Brazilian Political Theatre

When José de Ipanema asked whether I would be willing to write a preface for his book manuscript on Brazilian political theatre, I responded that I wasn’t the right person because I have no experience or insight into Brazilian theatre. He replied that the framing of his entire intellectual project was based on his reading of Bertolt Brecht and that I – as a scholar of Brecht – would be just the right person to make explicit and appraise the connection of his critical attention to a delimited, historical moment in the development of Brazilian theatre. On this basis I agreed to read the manuscript and discovered that in fact Brecht was at the center of the author’s reflections on the challenges and limits of politics in and of the theatre. Indeed, I was surprised to read at the end of the last chapter that de Ipanema’s research was inspired by the Symposium of the International Brecht Society that took place in Porto Alegre, Brazil, in May 2013 under the thematic focus “The Creative Spectator: Collision and Dialogue.” Although I was unable to participate in the Symposium because of a family emergency, Hans-Thies Lehmann and I wrote the Call for Papers under that title during his two-week residency at my university in March 2012. We spent the time brainstorming ideas that would solicit scholarly papers and stimulate open discussion about topics such as the function of emotions in “activating” the spectator, what it means to “activate” someone in the theatre audience, the historical context of Brecht’s idea of the “thinking spectator” (and what this means for post-Brechtian theatre), the nature of estrangement as a means to play with audience expectations, and finally the role of spectacle and the spectacular in the theatre. Looking back at the Call for Papers, I note that it opens with a statement of the very issue at the center of de Ipanema’s study: “Political theatre in Brecht’s sense today must be conceived in terms of the spectator, and Brecht’s call for a new ‘art of spectatorship’ can only be realized today in the context of a media environment in which audience practices have undergone dramatic changes.”

The core chapters of this study focus on a short period of time in Brazilian history and theatre, the years from 1958 until 1968, and on a limited selection of theatre performances chosen for their exemplary status within the landscape of “Brazilian political theatre” during those years. While the author carefully details the shift during this unique ten-year period of cultural revolution, he also supplements it with information about the preceding years that led to the cultural blossoming and the difficult years after the severe crackdown by the military junta that sought to abolish both the innovations critically analyzed in the core chapters and their originators. This granular approach toward assessing the possibilities and intentions of specific theatre productions and understanding as well their limits and achievements drills down into the historical and discursive context in which Brazilian theatre came to be “politicized”. In this sense de Ipanema takes on the role of an important mediator for Anglophone readers of a Brazilian discourse and its sources, providing English-language translations and definitions of Portuguese neologisms and concepts that arose within this discourse. I will let that material speak for itself, since I am not in a position to evaluate or add to these arguments and conclusions.

If the core chapters focus on the emergence of a national, Brazilian-inflected performance style, this strategy is embedded within a larger theoretical framework that actually describes more accurately de Ipanema’s main interest: how and under what conditions can the “political” be introduced into theatre performance? How does the “political” relate to the aesthetics of a performance? How does the form in which political content is conveyed already transmit aesthetic choices with ideological and ethical implications? Such questions broach, of course, a centuries-old debate that can be traced back to Plato, Socrates, and Aristotle, through the demands for democratizing access to knowledge in the Enlightenment, into the twentieth century via thinkers such as Georg Lukács, Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Michel Foucault, up until today with propositions by Hans-Thies Lehmann and Jacques Rancière about giving voice to and establishing the visibility of neglected groups. While the author repeatedly reminds us readers of this ongoing philosophical debate and constantly alerts us to the danger of a reductive binarism that sets political engagement against aesthetics, it is Bertolt Brecht who remains the touchstone for the problem of how staging practices can pull spectators out of their consumerist, passive behaviour and activate them either as critical thinkers or as citizens committed to changing an unjust status quo.

Why Brecht, a canonical author, an “old white man” whom some consider to be a macho whose plays appropriate “orientalist” and colonial spaces in China, Japan, Singapore, and other less obvious fantasy landscapes like Chicago and Mahagonny? For one thing, he is read and performed around the world not only because he wrote engaging plays but also because his is considered universally to be “political” theatre, in contradistinction to – as he would call it – culinary theatre. Yet, as de Ipanema recognizes, to label Brecht’s theatre as “political” misunderstands why he called it epic or later dialectical theatre, insisting on aesthetics and not on political content. To paraphrase the filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard, Brecht did not make political theatre but made theatre politically, that is, theatre needed to stage its revolution on aesthetic grounds by developing methods for engaging with contemporary reality, contesting how meaning is being constructed and by whom in specific historical contexts. Did Brecht provide answers or at least useful ways of questioning issues during the ten-year period of the cultural revolution in Brazil? Yes, but it was the task of theatre artists to discover the dramaturgical devices, acting techniques, use of space, lighting, projections, and other means of production that enabled the exposure of and even interference in how Brazilian society and its institutions were operating as they emerged from its colonial heritage. The first Brecht play produced in Brazil was The Good Person of Szechwan in 1955, and when Augusto Boal returned to São Paulo from New York City in 1956, he brought with ideas about breaking down the relationship between stage and auditorium that were seeded by his knowledge of Brecht’s learning plays. Today still, I would argue with de Ipanema, understanding how Brecht made theatre politically can help us recognize our own crises and find ways to respond by seeking aesthetic forms to “intensify” contradictions and break down audience consumerism.

I am impressed with de Ipanema’s effort to argue dialectically, perhaps even schooled on Brecht’s own dialectical thinking, which was not Hegelian. Conventional dialectics creates a tension between a thesis and an opposed antithesis in order to resolve the contradiction through a process of synthesis, out of which a new thesis develops that re-establishes identity, totality, and harmony. In contrast, Brecht’s is a dialectics of negation in which the synthesis is a negation of the antithesis in a dynamic process of continuity and discontinuity. The rejection of binary oppositions of (completed) “things” underlies the (evolving) process. In short, dialectics is for Brecht a particular way of apprehending reality, an epistemology based on a consistent sense of non-identity: things are not what they appear to be (thus, the need to find fresh estrangement effects). But it is also a method of analysis. Brecht analyzes social reality in terms of contradictions underlying social relations, and these contradictions are a powerful motor for transformation based on negation. History can be transformed because the historical process is subject to intervention in the assumed natural, common-sense order of things. If social formations are historical (rather than universal), then they are changeable, and this dialectic became his major tool for recognizing, examining, and representing social contradictions and antagonisms in his plays, with the goal of transforming society. Honing the readers’ or spectators’ dialectical thinking is the prerequisite for critique and intervention, the trigger of all agency, and the aesthetic method of epic theatre.

If Brecht’s understanding of the relation of representation to power and social change is still germane, then the anti-illusionistic techniques of estrangement and disruption are dependent on the respective context in which they operate, and thus it is necessary to reinvent new ways of seeing in a practice that is aware of its function, its historicity, and its inherent social and economic interests. This study on “Brazilian political theatre” looks back on a brief period of cultural disruption in order to analyze its hopes and its compromises in order to draw some lessons not only for Brazil but for postcolonial theatre in general.