Mapping Brazil - Performing Arts: North and Northeast

Salvador, Bahia

Felipe de Assis:“Teatro Castro Alves is the largest cultural venue in the city and the biggest drama institution run by the state. It offers a varied programme of different art forms and produces its own productions through the TCA Núcleo grant. The other state-run venues are Centro Cultural Alagados, Centro Cultural Plataforma (with a strong presence in peripheral/suburban districts of Salvador), Xisto Bahia and Cine Teatro Solar Boa Vista. Other important organisations in the city’s cultural scene are Teatro SESC SENAC Pelourinho, which holds local productions, festivals, exhibitions and touring productions, and Teatro Vila Velha, which has a multi-purpose room and a theatre and has a theatre group in residence, Bando de Teatro Olodum. Goethe-Institut, Alliance Francaise and Fundação Gregório de Matos are all major sponsors of the Salvador cultural scene. (...) Bahia is a state that is recognised for its cultural capital. The schools of theatre, dance and music at its universities are some of the oldest in the country. The performing arts, especially theatre and dance, are very strong. There is little in the way of commercial theatre, and most productions are dependent on funding from state government grants. Recently, the municipal authority provided funding two years running to support new projects. International partnerships are few and far between, and depend on personal contacts by the people involved.”

Ricardo Libório: “There is a lot of creativity but a shortage of interchange. Productivity ends up being hampered by the precarious state of the infrastructure and basic public services. There also lack new strategies to boost audience numbers, which impairs the sustainability of the whole sector and its voice in negotiations with the authorities. Although the Goethe-Institut provides a small amount of funding, local productions are basically dependent on public or public/private funding and sponsorship. There is more funding available from the state and less from the municipal government, while access to federal government funding is hampered because it tends to go to the main economic hubs of the country. Private involvement revolves entirely around funding mechanisms that foster the privatisation of decisions about what should be funded using public monies (something that embarrasses me when I try to explain it to people from other countries, because the way the system works never makes any sense to my interlocutors). Real arts patronage is non-existent. The current state of affairs makes any future prospects unclear. Yet the theatre scene in Salvador has great potential and creative capacity, despite the many gaps in the production chain. The only international productions in the city are during the Bahia International Theatre Festival (FIAC Bahia), the Bahia Latin American Theatre Festival (FILTE Bahia), Viva Dança and Interação e Conectividade. As festival producers, we are keen to broaden the scope and effective results, targeting our efforts towards taking advantage of access to different networks to enable activities that make it possible to broaden the range of artistic exchanges and reflections and organise the sharing of knowledge. To this end, we are work hard to forge stronger bonds and identify opportunities together with national and international partners.”

Felipe de Assis and Ricardo Libório are the coordinators and curators of Festival Internacional de Artes Cênicas da Bahia, an international theatre festival held annually in Salvador since 2008. Its goal is to divulge theatre, to encourage reflection and training through encounters between audiences, actors and technical professionals, and to consolidate the festival and widen its scope through actions designed to encourage creativity, artistic exchanges, reflection, new content, training, public mediation, networking and market expansion.

Natal, Rio Grande do Norte

Fernando Yamamoto: “Natal, the state capital of Rio Grande do Norte, has an incipient theatre scene, but some interesting groups are beginning to do work there. One is Gira Dança, a company that develops dance with different bodies (wheelchair users, dancers with Down’s syndrome, blind people, etc.), producing striking, vibrant work with a national and sometimes international footprint. Other groups, like Carmin, Bololô, Estação and Atores à Deriva, are going through a period of growth and development. (...) The cultural scene is still taking shape. I believe we are building up the groundwork for more favourable conditions for the development and maintenance of actors and theatre groups. The scene in the state is getting more consistent and what is being produced is more interesting than it was five or ten years ago. (...) There is an international dance festival, but it has not yet been scaled up and its format and programme are rather odd. O Mundo Inteiro é um Palco, a festival we at Clowns de Shakespeare theatre group produce, is coming out for the third year in 2015, and should receive its first foreign attraction this year, which is the first step towards making it a truly international event. (...) Another interesting aspect is the strengthening of an as yet informal network of groups from the north-east of Brazil, which are developing more consistent communication, interchange and circulation. Finally, I cannot fail to mention Rede Potiguar de Teatro, formed in 2012, which has managed to coordinate some exciting actions and thoughts in the city and the state, and recently mediated interactions between Brazilian theatre workers and Funarte (federal government arts foundation), taking on responsibility for articulating such interactions on a national level.”

Fernando Yamamoto is artistic director, producer and founder of Grupo de Teatro Clowns de Shakespeare, which has existed since 1994. Clowns de Shakespeare is a theatre company devoted to ongoing drama research with a strong political line, especially when it comes to supporting theatre companies in the north-east of the country. It researches Shakespeare (as its name suggests), the issue of comedy and the construction of the state of play, which has branched out recently into research about Latin America.

Fortaleza, Ceará

Rogério Mesquita: “Ceará has a rich, plural cultural scene that has had to be strong to withstand its geographical and political adversities. Job prospects are limited. The groups that are able to plan their work in the long term (Bagaceira and Máquina, for instance) have to penetrate the festival circuit and get funding from national grants, since the local arts budget is minimal. (...) The dramatic arts have great economic potential that is as yet untapped because of their semi-amateur status and the precarious working conditions. A theatre production may create up to 120 jobs, depending on how big it is: actors, directors, lighting technicians, set designers, costume makers, musicians, prompts and so on. But all this potential is wasted because of the lack of funding for productions and of continuous, serious public policies. In Fortaleza, each theatre group’s headquarters works like a mini cultural centre, and this has started to change the outskirts of the city. But it is a silent revolution. (...) The only international programming is in the Ceará International Biennial of Dance.”

Rogério Mesquita is an actor and producer and founded Grupo Bagaceira de Teatro in 2000. GOALS: We are an experimental theatre company who are developing our own language as we write our own plays. With a mixture of multiple references expressed in unexpected ways, Bagaceira has managed to associate its conceptual instigations with an accessible approach, winning public and critical acclaim and attracting ever wider audiences for our ongoing output.

Recife, Pernambuco

Pedro Vilela: “We currently have two theatre companies that have made a name on the national scene: Grupo Magiluth and Coletivo Angu de Teatro. Laudable work is also being done in other parts of the state by Poste: Soluções Luminosas, Companhia Fiandeiros de Teatro, Cênicas Companhia de Repertório, Companhia Anime and Grupo Totem. However, the vast majority of their members cannot make a living exclusively from their theatre work.

There is a major issue when it comes to performance venues in the city. The local government does not have a policy for occupying vacant spaces, and most public spaces are shut for renovations or derelict. Some groups working on the fringes are trying to maintain small premises to do their work and put on their productions. SESC is an important player; it has two theatres in the city and is developing new projects in other parts of the state, which I believe will involve five new venues. However, this is still very little if we consider the size of Pernambuco. Recife is a multicultural city with a great capacity to blend its traditions with contemporary manifestations. It has two big theatres managed by the local authority: Teatro de Santa Isabel and Teatro Luiz Mendonça. They are very little used by the city’s theatre groups because of the high rental costs, the difficulty of scheduling productions and the audience sizes required to fill them. Local production is still very much dependent on the state’s annual culture fund. There are no patronage laws anywhere in the state. As for funds from private businesses, the option is to apply for tax relief funds (the Rouanet law). However, local businesses are not used to dealing with this law, so projects are approved but no funds reach us. As for international partnerships, I can only recall the Iberescena grant, which sponsored a few of the Janeiro de Grandes Espetáculos theatre festivals.

It is hard to envisage any stability in this field in the long term. We live in a city where tax relief laws are not enforced (some years they happen, others they don’t). Many of the venues are in no fit state for use and there are no projects for the development of local actors. For instance, Magiluth had to leave the city to make a name for itself, and only then did it return. Generally speaking, groups are investing a good deal in building up audience numbers as a means of survival. Basically, most of the drama activity in the city is amateur. This does not mean amateurish (in quality terms), but in attitudes and management approaches.”

Pedro Vilela is an artistic director and manager. He has been manager and producer with Grupo Magiluth / TREMA! Plataforma de Teatro since 2012.

Belém, Pará

Adriano Barroso: “There are very few venues for performances of any kind in Pará. Those that do exist are in the city of Belém, but are in dire straits, with the exception of Theatro da Paz, which is out of bounds for local actors. In the private sector, there is the space used by the In Bust puppet theatre company and Casa dos Palhaços. Beyond this, everything is in the hands of theatre collectives. Even so, there are a huge number of actors doing high quality work, but their opportunities are very limited. It is a constant struggle to get some funding via federal tax relief laws or be adopted by some producer. Here, the Seamar law is used, but we depend more on the Rouanet tax relief law. (...) Our theatre group is still active and is one of the oldest in the country. We hope for improved working conditions in the future.”

Adriano Barroso is a playwright and director of Grupo Gruta de Teatro, which has existed in Belém since 1970

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