Quando corpos se fazem arte: uma etnografia sobre o Teatro Oficina

Abstract

The present work performs an ethnographic investigation of some artistic and organizational aspects of the oldest Brazilian theater company in activity: the Teatro Oficina. The analysis intents to discuss the development of the group's unique relation between body and art, that was partly responsible for its success. In order to promote this debate, it's necessary to deeply understand the parameters that guide Oficina's theatrical production, such as the company's use of space, its internal organizational mechanisms, its history and historicity, the company's notion of art as well as its aesthetical operators. The goal is to delineate the aesthetic and social field that enables the emergence and fruition of the body's artification (Shapiro, 2007) process, which will be taken as a reference vector in the analysis of the multiple languages that have been experienced over half a century of interventions. This paper sought to demonstrate that for some artists and some audiences the body in art is seen as an active part in the process of producing subjects and subjectivity, going past the simple aesthetic experience to lead us in the construction of a body that refuses to remain a passive object, that denies the condition of mere receptacle in which an idea is presented or coupled.