Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Cena, Corpo e Dramaturgia: entre tradição e contemporaneidade by Antonia Pereira

2014; Department of Spanish and Portuguese, University of Kansas; Volume: 48; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/ltr.2014.0039

2161-0576

Cláudia Tatinge Nascimento,

Theatre and Performance Studies

Reviewed by: Cena, Corpo e Dramaturgia: entre tradição e contemporaneidade by Antonia Pereira Cláudia Tatinge Nascimento Cena, Corpo e Dramaturgia: entre tradição e contemporaneidade. Antonia Pereira, Marta Isaacson e Walter Lima Torres, org. Rio de Janeiro: Pão e Rosas, 2012: 208pp. Cena, Corpo e Dramaturgia: entre tradição e contemporaneidade collects articles, essays, and interviews by Brazilian and international performing arts scholars and practitioners. The anthology is the outcome of the year-long “Projeto Intercultural: Estudos da Cena, da Dramaturgia e do Movimento entre Tradição e Contemporanei-dade,” which hosted talks, panels, and performances at Universidade Federal da Bahia (UFBA), Universidade Federal do Paraná (UFPR), and Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS) in 2010–11. Cena, Corpo e Dramaturgia’s accompanying DVD contains excerpts of director Antonia Pereira’s Trilogia Memórias, as well as testimonies by the three productions’ actors and spectators. Cena, Corpo e Dramaturgia considers dramaturgical strategies in a range of dance, theatre, and performative events—in a clear reference to Hans-Thies Lehmann’s seminal study, this publication’s organizers claim that this pursuit is most necessary even if many see contemporary performance as “predominantly Postdramatic” (14). Articles and interviews are organized in three sections: the first discusses experiments with technology and media, the next examines the body and movement onstage, and the last one is dedicated to the dynamic connection between memory, history, and narrative in artistic creation. Of particular interest are the contributions of Brazilian scholars, since the articles authored by their international counterparts were published previously in languages other than Portuguese. In the first section, Ivani Santana comments on existing difficulties in disseminating findings in dance studies and introduces the accomplishments of Mapa D2, a virtual platform that supports collaboration between Portuguese and Spanish-speaking scholars and practitioners across Latin America and Europe. Santana’s argument primarily draws from the cognitive sciences and semiotics. Jaqueline Pinzon [End Page 207] explores the use of virtual images in theatre. Her case studies are the productions of Isadora. Orb and Ridículo. Pinzon argues that while the former integrates actors and projections, the latter makes the production’s technological equipment visible to dissociate the two. Marta Isaacson’s essay on intermediality offers a historical perspective on the use of media in theatrical performances from the late XIX century on. Under the subheading “Technological Poetics,” Isaacson proposes four main kinds of interaction between real bodies and virtual images on the theatrical stage: these may aim at creating a synthetic or hybrid picture, amplifying the body/object for spectators, establishing a dialogic relationship with each other, or play up the inherent frictions between real and virtual. In the section on the body and movement, Cristiane Wosniak looks at dance performances on the Web. By linking dramaturgy, technology, and the performer’s body to bring attention to new directions in choreography and dance studies, Wosniak’s argument explains how cyber imagination comes to render the body immaterial. This section of the anthology also counts on a text in which artists Cintia Bruck Kunifas and Mônica Infante detail their conceptual approach to devising choreography. The book’s final part, “Dramaturgia: memória e narrativa,” combines the writings of scholars, artists, and artist-scholars. As they discuss the use of cultural traditions, national history, and Greek mythology in Trilogia Memórias’ multiple narrative threads, Antonia Pereira and Karina de Faria ably discuss their creative processes from a theoretical perspective. Walter Lima Torres’s insightful interviews with vocal coach Mônica Montenegro and playwright Samir Yazbek illuminate the work of two important Brazilian practitioners. Thales Branche Paes de Mendonça analyzes the actions of masked participants in Paraná’s traditional religious celebration Marujada de São Benedito de Quatipuru from a carnivalesque perspective. The role of carnival in Brazilian culture is also the focus of Célia Arns de Miranda’s “Otelo da Mangueira: Shakespeare no carnival carioca.” She focuses on Gustavo Gasparani’s musical adaptation of Othello, which brings the story to 1940 and places the moor at a samba school in Rio de Janeiro’s favela da Mangueira. Walter Lima Torres’ “O Direito ao Teatro” is a valuable examination of how current...