Brazilian playwriting: the popular. the sacred, the contemporary.

Abstract

This research aims to work with Brazilian playwriting in order to analyze its form constitution in the course of time, which was developed in its relations with national popular theatrical performances. Three lines of investigation will be explored: the popular, the sacred and the contemporary. Historically, in the 19th century until the beginning of the 20th, as much as the intellectual and economic elite longed to see in Brazilian theater a mirror of the European refinement, the national exuberant epic scene, religious or profane, was more effective than the literate theater movements. From sacred to profane, form street revelry to the stage, the popular path of a theatrical performance that developed itself without an official recognition became one of the more powerful basis for national theater, visible in the theater of the past and in contemporary productions of many regions in the country. Thus, the aim of this project is to produce an extended analysis of Brazilian playwriting with this theoretical ground: the epic as its blown form, fragmented, of the great narratives, an expanded form of popular theatrical performance. It will be select a group of pieces to be analyzed by this ground. Beyond that, the project includes, in order to help with the theoretical research, a series of activities to be implemented in the newly-created Playwriting Laboratory of the Theater Department of Unicamp. (AU)