Letters to Theo

body and contestation

Abstract

This is a critical-poetic essay based on the action Uma Partida de Futebol (“A Soccer Match”), a performance by Théo Mantelato, supervised by Dr. Elvina Maria Caetano Pereira (Nina Caetano) in the UFOP Arts Department. The performance approaches a soccer match from its relations with gender issues.  The paper’s author is particularly interested is in the soccer field as a playful, discursive and political space. The choice for a letter format, as an alternative from academic writing, is proposed here as a dialogical mode that understands criticism and writing about the artistic object, no longer like operations of distance or just an exercise of judgment, but like gestures marked by proximity and subjective reading of the work: gestures capable of asking questions and enabling new reverberations and creational instances.