Thus, this translation, at this moment in performance research in the country and in the context of this Dossier, seeks to contribute to a better understanding of the specific place and of critical approaches to the possible dimensions of performance as a field in Brazil.
Copyright (c) 2026 Jon McKenzie; Alessandra Montagner https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
“To hate theater”: intersections of performance in Marina Abramovic’s plays
This article analyzes how Marina Abramovic’s artistic career complicates the dichotomous relationship between performance and theater that she herself proposed. Based on the analysis of three of Abramović’s plays (Biography, Delusional, and Seven Deaths of Maria Callas), it argues that the line between these two languages is tenuous and susceptible to transition. We draw parallels between concepts from performance—performative, order of presence, and event—and concepts from theater—theatricality, character, and order of representation—showing how these categories interpenetrate. Cohen’s reflection highlights that this hybridization also marks Brazilian practice. It concludes that the opposition between these languages is insufficient to describe the complexity of scenic practice, even that of Marina Abramovic herself.
DOSSIÊ A QUESTÃO DA PERFORMANCE COMO ÁREA NO BRASIL
Black wave: notes on the Concept of Black Performance
This article proposes a theoretical reflection on the concept of Black performance, from a decolonial and critical perspective on the geopolitics of knowledge. Methodologically, it is guided by the thinking of Diana Taylor and Leda Maria Martins, who understand performance studies as a form of knowledge production. In this discussion, reflecting on the concept of Black performance means recognizing a set of artistic, political, and poetic actions developed by artists who self-identify as Black (both Black and Brown), and whose creations engage with ethno-racial issues, positioning the Black body as a site for the production of critical knowledge about Brazilian society.
Copyright (c) 2025 Daniele Avila Small, Marcos Antônio Alexandre, Sofia Boito https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
The institutionalization of performance: about the inclusion of actions in Brazilian museums
In order to contribute to performance studies, this article reports on the development of the Guide for the Preservation of Performance Art in Brazilian Public Museums (2025), launched by the Research Group Musealization of Art: Poetics in Narratives (UFBA/UnB) with funding from the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development and distributed by the Brazilian Institute of Museums. After a brief history of the shift in mentality that enabled the acquisition of performance art by art collections and a description of the challenges faced by museum professionals trained in the preservation of material art, an overview of the project's stages and the support received is presented, as well as lessons learned for the admission of performance art as an academic field in Brazil.
Copyright (c) 2026 Bianca Andrade Tinoco, Anna Paula da Silva https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Renato Cohen’s pioneering research: the PUC/SP Performance Studies Group – persona, pedagogies, and future perspectives
This brief account presents the trajectory of the Performance Studies Group at the Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo (PUC/SP, CNPq), created in 2002 by Renato Cohen (1956-2003) in dialogue with performance studies developed within the academic and artistic spheres. The Study Group has had various configurations over the years, encompassing research lines and meeting formats as diverse as the field itself. The knowledge produced has been shared through academic and artistic events, proposing an innovative approach to the teaching-learning process in Arts at the university. Specifically, it also addresses actions in performance pedagogy, initiated within the Study Group and continued through its professors and alumni.
Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo - PUC/SP
Copyright (c) 2026 Samira Brandão, Lucila Andreozzi https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Performance in language: inter’views - Fernanda Raquel and Maria Victoria Abdalla interview Ana Luisa Santos, André Parente, Mário Ramiro, Coletivo Parabelo and João Perci Schiavon
Through interviews with artists and researchers Ana Luisa Santos, André Parente, Mário Ramiro, Coletivo Parabelo, and João Perci Schiavon, this material presents a snapshot of performance art in contemporary southeastern Brazil, providing clues without exhausting the possibilities for mapping that emerge in this vast territory. To this end, it begins with questions about its naming, what defines it, how a performance art form is formed, how it is possible to think about it considering already established institutional territories, and where it is found today, right now, in Brazil. Through a cartography woven from perspectives operating in heterogeneous spaces, performance art is constellated in varied locations, such as schools, psychoanalytic clinics, museums, the domestic environment, and the city.
Copyright (c) 2026 Fernanda Raquel, Maria Victoria Abdalla, Ana Luisa Santos, André Parente, Mário Ramiro, Bárbara Kanashiro Mariano, Denise Pereira Rachel, Diego Alves Marques, João Perci https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
“Post-pandemic body”: (re)significations of the body–space relationship and the home
This article approach the relationship between the body and residential space during the global coronavirus pandemic. Since then, studies on spatiality in architecture have become urgent to understand how confinement has transformed the ways in which the body-subject perceives spaces. Therefore, discussions are presented on the impact of this phenomenon on undergraduate Dance students at the Universidade Federal de Viçosa – Minas Gerais. The qualitative research is a case study, conducted with body awareness practices in dance, with the aim of discussing the body-space perception of the participants. The results showed bodily re-dimensioning, including the retraction of movements, dependence on virtual environments, and the lack of flexibility in the home environment.
Copyright (c) 2026 Ronaldo Mansur, Andréa Bergallo Snizek, Matheus Menezes Oliveira https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Theatre of the oppressed and blackness: reflection of an negroreferenced pedagogical practice in theatre
The main objective of this text is to present an experience report in Theater of the Oppressed (TO) based on the theme of Blackness, based on three workshops held in Macapá (AP). Based on the assumption that the Theater of the Oppressed has as its essence to address social issues and the processes of oppression that exist in society, we focus on the racial aspect by inserting negroreferenced methodologies into the practice carried out, understanding the need to emphasize the Afro-Brazilian issue as well as establishing this knowledge as an element for a differentiated and expanded experience of the technique in question. This work reflects on the practice of TO with black people, in addition to providing a brief historical trajectory of the relationship between Theater of the Oppressed and Blackness, contextualizing environments and people.
Possible paths to perform in (the) school
This article presents reflections on the presence of performance in the school environment based on experiences developed in the classroom. The proposed actions aim to activate the school space, attributing new meanings through the students’ bodies. Throughout the text, possibilities for incorporating performance into pedagogical practices are discussed, particularly regarding the notion of the teacher-performer and the potential of performance within the educational context. The results indicate that performance constitutes a fundamental ally of teaching practice, enhancing creative processes and contributing to the resignification of school space.
The body-as-bridge of a defiant artist: Patricia Freitas interviews Micaela Cyrino
The following text presents the transcript of a recent interview with São Paulo-based performer Micaela Cyrino, whose works are marked by engagement with social issues, such as the fight for quality public healthcare and gender and racial equity. Among her most notable works are Cura (2015) and $OROPO$ITIVA (2019), performed both in Brazil and abroad, and which are also featured in the archives of the Hemispheric Institute managed by the Performance School, affiliated with New York University. In this conversation, Cyrino unveils her main aesthetic and ethical influences, as well as highlights the fundamental points and current challenges of black and counter-hegemonic art.
Crossroads: black performance and performance art with perspectives on the black body
The article discusses the confluences between Black performance and performance art, highlighting the body as a territory of memory, resistance, and creation. The authors highlight how Black performance, rooted in the African diaspora, affirms humanity, produces subjectivity, and acts as an anti-racist strategy. Black artistic practices—hybrid, ritualistic, or engaged—reaffirm orality, ancestry, and denounce colonial and contemporary violence. In Brazil, experiences like those of Lucimélia Romão, Priscila Rezende, Mônica Santana, and other artists demonstrate how these performances destabilize Eurocentric epistemologies, expose structural racism, and reclaim the right to life and enjoyment.
Copyright (c) 2026 Monica Pereira de Santana, Lucimélia Aparecida Romão https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
O Brasil como problema no teatro, o teatro brasileiro como problema histórico
Copyright (c) 2025 Luiz Paulo Pimentel de Souza, Mariana Soutto Mayor, Paulo Bio Toledo https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Stage lighting engendering bricolages in children’s theatre
This study reflects on the role of stage lighting in children’s theatre as a poetic language that can develop imagination and foster multiple interpretations. Grounded in Claude Lévi-Strauss’s concept of the bricoleur and Gaston Bachelard’s studies on the poetic image as a variational phenomenon, spectators—especially children—are understood as active agents in the construction of meaning, articulating visual fragments based on their subjectivities. Supported also by Lev Vygotsky’s theories on the mechanisms of creative imagination, this study investigates how lighting design activates the inherent processes of child development, attributing to young spectators a bricoleur’s gaze upon the scene.
Copyright (c) 2025 Fernanda Guimarães Mattos Souza https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Registration of research projects and researchers of the cultural performances program at the Faculty of Social Sciences – UFG
The present investigation aimed to record and inventory the research developed within the Graduate Program in Cultural Performances (PPGPC) of the Faculty of Social Sciences at the Federal University of Goiás (UFG). Grounded in an interdisciplinary perspective of performances as social, artistic, and political practices, in light of the works of Victor Turner, Robson Corrêia de Camargo, and other scholars in the field, a survey was conducted using UFG’s institutional database. After identifying the master’s theses and doctoral dissertations, their categorizations served as the sampling source for studies in cultural performances.
Copyright (c) 2026 José Henrique Rodrigues Machado, Vânia Dolores Estevam de Oliveira https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
The graduate program in cultural performances at UFG: artist training and the debate on Black Performances
The Graduate Program in Cultural Performances at UFG was created in 2012 within the interdisciplinary area of CAPES, at EMAC, as an alternative training option for arts professionals in Goiânia. It was transferred to the Faculty of Social Sciences and, in 2025, to the Media Lab/UFG, when it became known as the Graduate Program in Arts, Cultures and Technologies. Despite the institutional changes, its interdisciplinary vocation and its contribution to the training of diverse artists are evident. This article highlights the work of Black female researchers and the production of studies that articulate Cultural Performances and Black identity, presenting a literature review and an overview of the constitution, transformations, and permanence of the Program in relation to the notion of Black Performances.
Dance in pandemic times: experiences and meanings in the virtual space from a phenomenological perspective
This study phenomenologically analyzes the lived experience of young members of the Laboratory of Body Studies during the COVID-19 pandemic, specially the effects of social isolation on the practice of dance in virtual environments. This investigation included in-depth interviews, visual records, and class journals to understand how its nine participants resignified their domestic spaces and their own bodies and developed new forms of expression and bodily resistance. Data analysis was based on a phenomenological approach to grasp the meanings attributed by the participants to their experiences. Results show that dance emerged as a strategy for emotional coping, reinvention of affective bonds, and strengthening of corporeality, even in the face of the technical and spatial limitations due to the pandemic. Despite physical distancing, artistic practice remained, reaffirming the power of moving body as a form of resilience and overcoming.
Copyright (c) 2025 Kaio César Cellli Mota, Michele Viviene Carbinatto https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Copyright (c) 2025 Henrique Rochelle, José Veríssimo, Marilia Velardi, Suzana Schmidt Viganó https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
The Stretching of Dramaturgical Forms in Propositions for a Participatory Audience: A Study of the Plays Manifesto Transpofágico, Azira’i – um musical de memórias and Hoje não saio daqui
This study aims to investigate dramaturgical forms that include in their structures performative games (openings of the scenic experience to chance) considering the relationship with a participatory audience who is co-responsible for the scene. These propositions will be analyzed based on three contemporary Brazilian plays: Manifesto Transpofágico (2021) by Renata Carvalho, Azira’i – um musical de memórias (2024) by Zahy Tentehar and Duda Rios, and Hoje não saio daqui (2020) by Cia Marginal and Jô Bilac. All plays were written mostly by actor-authors for their own bodies, considering their dissident identities. Based on autofictional assumptions and critical fabulation, these voices access larger social structures, contributing to the decolonial scene.
Copyright (c) 2025 Juliana Pamplona https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Dramaturgy of the encounter: lesson planning as a dramaturgical practice
This study proposes understanding theater lesson planning as a dramaturgical practice. Drawing from contemporary notions of dramaturgy as a composition of the sensible, it introduces the idea of “dramaturgy of the encounter” to shift planning from a prescriptive and normative function to a creative, sensitive, and collective gesture. Based on a critical reading of curricular reforms and the emphasis on skills and competencies, this study investigates how to inhabit contradictions without giving up creation. This research deems planning as an aesthetic construction of atmospheres, fields of presence, and zones of latency in which the class becomes a provisional writing of possible worlds.
Copyright (c) 2025 Filipe Brancalião Alves de Moraes https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Os Ossos do Barão from 1963: memories of the meeting between Jorge Andrade and Maurice Vaneau
Via traces of text and theatrical scenes, this study aims to propose a return to the early 1960s, looking at the creators of one of the most successful theatrical productions of the period: Os Ossos do Barão, from 1963. Written by Jorge Andrade, the play was staged by Maurice Vaneau at the Teatro Brasileiro de Comédia. The encounter resulted in a production that ran for a few years, attracting spectators and critics. It currently helps us understand the presence of foreign directors in Brazil and a way of producing theater that consolidated the presence of directors/directors in the following decades.
Copyright (c) 2025 Luiz Humberto Martins Arantes https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Black dramaturgies: or on writing color and body as text
This study, based on PhD research, aims to analyze Black dramaturgies — a term used in the plural to designate the written and the performed text — as pulsating writings engaged in establishing other realities via the po[ethic] apprehension of Brazilian socio-racial processes; aesthetically reworking Black experiences; and revealing epistemologies of the scene that make Blackness visible in its difference, creativity, and relevance. Drawing on the dramaturgy of Grace Passô and Anderson Feliciano, we seek to reflect on how these artists inscribe color and body as text, producing language effects that, by a process of formal conception, encompass the contradictions of society and the theatrical experience, weaving multiple and fabular layers of the Black subject.
Copyright (c) 2025 Soraya Martins Patrocinio https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Violence and raciality in contemporary playwriting
This study is grounded in the concept of “necronarrative” developed by Aldri Anunciação to examine how contemporary Brazilian playwriting articulates violence and raciality. Its analysis focuses on plays that address the genocide and mass incarceration of Black and marginalized youths, such as Buraquinhos ou o vento é inimigo do picumã (Jhonny Salaberg), Cárcere ou porque as mulheres viram búfalos (Dione Carlos), and Cavalos pretos são imensos (Bárbara Esmenia). These works broaden racial and gender perspectives by subverting stereotypes and proposing new poetics that challenge an imaginary white playwrights have historically shaped. This study stems from the PhD thesis “Tuesday without theater: blackface, agency, and black representations in contemporary dramaturgy,” which I defended with the support of a CAPES scholarship.
Copyright (c) 2025 Marcos Nogueira Gomes https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Modern Brazilian theatre: interpretative traditions and vectors of conceptual diffusion
This study theoretically overviews the main interpretations on the idea of modern theater and points some issues related to its dissemination. For this, it analyzes perspectives that address the phenomenon by the emergence of stage directing and dramaturgical innovations. It then examines the incorporation of these developments into the Brazilian context and the key vectors of their conceptual dissemination. This study aims to understand the historical and intellectual processes that enabled the construction and appropriation of the idea of modern theatre.
DOSSIÊ: TEATRO BRASILEIRO COMO PROBLEMA HISTÓRICO, O BRASIL COMO PROBLEMA NO TEATRO
Copyright (c) 2025 Henrique Brener Vertchenko https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Contextual dance and cultural mediation in the “Pele” project: actions between Theatro Municipal de São Paulo and the streets of the city
Aiming to problematize how the architecture and operational rules of traditional theaters can perpetuate colonialist values and generate violent power relations based on segregation, this research intersects contextual dance, Theatro Municipal de São Paulo, and the streets surrounding it. Drawing from the history of Theatro Municipal de São Paulo, this study discusses the artistic creations and cultural mediation actions developed in “Skin: between the body, the street and the Theater”, pondering how the actions of infiltrating, tensioning, turning inside out, and bordering could act on the cracks in the solid walls of its building, widening the points of contact between the interior of the theater and the streets around it.
Copyright (c) 2025 Laila Renardini Padovan https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0