What presides in the arguments presented in this essay is the idea that Portuguese contemporary theatre has been creating the space and developing practices that we can envisage in the creation of assemblies implicated and interested in changing the world, pre-enacting a sphere for social discussion and debate. Thus, we would look at these attempts to change the world through the constructions of theatre assemblies in Portuguese contemporary theatre accordingly to the case of Gonçalo Amorim's Experimental Theatre from Oporto. Thus, this essay aims to present and discuss some of the creative methodologies and processes undertook in this theatre collective, namely the "discussions on stage" strategy. This specific way of creating a text/performance can be related, I believe, with what can be understood as way to manifest their world vision and their political beliefs. ; info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion
Um museu vivo de memórias pequenas e esquecidas - sobre a ditadura, a revolução e o processo revolucionário [The Living Museum of Small, Forgotten and Unwanted Memories - on dictatorship, revolution, and the revolutionary process], by Portuguese theatre artist, Joana Craveiro / Teatro do Vestido is a five hour performance that deals with Portuguese history from the last century, focusing on the fascist dictatorship (1926-1974) and on the 1974 Carnation Revolution. It is a performance composed by five lectures (presented separately throughout 2014 – in its final version it premiered in November 2014). It departs from a minuciously built historical research, mixing innocent family memorabilia such as letters, books and pictures with the most relevant public events that occurred in that period. Craveiro's work departs usually from autobiographic, personal and subjective materials. This performance is no exception. But this lecture-performance has the singularity of merging the intimate and the public, the factual and the objective, the poetic and the journalistic. It is a performance that clearly fights the oblivion of the horrors of the dictatorship and the current Right Wing politics desire to blank out some of its major accomplices and perpetrators. Joana Craveiro was born in 1974. I was born in 1975. Politically and ideologically, although there are some nuances on our approaches, I think we are on the same side of the barricade. And the stories that Joana Craveiro lectures on (memories from the early years of democracy, the freedom of the eighties, contemporary labour precariousness…) are very familiar to me - to a sense that they could be my own memories. Craveiro has created a Museum of Memories for our generation. For me as critic, I have no objective distance whatsoever of this artistic object. I have no option than being Baudelarian (partial, political and passionate) about this performance. As a critic I feel a passionate urge to defend, to read, to discuss this performance as part of my generation task ...
Violence, as the influential critic Michael Billington states, "permeated the culture in the Fifties". In fact, after John Osborne's angry outburst with Look Back in Anger in 1956, it became clear that "violence was a theme that preoccupied a large number of writers, and the reasons for this were social, political and cultural" (Billington 2007, 109). In a recently published volume, Violence Performed (2009), Patrick Anderson and Jisha Menon argue that "enactments of violence are both spectacular in their cultural impact and embodied in their transaction and effect"; "that violence is a binding, affective experience that crosscuts the domain traditionally registered and distinguished as the physical, the psychic, and the social"; "that conventional distinctions between 'victim' and 'aggressor' are often ill-suited to fully explain the effects of violence"; "that representations of violence are not innocently mimetic, and risk extending the very trauma they aim to expose"; and, finally, that "scholars in performance studies are ethically obligated to explore specific sites of violence acts as well as larger questions about the performative ontology of violence" (Anderson & Menon 2009, 1-14). This volume is a perceptible consequence of the interest that the representation of violence is having in contemporary theatre and performance studies. In this sense and considering these topics, I will explore and present the portrayal of violence in some British plays that were staged between 1951 and 1965, in order to discuss the role, impact and aim of its representation. Thus, I will consider John Whiting's Saint's Day (1951), Ann Jelicoe's The Sport of my Mad Mother (1956), Arnold Wesker (Chicken Soup with Barley (1958), Harold Pinter's Birthday Party (1958), David Rudkin's Afore Night Come (1962) and Edward Bond's Saved (1965). My aim is to discuss the way how theatre in the post WWII changed the traditional ways of representing violence. On one hand, violence and reality became more and more familiar and domestic, ...
This text is divided in two parts. Firstly, I deal with the evolution on Portuguese theatre from the post-second world war period until present day. I'm focusing on the experimentalism of the forties, characterized by an urge for renewal and modernization; the constitution of a highly politicized independent theatre movement, in the seventies; and the plurality of contemporary Portuguese theatre. Secondly, I deal with the alleged inability of Portuguese writers for playwriting, signalling the most significant names of the post Carnation Revolution, on the 25th of April 1974, to present days. ; info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion
British realist drama after the Second World War tests the "rhetoric of ineffability" of the horror and violence and tried to understand a terribly new world. The representation of violence was regarded as a moral and ethical imperative in reaction to the progressive trivialisation of evil in which drama was an act of positive consequence. We can call this type of playwriting "synecdoche dramaturgy", i.e. one that offers a part of the world but aims at intervening in all of it, transforming it, denouncing its iniquities and, in some cases, suggesting ways of correcting and improving it. It was a dramaturgy that started from clearly political motivations but showed confused political thinking based mainly on idiosyncratic visions of the world. Its main traits included: a superlative manifestation of the cult of honesty, leading to a tendency to make confessions in which the leading characters were often regarded as their playwrights' alter-egos; an appreciation of real emotion and the expression of this emotion; nostalgia for the past, often mystified times; opposition between those who have ideas or intentions and those who actually do something; a taste for the freedom offered by manual work; attention to real historical events; the disturbing presence of babies, often regarded as a sign of death; domestic escapes unaware of the problems of the world; dialectic hesitation between a pacifistic or combative attitude, manifestation of a sometimes unclear feeling of rebellion and, of course, the representation of violence. ; info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion
This text is divided in two parts. Firstly, I deal with the evolution on Portuguese theatre from the post-second world war period until present day. I'm focusing on the experimentalism of the forties, characterized by an urge for renewal and modernization; the constitution of a highly politicized independent theatre movement, in the seventies; and the plurality of contemporary Portuguese theatre. Secondly, I deal with the alleged inability of Portuguese writers for playwriting, signalling the most significant names of the post Carnation Revolution, on the 25th of April 1974, to present days. ; info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion
ABSTRACT - This text is divided in two parts. Firstly, I deal with the evolution on Portuguese theatre from the post-second world war period until present day. I'm focusing on the experimentalism of the forties, characterized by an urge for renewal and modernization; the constitution of a highly politicized independent theatre movement, in the seventies; and the plurality of contemporary Portuguese theatre. Secondly, I deal with the alleged inability of Portuguese writers for playwriting, signalling the most significant names of the post Carnation Revolution, on the 25th of April 1974, to present days.
Texto dividido em duas partes, na primeira aborda-se a evolução do teatro em Portugal do pós segunda grande guerra à contemporaneidade, focando particularmente o experimentalismo do final dos anos quarenta, um período que se pode caracterizar por uma ânsia de renovação e modernização; a constituição de um teatro independente fortemente politizado nos anos setenta; e a pluralidade da cena contemporânea. Na segunda parte aborda-se a alegada incapacidade atávica dos escritores portugueses para a escrita dramática, mapeando os nomes mais significativos do pós-25 de Abril de 1974 até à contemporaneidade. ; This text is divided in two parts. Firstly, I deal with the evolution on Portuguese theatre from the post-second world war period until present day. I'm focusing on the experimentalism of the forties, characterized by an urge for renewal and modernization; the constitution of a highly politicized independent theatre movement, in the seventies; and the plurality of contemporary Portuguese theatre. Secondly, I deal with the alleged inability of Portuguese writers for playwriting, signalling the most significant names of the post Carnation Revolution, on the 25th of April 1974, to present days.
