We do theater while rehearsing the revolution

movements between territories, culture and art in Olinda, Recife, and Paulista

Abstract

This article is an experimentation in writing based on the narratives of Genivaldo Bazílio, master of popular culture in Pernambuco, on his involvement with street theater and the founding of the Grupo de Teatro Atual (GTA) together with a group of people in the periferias of Recife, Olinda and Paulista, communities marked by racial and social inequalities. The aim is to turn speech into text as part of a joint writing process - both in the passage of audio to written form and in the marking of pauses and selection of sections. In doing so we hope that the act of remembrance becomes itself a theoretical reflection on a collective trajectory that traverses neighborhoods and encounters movements of popular culture, such as Pernambuco’s Movement of Popular Theater, the Unified Black Movement, the struggle to turn the Nascedouro of Peixinhos into a cultural space, the Landless Movement, Paulo Freire’s pedagogy of the oppressed,  Abdias do Nascimento’s Black Experimental Theater, Augusto Boal's Oppressed Theater, the National Coordination of Black Entities and the union movement. Such reflection about GTA’s trajectory is not presented by means of a theoretical discussion and explanatory synthesis of a historically situated cultural movement, but rather by showing how authors, movements and theoretical discussions worked their way through GTA and influenced their practice as a black popular street theater.