ISSN: 2596-0229
Archives
-
Theater education and the end of the world
Vol. 7 No. 13 (2024)Over the past years, the accelerated changes in our lifestyle have come to some extreme and irreversible points, “points of no return”, which are situated in a more conventional field defined as “real”, but, at the same time, in realms less identifiable as such, that cause quite concrete consequences in our lives (the fall of existential certainty, for example). The COVID-19 pandemic was a global catalyst of already existing forces in different spheres (social, academic, economic, etc.). We underwent rearrangements of our values and the exhaustion of ways to see the world and life itself, ways to feel and perceive, desire, plan, construct and share social structures and connections.
The predominant images of the end of the world are formed by explicit catastrophes in an old-fashioned apocalypse that might be caused by global warming, unexpected plagues, or the coordinated rise of all smart machines. However, we should extent our understanding of the term “world” beyond the viewpoint of the Earth as the material habitat of all human race and the living things we know. It is striking how our emotional structure, our beliefs, our solutions to deal with the world, our current arrangements of social relationships, have not been able to respond to the demands of being alive in a minimum viable way. Different worlds are in process of collapse.
In the field of arts, in the second half of the twentieth century and at the beginning of the twenty-first century, styles of expression tried to explore the margins between the real and the fictional, thus defying (each time less efficiently) current ethical and aesthetic parameters. As a broader phenomenon in this context, performativity, considered in a concept more circumscribed to the philosophy and drama fields or put in a highly acclaimed position among the gender studies, has become an instigator of a major diversification of behavior and corporality in the daily routine and in the different social and hegemonic media. At the same time, the political turbulence and the intensification of reactionary movements, situation in which we still are, compromised the margins between what is perceived as true or false, right or wrong, in a disturbing complexity that few or any fictional work has ever done or even suggested.
In a paroxysm of changes in perception since the beginning of the twentieth century, we are immersed in the audiovisual world and in the online gatherings, or even, in the metaverse and the augmented reality, which rearrange how we live our time and space as much as our notion of relationship and presence. Nowadays, everyone accepts as an inevitable resource the smartphones (protheses used for every single body thus turning us into undeniably cyborgs), which gather and materialize all of these modifications that have been alarming us on a daily basis with an unprecedented intensity of alterations in our attention. These new forms of perception question the very fabric of reality in a magnitude certainly never seen before, perhaps never even ambitioned for any aesthetic movement, and challenge our parameters related to what should and can be a drama class or a cultural action in theater.
Concerning to the Artificial Intelligence, AI, which since its baptism has been intimating us with the central matter of imitation and the resulting substitution of human beings, we observed the rising omnipresence of machines that make decisions for us. Even though some positive predictions try to reduce the apprehension before the rising control over our lives and the precariousness of work, AI will certainly turn us obsolete, from the viewpoint of labour exploitation, unless we establish other parameters able to compete with the culture of efficiency and competence so relevant to capitalism. If traditionally theater education was proclaimed as a promise to develop ethical values, nowadays it has been haunted with the possibility of being captured as a training for non-replaceable human resources: the so-called soft skills.
Strangely, economic sectors seem to be interested in occupying, in a risky predatory way, a space that might not have received our proper attention: to put into action a conception proposed by Nietzsche and discussed since decades ago according to which art and life are imbricated, in a radical and broader expansion of the notion of aesthetics. Concerning to theater education, for a long time, we have had elements to create a wider vision of its pedagogical practice and to touch the perception frames that regulate our relationship with reality – the aesthetics of and in our lives, the theatricality of everyday life.
In this perspective, we might be able to create broader relationships between Theater Education with all of these social transformations of finitude, ruin, exhaustion, instability, drastic changes, and deterritorialization. Therefore, in this special issue we aim texts that approach the relationship between Theater Education and themes that one way or the other symptomize or characterize the end of the world in different dimensions.
-
Documentary Theater
Vol. 7 No. 12 (2024)In the last two decades it has been possible to observe, both regionally in Latin America and in many parts of the world, an exponential growth in shows and scenic experiments that can be included in the broad spectrum of documentary theater. It was a kind of resurgence, or new phase, since this type of theater seems to have lost visibility, or at least, centrality in the theatrical field for a certain time. In principle, there is a critical consensus that the most recent practices differ significantly from previous experiences, indicating a history characterized by discontinuity, in which, roughly speaking, two different models can be recognized: a documentary theater that can be called canonical – whose first prominent figure is certainly Erwin Piscator, who has in Peter Weiss one of his greatest directors/formulators and who also encompasses some of Augusto Boal's most daring experiments; and the recent practices that have been addressed under the term new documentary theater – a field in which the presence of non-actors, the new possibilities of audiovisual and the placement of representation in a kind of state of liminality brings it closer to the so-called theatres of the real, in which the emergence of reality on the scene is the keynote. Both models are still alive in practices as distinct as the biodrama, the court theater, the verbatim theater or the epic-dialectic theater of a documentary nature.
-
Multispecies Scenes
Vol. 6 No. 11 (2023)To what extent do the performing arts contribute to a tension in the anthropocentric paradigm towards a real epistemological turning point? How can we include non-human life in the creative processes of the contemporary scene beyond an instrumental perspective? How can we engage epistemologically and poetically with the multiple species that make up our existence? How can the performing arts collaborate with the reinvention of life possibilities among multiple species?
-
Jul. 2022 - Theatre and Performance in Latin America (Dossier)
Vol. 5 No. 10 (2022)A Ephemera entra em seu quinto ano de existência, lançando seu décimo número: o dossiê Teatro e Performance na América Latina, que conta com a participação de diferentes pesquisadores e pesquisadoras do Brasil e de outros países da América Latina.
-
Dec. 2021 - Street Practices Dossier II
Vol. 4 No. 9 (2021)Segundo número do Dossiê práticas de Rua, intitulado Ações Artísticas como política de resistência, organizado por Alexandre Falcão e Marcelo Rocco.
** Como tributo, a capa do presente número da Ephemera traz o saudoso Toni Edson (1979-2021) em cena no espetáculo Baldroca (2018), do grupo Joana Gajuru, de Maceió/AL.
-
sept. 2021 - Street Practices Dossier I
Vol. 4 No. 8 (2021)Primeiro número do dossiê Práticas de Rua, organizado por Alexandre Falcão e Marcelo Rocco. Este primeiro número do dossiê é dedicado especialmente ao Teatro de Rua e à temática ambiental.
-
dez. 2020 - BLACK PO-ET(H)ICS OF (RE)EXISTENCE dossier
Vol. 3 No. 6 (2020)BLACK PO-ET(H)ICS OF (RE)EXISTENCE dossier
Closing the year 2020, Ephemera Journal is out with the Special Issue Black Poethics of [Re]Existence. Organized by scholars Nina Caetano and Marcia Sousa, Ephemera’s sixth issue takes the front line on the affirmation in the contemporary scene of a black poetics . As a symbol of resistance, our front cover displays a photograph of Mrs. Maria Tereza Mafra, a 95-year-old midwife from “Jamary dos Pretos”, an ancestral marronage in the State of Maranhão, Brazil, taken by the young quilombola photographer Joelington Rios. This dossier congregates a multitude of black artists and scholars, to whom we would like to thank for their contributions.
-
August 2020 - Dossier Disabled Bodies on the scene
Vol. 3 No. 5 (2020)Dossier DISABLED BODIES ON THE SCENE: BEYOND INCLUSION AND ACCESSIBILITY
-
Apr. 2020 - Dossier Antonin Artaud II
Vol. 3 No. 4 (2020)Antonin Artaud’s reverberations (1896-1948) and his thought echo strongly, even today, more than 70 years after his death. Researchers, artists and contemporary performers continue to give voice and body to their ideas and attest to their importance. In 2019, Ephemera - Journal of Theatre and Performance Studies, edited by Federal University of Ouro Preto, Brazil, circulated a call for papers to the Special Issue Antonin Artaud and Reverberations, which received such a large volume of high
quality articles that we ended up deciding to break this dossier into two issues, which demonstrates the enormous repercussion of Artaudian work not only on the performing arts, but also on psychology, philosophy and so many other fields.
More than that: the positive reception of the first dossier made us even more excited for launching this second part, in which we sought to organise the papers in order to illustrate the repercussions and relationships woven in and by the artaudian work since his first writings, connected to the avant-gardes of the beginning of the 20th Century, until nowadays, with strong influences on Performance Art and the contemporary scene
