Lecture:
Modern Brazilian theatre – a constructions

Dr. Larissa de Oliveira Neves Catalão
Assistant Professor at Campinas State University

14th November 2019, 4.30 PM
CPD 1.44, Centennial Campus, HKU

This lecture will shed light on some characteristics of Brazilian modern theatre and how its configuration is different from European modern theatre. While in Europe modern theatre starts to develop by the end of the 19th century, in Brazil it will appear with text, scene and audience impact in the 1940s onwards. Brazil’s scene always had a great proximity with European theatre, especially of French, Portuguese, Spanish and Italian origin. However, for modern theatre, it was very difficult for Brazilian artists to achieve the maestri and unique way of building text and scene in a modern style. They only created Brazilian theatre per se when they stopped looking up for foreign models and started to use Brazilian theatricalities to build their works. I will present the revolutionary ideas of the theatre critic Antônio de Alcântara Machado, who was one of the first writers to acknowledge that modern theatre would only exist in Brazil when artists began to seek for inspiration in Brazil’s own culture.

Short-bio
Larissa de Oliveira Neves Catalão is an Assistant Professor at Campinas State University – Unicamp. She is a specialist in playwriting, Brazilian theatre, theatre theory and popular culture. She works both on Graduate and Undergraduate programs in the Art Institute of Unicamp. Larissa is editor of Pitágoras 500, a peer-review journal, and coordinates the research group Letter and Act. She published the book O theatro: crônicas de Arthur Azevedo (2009), and several papers on Brazilian theatre.