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Artistic Actions in Education: the expanded scene in expanded scenery

Abstract:

The text introduces possibilities for performing artistic actions in formal education contexts, seeking to affirm the K-12 education and the university as potent cultural and artistic spaces in society. These ideas are developed through the daily investigation of my artistic and teaching practices since 2009, as a contributor at the Coletivo Teatro Dodecafônico and a university professor in the training of theater teachers, focused on corporeality studies in the field of Education and artistic creation. Artistic practices of the expanded contemporary scene are the catalyst elements of the actions performed in these educational contexts and the reflection around the artistic practices seen as knowledge processes.

Keywords:
Artistic Action; Artistic Practice and Education; Expanded Scene; Corporeality; Teacher Education

Resumo:

O texto apresenta possibilidades de realização de ações artísticas em contextos de educação formal, buscando afirmar a escola básica e a universidade como potentes espaços culturais e artísticos na sociedade. Tais ideias se desenvolvem por meio da investigação cotidiana das práticas artísticas e docentes da autora, desde 2009, como colaboradora do Coletivo Teatro Dodecafônico e professora universitária na formação de professores de teatro, focada em estudos da corporalidade no campo da Educação e da criação artística. Práticas artísticas da cena contemporânea expandida são os elementos catalisadores das ações realizadas nos contextos formativos abordados e da reflexão em torno das práticas artísticas vistas como processos de conhecimento.

Palavras-chave:
Ação Artística; Prática Artística e Educação; Cena Expandida; Corporalidade; Formação de Professores

Résumé:

Le texte présente quelques possibilités de réalisation d’actions artistiques dans les contextes d’éducation formelle, en cherchant à affirmer l’école primaire et l’université comme de puissants espaces culturels et artistiques de la société. À partir de l’analyse quotidienne de mes pratiques artistiques et d'enseignement depuis 2009, en tant que collaborateur dans le Coletivo Teatro Dodecafônico et professeur d'université dans la formation de professeurs de théâtre, telles idées sont développés, mettant l’accent sur les études de corporalité dans le domaine de l'éducation et de la création artistique. Certaines pratiques artistiques de la scène contemporaine élargie sont les moteurs des actions effectuées et la réflexion autour des pratiques artistiques en tant que processus de connaissance.

Mots-clés:
Action Artistique; Pratique Artistique et Éducation; Scène Élargie; Corporalité; Formation des Professeurs

My current work as a professor, performer and researcher relates elements of the expanded contemporary scene (which will soon be presented in this text), ethnography approaches (Mauss, 2003MAUSS, Marcel. Sociologia e Antropologia. São Paulo: Cosac Naify , 2003. ; 2006MAUSS, Marcel. Manual de Etnografia. Buenos Aires: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2006. ; Geertz, 1989GEERTZ, Clifford. A Interpretação das Culturas. Rio de Janeiro: Editora LTC, 1989.), the Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology (2003MERLEAU-PONTY, Maurice. O Visível e o Invisível. São Paulo: Ed. Perspectiva, 2003.; 2004MERLEAU-PONTY, Maurice. O Olho e o Espírito: seguido de A linguagem indireta e as vozes do silêncio e A dúvida de Cézanne. São Paulo: Cosac Naify , 2004.), as well as the perspective of embodiment (Csordas, 2011aCSORDAS, Thomas J. Modos Somáticos de Atención. In: CITRO, Silvia (Coord.). Cuerpos Plurales. Antropología de y desde los cuerpos. Buenos Aires: Biblos , 2011a. P. 83-104.; 2011b; Citro, 2009CITRO, Silvia. Cuerpos Significantes - travesías de una etnografía dialéctica. Buenos Aires: Biblos, 2009.) as unique ways of understanding social life and, consequently, the training of theater teachers or the theater in school education. Throughout my corporal and social trajectory, these ways of looking and acting in the artistic and teaching investigations that I undertake are constituted from the studies and practices of these methodological fields. In this sense, the reflection that I build in this text and the actions that are presented here are part of the teaching research project under development at Universidade Federal de Uberlândia (UFU)7 1 The research project in question is called Corporalities, Theatricalities, Performativities on the Scene and in Contemporary Education - Global Views, Network Actions, Local Actions, covering the period from 2017 to 2021. .

From my initial (bachelor’s and undergraduate) training in Performing Arts, through post-graduate studies, and working in research and scenic creation groups, some interpretations of theater in the 20th and 21st centuries have interested me especially to (re)think about the possibilities of doing theater in teaching processes, particularly in the school context, about which a wide range of critical readings have been produced in the last century (Bourdieu; Passeron, 1982BOURDIEU, Pierre; PASSERON, Jean-Claude. A reprodução: elementos para uma teoria do sistema de ensino. Rio de Janeiro: Editora Francisco Alves, 1982. ; Foucault, 1994FOUCAULT, Michel. Vigiar e Punir. Petrópolis: Vozes, 1994.; André, 2011ANDRÉ, Carminda Mendes. O Teatro Pós-Dramático na Escola. São Paulo: Ed. UNESP, 2011.; Escuza, 2013ESCUZA, César. Creadores creando comunidad. Tejedores de visiones y saberes. In: NOGUEIRA, Márcia Pompeo. Teatro na Comunidade: conexões através do Atlântico. Florianópolis: Ed. UDESC, 2013. P. 52-62.).

Based on these interests, I have organized this text into three parts. As an introduction, in the first section I briefly introduce three elements which are found in the theatrical making at the turn of the 20th to the 21st century, seeking to understand its reverberations in artistic making and in teaching in the school context: the collectivization of creative processes and the means of producing meaning in the scene, the understanding of the process of creation as a process of collective knowledge and, finally, the presence of the body and space in the center of the contemporary scene. These aesthetic and conceptual traits, as ways of understanding contemporary scenic phenomena, are at the very heart of some changes in teaching practices in K-12 school and higher education when it comes to the teaching of the performing arts, which I will briefly describe in this introduction.

In the second section, I present the notion of artistic practices in an expanded field, as aesthetic and political contextualization for some actions - three dérives (drifts) and one reperformance - that were developed by me in the processes of training theater teachers at the university and in partnership with the UFU K-12 School. This section, core of the text, presents and reflects on these experiences as artistic actions in the school contexts in which they took place, seeking, on one hand, to reiterate artistic practices as unique forms of knowledge and, on the other hand, to affirm K-12 school and university as potential cultural and artistic spaces.

The body of this second section is divided into two items: in the first, I present the artistic practices themselves, carried out in K-12 school and at university; in the second, I outline the methodological traces that are manifested in them, weaving considerations around their potentialities in the processes of training in which they are inserted and establishing dialogues between them and the notion of artistic action.

In the final remarks I try to identify and manifest the ways of conceiving the artistic and educational processes involved in the actions shared in the text, underlining them as a political choice in face of the current problematic realities.

Precursor (Ide)actions8 2 T. N.: (Ide)action is a neologism created in order to preserve the author's proposal of combining the senses of idea and action in the word (Ide)action, which is possible in Portuguese by the very composition of the word (Ideação), but not in English (Ideation). It was then chosen to translate in this way for a better adequacy of the original meaning of the text.

The first aspect that I emphasize in the contemporary theatrical making, present in processes of creation of artistic groups or collectives, as well as in projects of cultural and artistic action, is the collectivization of the creative processes and the means of production of meanings in the scene. The use of play/improvisation modalities for the construction of scenes, as well as their reading (by means of conversations, individual or collective protocols and logbooks,) are ways that provide the participants of a process with the unveiling of these modes of production of meanings in scene (Pupo, 2001PUPO, Maria Lucia de Souza Barros. O lúdico e a construção do sentido. Revista Sala Preta , São Paulo, v. 01, p. 181-187, 2001.). Also, in this journey, actual topics of social life that are articulated to the scene or to the daily work of the collective emerge, bringing out the possibility of reflecting more broadly on the modes of artistic production and its relations with the historical-social time in which they are produced (Ceccato, 2010CECCATO, Maria. O Teatro Vocacional e a Apropriação da Atitude Épica Dialética. São Paulo: Ed. Hucitec, 2010.). Thus, in some artistic contexts over the last century, the different dimensions of the creative process are recognized and debated by the subjects participating in it, rather than being centralized in the hands of a director.

One of the challenges faced in the school environment when thinking about this specific aspect seems to be in managing to gradually build a process of appropriation of procedures for the construction of meanings on stage, in the short time of practice that the Arts curriculum component has each week in most K-12 Education. Carmela Corrêa Soares (2010SOARES, Carmela Corrêa. Pedagogia do Jogo Teatral - uma poética do efêmero. São Paulo: Hucitec, 2010.), in dialogue with French authors and her experience in a public school, affirms the potential of play as an aesthetic object and the production of small forms in everyday school life, through her work on attention, looking and listening. The focus would be on giving greater depth to experimentation and aesthetic research in the production of a small performance or scene than in the production of a large end-of-year show. In this sense, the pedagogical organization of daily work is part of the challenge and possibility of creation. The teacher would need to take to the last consequences the motto less is more: fewer playing proposals for each working day; proposition of quick records to build memories that can be accessed after a week; use of whole sessions for reading scenes and protocols. A kind of resizing and distribution of the practice in small doses is necessary, especially if we take as a parameter the temporality experienced in groups or collectives, and even in practical classes in undergraduate teaching, with extended duration between two and four continuous hours of work.

Quite articulated to the first one, the second element that I highlight among my interests is the understanding of the creation process as a process of collective knowledge. Jerzy Grotowski stated in 1960: “The form - its structure, its variability, its play of opposites [...] - is a peculiar act of knowledge. The act of knowledge, by its nature, is something open, not finished, it cannot be a repetition of methods and effects” (apud Flaszen; Pollastrelli, 2007FLASZEN, Ludwig; POLLASTRELLI, Carla (Org.). O Teatro de Jerzy Grotowski 1959-1969. São Paulo: Perspectiva ; Pontedera, IT: Fondazione Pontedera Teatro, 2007., p. 46-47). Antônio Araújo, back in 2012ARAÚJO, Antônio. A cena como processo de conhecimento. In: RAMOS, Luiz Fernando. Arte e Ciência: abismo de rosas. São Paulo: Abrace, 2012. P. 105-113. (p. 109), reflects: “We experience a type of artistic creation that occurs [...] in the encounter with the other, in the presence of the other. The collaboration is a device of research. Creation is a networking practice”. I also emphasize the specific way of producing knowledge when one creates artistically: tactile, sensory, mobile and moving knowledge from the encounter and confrontation with others; reworked, edited and poetized in bodily forms - gestures, sounds, words, luminosities, visualities of the scene. “The process does not only produce knowledge, but is, in itself, knowledge” (Araújo, 2012, p. 108) - that is, it is not a journey that only makes sense in its completion or final object resulting from the journey. It is about the discoveries, tensions and reversals that are conquered or fought at each moment of it, at each conflict between the participants, at each bodily encounter.

Similarly, in the concept of education that inspires this reflection, the school is time and space to foster curiosity, to provide processes of knowledge construction, as opposed to the idea of summary acquisition of them or consumption of knowledge as accumulative products. Therefore, the daily work of the theater teacher would be to create these investigative environments, still in dialogue with Antônio Araújo, to create fields of experience in which scenic senses are engendered, through getting to know each other, others and the world. A first challenge in this process would be to read the real interests of the group of students in order to launch real challenges to them. Not all students in a school classroom will have the desire and willingness to enter the scene as performers. Understanding the different possibilities of each person participating in the process can generate experimentation in writing, composing soundtracks and scenarios, providing other ways of distributing roles and ways of engaging in the creation process. Finally, going back to the initial statement, artistic experimentation and the elaboration of artistic forms in the daily life of the sessions are themselves a unique way of learning and getting to know in the concept of education and artistic process that inspires this reflection.

The third aspect that interests me in the dialogue between the artistic forms of the last century and the teaching processes in school contexts is the presence of the body and space at the center of the contemporary scene. For some time now, the various aesthetic changes in the creation and composition of the arts of the scene have been discussed. The theatrical text or even a fable are not necessarily the axis around which the scenic creative paths revolve. We are witnessing a process of blurring boundaries between artistic fields, including the emergence of information technologies on stage or the presence of screens and projections on it, among other heterogeneous traits in different countries and creators of the last century (Féral, 2008FÉRAL, Josette. Por uma poética da performatividade: o teatro performativo. Revista Sala Preta, São Paulo, v. 08, p. 197-210, 2008.; Lehmann, 2009LEHMANN, Hans-Thies. Teatro Pós-Dramático. São Paulo: Cosac Naify, 2009.). In particular, the elements that involved me most as a performer and researcher were the shifts in meaning and role of bodies and spatiality in this contemporary scene.

Bodies no longer as organisms only or instruments at the service of the construction of (or the metamorphosis into) a character. Plastic, complex, subjective, social, political bodies. Reinvented spatialities, either in the use of diverse architectures to theatrical making, or by the occupation of urban spaces, annexation of the real, of wanderings, of actors, performers and audience by spaces thematized in and by the scene. From my point of view, these aesthetic propositions opened instigating possibilities for the work in the context of K-12 education.

On the one hand, there is a model designed in series for public school architecture, which, most of the time, provides reduced spaces for classes, overloaded with furniture also produced in series, making scenic experiments difficult, as is usually experienced in free theater courses and in the classrooms of the initial training of theater teachers. On the other hand, in dialogue with these aesthetic propositions that I have been emphasizing, the playing between bodies and architectures, resignifying meanings already given to such architectural constructions, the wandering and the corporeality of these political subjects as the center of the scenic creation do not necessarily demand the use of amphitheaters or empty rooms with wooden floors for their realization. Other poetics and artistic actions are now part of the teaching practices of different teachers / performers (Araújo, 2013ARAÚJO, Getúlio Góis de. All Star? Um estudo autoetnográfico sobre adolescentes, teatro e escola. 2013. Tese (Doutorado em Artes Cênicas) - Universidade Federal do Estado do Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro, 2013. ; Bonatto, 2009BONATTO, Mônica Torres. Percursos entre arte contemporânea e processos de criação cênica na escola. In: REUNIÃO CIENTÍFICA DA ABRACE, 5, 2009, São Paulo. Anais... São Paulo, 2009.; Oliveira, 2015OLIVEIRA, Ricardo Augusto Santos de. Labirinto do Minotauro: processo criativo de performance na escola com o tema do medo. 2015. 94 f. Dissertação (Mestrado em Artes) - Universidade Federal de Uberlândia, Uberlândia, 2015. ; Rachel, 2015RACHEL, Denise Pereira. Adote o Artista não deixe ele virar professor: reflexões em torno do híbrido professor performer. São Paulo: Editora UNESP; Selo Cultura Acadêmica, 2015.), among which I am included.

The three aspects highlighted so far already configure a theatrical practice with contemporary traits in the school context that questions the idea of making theatre on commemorative dates or to teach contents from other school subjects. From a historical point of view, I think it was a process of varying the possible poetics in the school classroom, taking the theatrical making beyond the idea of staging a text. This change in the attitude of the theater teachers could then be brought closer to the idea of cultural action, in which all the social actors involved in that process define their own ends in the universe of culture, in this case, the universe of theater. They define their ends, and, with time, they make their own the modes of production of meaning in this universe.

One last important element to highlight is a certain disparity between the advances instituted in the field of creation and research in Performing Arts or in the specific field of Theater Pedagogy, and the instability of the processes of consolidation and legitimization of Theater teaching (and even of the different artistic modalities) in the Brazilian K-12 education. Comprehensive legislation was conquered in the 1990s, affirming the obligation to teach Art in all K-12 education. However, the concrete situation of legitimization of this field of knowledge in different regions of the country until today is extremely heterogeneous and sometimes precarious from the point of view of those who act daily at school. This precariousness ranges from the lack of public tenders for teachers in each artistic field, in most of the municipal and state school networks, to the reduced understanding of principals, teachers and students about the role of artistic making in formal education, and the little curricular space and time devoted to the arts at school.

I believe that the words challenge and boldness summarize the (in)tense landscape of those who seek to establish collective artistic processes in today’s school context. If the symbolic and concrete place of the Arts in K-12 education had not been consolidated since the conquests of the 1990s, from the processes of elaboration of the Common National Curriculum Base, the reform of High School and the presidential elections of 2018, the precarious context has intensified. In my schooling or training trajectory, I have never witnessed a moment in Brazilian history that has so deeply questioned the importance of the right to study and of artistic experience in the training of any person, and even more, the function and meaning of formal education. In such a context, the artistic actions presented in the next section are, more and more, tiny, simple, micropolitical forms seeking to vary and give maintenance to dissonant forms of existence that artistic making can provide.

(Ide)actions in development

Theory as an interdisciplinary or in-disciplinary practice - as I prefer to say today - dialogues with the expansion of the arts, but also with the expansion and problematization of the category of art itself, considering the flow between art and life in a double sense: not only from the transformations that art has brought to our contemporary life, but also including, most especially, the mutations and contaminations that the space of reality and citizenship practices have introduced into the increasingly expanded field of art and all systems of representation (Caballero, 2010CABALLERO, Ileana Diéguez. Cenários expandidos. (Re)presentações, teatralidades e performatividades. Urdimento - Revista de Estudos em Artes Cênicas, Florianópolis, v. 15, p. 135-148, 2010., p. 136).

The current outlines of the actions and reflection I am about to present are configured in recent years, when elements of my artistic practices as a performer articulate themselves more closely to my daily work as a professor, both in the context of the classrooms at the university, and in actions in partnership with teachers of K-12 education at the school.

I have been calling the multifaceted and not homogeneous set of artistic actions that I share in this text, among others that I have experienced as a performer professor, of artistic practices of the expanded contemporary scene. The notion of expanded field in the arts of the scene has been borrowed since the debate established by Rosalind Krauss in the classic text Sculpture in the Expanded Field, of 1979, published in Brazil in 1984. This notion seems to have managed to encompass, as Ileana Diéguez Caballero would say (2010CABALLERO, Ileana Diéguez. Cenários expandidos. (Re)presentações, teatralidades e performatividades. Urdimento - Revista de Estudos em Artes Cênicas, Florianópolis, v. 15, p. 135-148, 2010.), the scenes and scenarios that overflow the theatrical milestones in the strict sense, making it possible to reflect on the theatricalities, performativities and corporealities that emerged in the last century in their multiplicity of artistic, social and political forms, of social actors (not only artists, but citizens in general), and of spaces (not only cultural or theatrical spaces, but also in the city streets and in places of political conflicts, etc.).

In this scope, I am particularly interested in the possibility of acting and reflecting in the fields of the arts and the training of Theater teachers, articulating perspectives between the daily life of the bodies in society and the artistic forms that unfold from them. Furthermore, acting and reflecting in this field, assuming there is theatricality and performativity emerging from social interactions and that there is an intentional production of theatrical or performative corporealities that are engendered in the historical and political tensions in society. It is worth remembering, once again in dialogue with Ileana D. Caballero:

[...] it is not through fatigue or exhaustion of traditional theatrical forms that we reach the perception of theatricalities in social spaces. In some way, the existence and recognition of the two spaces - the artistic and the social - implies a given conscious relationship, or not, of these spaces and situations (Caballero, 2010CABALLERO, Ileana Diéguez. Cenários expandidos. (Re)presentações, teatralidades e performatividades. Urdimento - Revista de Estudos em Artes Cênicas, Florianópolis, v. 15, p. 135-148, 2010., p. 143).

In particular, my artistic-pedagogical experimentation of crossing these two spheres (artistic and social) comes from a conception of art teaching and a conscious intention to question any pre-requisites for artistic creation, as well as the need to break with the beastly life, as outlined by Pelbart (2003PELBART, Peter Pál. Vida Capital - ensaios de biopolítica. São Paulo: Editora Iluminuras, 2003.), to break with automatism and productivism, to establish distended times and dilated presences especially in these two contexts of formal education: the university and K-12 school. In this sense, I consider school itself to be an expansion of the scenarios in which this expanded scene has come about in this century.

From the context built up to this point, I present next a brief kaleidoscope of practices carried out at the university and in partnership with teachers from the K-12 school9 3 I am referring here especially to Getúlio Góis de Araújo, from the UFU K-12 School, whom I thank for the partnership we have built and for the authorization to cite the experiences we have carried out together and presented together in other texts. , outlining them as artistic actions in the expanded scenario of formal education.

Breviary

The starting point for the actions that I share below has always been to create ruptures in the fast pace of life that children, young people and adults currently lead, including the school and university contexts. Thus, the initial challenge is always the pause. Deliver the weight. Breathe. Realize yourself. Then find the eyes of your fellow workers, find their hands, walk together, initially inside the work room itself. In this process, generally silent, there is also a reunion between teachers and students, between bodies and space, the establishment of other somatic modes of attention (Csordas, 2011bCSORDAS, Thomas J. Embodiment: Agency, Sexual Difference, and Illness. In: MASCIA-LEES, Frances (Org.). A Companion to the Anthropology of the Body and Embodiment. Chichester, UK: John Wily and Sons, 2011b. P. 137-156.), other temporalities and spatialities in the, sometimes, repetitive flow of school daily life.

In general, this premise dialogues with the ideas and actions of thinkers and/or activists such as Milton Santos (2001SANTOS, Milton. Elogio da Lentidão. Folha de São Paulo, São Paulo, 11 mar. 2001. Disponível em: <Disponível em: http://www1.folha.uol.com.br/fsp/mais/fs1103200109.htm >. Acesso em: 02 jan. 2019.
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), the group of situationists (Debord, 1999DEBORD, Guy. Teoría de la deriva (1958). Internationale Situationniste, Madrid, Literatura Gris, v. I, 1999. Disponível em: <Disponível em: http://www.ugr.es/~silvia/documentos%20colgados/IDEA/teoria%20de%20la%20deriva.pdf >. Acesso em: 01 ago. 2014.
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), performers, artists and walking collectives (Careri, 2013CARERI, Francesco. Walkscapes: o caminhar como prática estética. São Paulo: G. Gili, 2013.; Jacques, 2014JACQUES, Paola Berenstein. Elogio aos Errantes. Salvador: EDUFBA, 2014.; Veloso, 2017VELOSO, Verônica Gonçalves. Percorrer a cidade a pé: ações teatrais e performativas no contexto urbano. Tese de doutorado. São Paulo: USP, 2017.), who have been trying to make a critical reading of the urbanistic projects initiated in the Modernity and find other ways to inhabit the city and themselves in times of productivism, programmed acceleration and emptying of the meanings of life.

Elásticos [elastic bands] (in town and at school) - the proposition is inspired by the performance program of Gustavo Ciríaco and Andrea Sonnberger (2006), Aqui enquanto caminhamos [Here, as we walk], reread as a dérive [drift] by the Coletivo Teatro Dodecafônico. A wide elastic band involves groups of people who walk under the following instructions: keep the elastic tensioned between the bodies without dropping it; walk collectively and silently from the questions what makes us walk?, what makes us stop? In a first experience, two teachers and two undergraduate students place themselves in the center of the city and walk, pause, touch trees on the sidewalks, windows, gates; they walk on the curb, tangle on the elastic-band, approach and push away, tensioning the distances. The displacement drags on, time stretches. An hour and a half, four blocks. It rains. Stop at the tiny doorway bar. The experience that will be taken to school the following week is finished.

In the K-12 school we are subdivided into groups of six or seven people, mixing nine-year-olds, undergraduate students and teachers. Before leaving the school amphitheater: shut our eyes, pause, surrender to the ground, give ourselves time. Only then, get up, be in a group and walk.

A first challenge: walking from seven wills, fourteen feet, fourteen eyes, fourteen hands and a school with unevenness, stairs, ramps, sometimes narrow corridors, cafeteria full of tables and benches. A first pleasure: to leave the closed room, to leave the dark room, to be outdoors, to feel the sun on our skin, to be in the other spaces of the school while most of its population is in the classrooms. There are smiles of pleasure, there are smiles of those who plan to challenge the group: to tension the elastic to the maximum, to stay at its margins, outside the circle that it delimits between the bodies, subverting the initial idea. There are bodies that climb small and large walls, groups subdivided into unevenness, revealing layers of architecture, previously invisible framing cutouts, previously invisible bodies. The action while breaking established flows in the school routine, sets up other usages of the space, invites passers-by audiences (lunch ladies, cleaners, security guards), school inhabitants. From within the action I also invert glances at the students, see them perform, test possibilities, limits and rules, parodying propositions. The approach given by the proposition engenders suspensions of roles, formation of transitional communities, temporarily rearticulating ways of knowing oneself and the school space.

Dos afetos nos espaços [On affects in the space] - a dérive in pairs, proposed both in the university and in the K-12 school by the two teachers, inviting one of the students to take another one to significant places in that space throughout his/her history of living in the school. It is possible to walk, pause, tell some story linked to the spaces one walks through. At the end of the time given for the walk, ten minutes for an automatic writing - a mode borrowed from surrealistic practices, in which the invitation is to write without taking the pencil off the paper, without selection or premeditated composition. A writing that explores territories of the unconscious, flirts with literature (Veloso, 2017VELOSO, Verônica Gonçalves. Percorrer a cidade a pé: ações teatrais e performativas no contexto urbano. Tese de doutorado. São Paulo: USP, 2017.), with phenomenological description, with ethnographic field notebooks. A kind of real-time composition in writing. The moment of writing, the here and now of its execution was intense: the bodies literally leaned over the paper - lying down, sitting on the floor - drawing, throwing words in uppercase on the paper, weaving micronarratives. The task of writing, so present in everyday school life, seemed to be re-read there by a significant event experienced on the walk through the school. The notion of psychogeography (Debord, 1999DEBORD, Guy. Teoría de la deriva (1958). Internationale Situationniste, Madrid, Literatura Gris, v. I, 1999. Disponível em: <Disponível em: http://www.ugr.es/~silvia/documentos%20colgados/IDEA/teoria%20de%20la%20deriva.pdf >. Acesso em: 01 ago. 2014.
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) or of an affective map took shape in everyone’s experience.

In the artistic-pedagogical process in which this action was inserted, the resulting textual production brought to light the itineraries lived by the students, the emotions and tensions of their stories in that space. From the shared actions, from the spaces present in the narratives, from the significant memories brought in the writings, we began to build the script for the edition of an audiotour. The deambulation carried out by the audiotour was a culmination in the process experienced, serving as a kind of ritual process in the completion of the trajectory of ninth grade students in school and undergraduates in Graduation10 4 The audiotour composition process was shared in text in Revista Urdimento v. 1, n. 34 (Caon; Araújo, 2019). . Liminal states emerge, with suspensions of collective roles and habitus; social bonds that are little experienced are forged among people in this context, as well as moments in and out of time or of the given social structures, similar to the observations made by Victor Turner (2013TURNER, Victor. O Processo Ritual: estrutura e antiestrutura. Petrópolis: Ed. Vozes, 2013., p. 97-98) about liminality and communitas11 5 Victor Turner (1920-1983) deepened his studies on these notions in the classic book in the anthropological field, The Ritual Process, translated and edited in Brazil by Editora Vozes. The scholar develops an approach articulating elements of anthropology and theater for analysis of what he started to call social dramas. .

Walk, stop, read, listen, write. In a circle, next to a tamarind tree, in the inner courtyard of a university building, we close our eyes. I propose that we turn our attention to the different dimensions of our sensing that are being crossed by the multiple stimuli of the environment: the sounds of winds, birds, machines and people in the surroundings; the contact between the feet and shoe soles, between them and the floor; the wind in the exposed skin fragments, the fabrics in contact with the skin, the aromas or tastes present at that moment. Next, I invite us to walk in pairs around the university campus - one person with closed eyes, being guided, and the other one choosing the routes. The guide, besides guiding the path of the one with closed eyes, chooses landscapes, moments to propose pauses, positions his/her pair in front of some spatial cutout and reads a text fragment standing behind him/her fellow. After one hour of trajectory, the roles are switched. At the end of the process, each person has ten minutes to perform an automatic writing. The text they read was Tim Ingold’s12 6 Tim Ingold (1984-) is a British anthropologist, with studies in Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology who has been developing what he calls ecological anthropology, based, among other things, on the questioning of the categories of nature and culture. chapter Earth, Sky, Wind and Weather, read in the context of a postgraduate course13 7 Entitled Scenes and writings: memories, learning and creation procedures. Still in 2019 I also offered a discipline in undergraduate studies (Pedagogy of Theatre 3), sharing working procedures connected to walking as aesthetic and political practices. , all organized around walks and readings performed in displacements. In the crossing between the program and the intentionally chosen text, the randomness of the paths and pauses elected by the conductor, who is also in drift, emerge significant sensorial experiences, synchronies and resignifications of space.

I’m guided. I lie on the lawn under a gentle sunshine, there are buildings under renovation, red earth exposed. A treetop rises from my point of view from the ground, which leads me to see the outline of the sky in it, the architectural lines of a block, finally, the clouds... As my attention moves, my companion narrates: “The hill is not an object on the surface of the Earth, but a formation of that surface. [...] And fire is not an object, but a manifestation of the process of combustion” (Ingold, 2015INGOLD, Tim. Estar Vivo: ensaios sobre movimento, conhecimento e descrição. Rio de Janeiro: Editora Vozes, 2015., p. 182). And he/she continues: “Neither are the clouds objects. Each one is rather a vaporous, incoherent tumescence, which swells and is carried by the currents of the environment. To observe the clouds [...] [is] to have a fleeting glimpse of a sky-in- formation, never the same from one moment to the next” (Ingold, 2015, p. 182). Body that moves and pauses. Nomadic text. Listening and saying the text during a walking journey, in the open air, transforms the experience of the reading previously done by me in my home office. The time of reading, the time of listening to the words of the other while looking at the world from the ground, transforms the moment into fruition. Enjoyment of oneself, of the other, of the place. The looked place of things is displaced, the listened place of the text too. Space re-framed, listening altered. Aesthetic experience and knowledge dislocated.

Tunnel. In 1973, Lygia Clark proposed for the first time this action, in which people (who transit between spectators and performers) are invited to cross a 50-meter cloth tube. In 2018, at the end of a semester of performatic and wandering actions involving teachers and undergraduate students in theater and in the ninth year of elementary school, we produced two red mesh tubes about 7 meters long each. We invite the participants of the process to experience the displacement through this reduced space, which, from the artist’s proposal, is similar to the channel of birth and also to the experience of claustrophobia/suffocation. We pass through the fabric individually and in a second opportunity in pairs (each one starting from one end of the cloth). As an action of reperformance, keeping its adjustments for the space and time dimensions of the school context, the lived experience gave way to laughter, giggling, and entanglement. Breathless, tired, relieved or simply inert, immobile, stretched out on the floor, releasing the weight, breathing, the bodies reappeared (reborn?) at the end of the tunnel. Instead of the crying of birth, laughter. For pleasure, for fear or anxiety. At the end of the journey, a laughter of relief, for conquering the arrival in the world. Perhaps the world itself is renewed (its luminosity, its atmosphere and our encounter with it) by the event. We were reborn among ourselves with transformed bodies.

At the end of this small sharing, I understand such devices and their outcome as artistic actions in the school context. The proposition of programs that establish distended times, diverse somatic modes of attention, allow transformations in our perception of ourselves and our interaction with the world. It is about the creation of situations, the emergence of events, with no predetermined purpose. The programs give instructions that are configured as ways of doing, outline a deliberate way of being in the situation or of paying attention, organize actions and compositions. An external spectator can perceive there an aesthetic, artistic ordering. A participant or spectator within the group of participants as well. What seems unique to me is the establishment of collective acts in which each body works on its own ways of being in the world, consciously composing with other beings and with the environment. In this attitude would be, simultaneously, the aesthetic and ethical potential of the actions, as well as the delineation of a peculiar way of learning.

Two contours of the pedagogical process

In general, the proposition of these actions is based on two procedures. On the one hand, the initial or a posteriori contact with images, videos, distinct materialities created by other people, who call themselves artists or not, who have performed similar actions in other spaces and times. In this way, the conceptual study and the historical contextualization of the references take place in the process of fruition of these actions, by aesthetic and ethical crossing, by enchantment, inquiry or indignation. From my point of view, this way of proceeding becomes the key in the organization of the processes coordinated by me in recent years. It is based on the sharing of my effective interests by artists, scholars, research contexts, as well as by the exposure of the actions in which I have been involved. The interconnection between these two aspects of such a procedure - the effective exposure of the professor’s interests and the study of the artistic field through a significant experience of fruition - seems to me to be one of the dimensions that has resonated my practices in the teaching of Theater.

On the other hand, the dynamics of work is based especially on the action itself and on an action that is aimed at itself. In acting collectively from the reperformance or from the collective creation of programs to be fulfilled by the group itself. Action experienced by all the bodies-people who are in the process - teachers and students - without exception.

As in some philosophical schools in the Antiquity, certain performative actions require the artist to modify attitudes or even commit to a type of askhesis (asceticism) in order to mobilize the necessary energies and channel them into the creative act. In an art that works with great freedom in relation to conventions and styles, creation often relies on the cultivation of states of body-mind that will sustain the devices of communication with the public (Quilici, 2014QUILICI, Cassiano. O campo expandido: arte como ato filosófico. Revista Sala Preta , São Paulo, v. 14, n. 02, p. 12-21, 2014., p. 19-20).

Exposure of oneself to events in their unpredictability. Action on oneself, crossings, collective enjoyment. This work on oneself evoked by Cassiano Quilici, involving the break (although temporary in the cases I share) of habits and temporalities, is what seems to bring both that suspension of the most mechanized flow of life, and the opening and irruption of other bodily states, in which social roles are suspended and intense bonds are created between the participants, engendering anti structures and communitas. Such irruptions thus named come close, as previously mentioned, to Victor Turner’s (2013TURNER, Victor. O Processo Ritual: estrutura e antiestrutura. Petrópolis: Ed. Vozes, 2013.) studies on ritual processes and social dramas, in which liminal states emerge - “[...] states of transit, of spontaneous collective movements that generate non-hierarchical temporal associations and where social actions that invoke possible transformations or where transformational symbolic spaces are created [...],” says Ileana Diéguez Caballero (2010CABALLERO, Ileana Diéguez. Cenários expandidos. (Re)presentações, teatralidades e performatividades. Urdimento - Revista de Estudos em Artes Cênicas, Florianópolis, v. 15, p. 135-148, 2010., p. 145) when studying the same author.

The articulation between these two procedures: the fruition of aesthetic propositions of artists or collectives and the effective invitation to live the events, create situations (or artistic actions) is what seems to me to configure this (ide)action about the potentiality of these two contexts of formal education (K-12 school and university) as cultural and artistic spaces, in which dissonant times and spaces are constituted, in which difference is produced, variation in the institutionalized modes of existence.

Final Remarks

Thus, the well-known formula of Beuys (2011), ‘each man, an artist’, does not necessarily mean transforming a person into a sculptor or an actor. It is about recovering the artistic sense that our activities can acquire, opposing it to the alienated forms of work and the instrumental rationalization of production (Quilici, 2014QUILICI, Cassiano. O campo expandido: arte como ato filosófico. Revista Sala Preta , São Paulo, v. 14, n. 02, p. 12-21, 2014., p. 13).

The propositions shared by me are fragments of artistic pedagogical processes set up at the university or in partnership between university and K-12 school that constitute, in my opinion, artistic actions. It is not a matter, in these cases, of passing on knowledge from one person who knows to another who ignores it (Rancière, 2002RANCIÈRE, Jacques. O Mestre-ignorante: cinco lições sobre emancipação intelectual. Belo Horizonte: Autêntica, 2002. ). It is about inviting, summoning, provoking oneself and others, to open oneself to the events that emerge in these propositions, with their aesthetic and ethical traits; and that already configure themselves, in the there-and-now of their action, in a kind of symbolic enunciation; engendering modulations of corporeality, suspensions of roles, transforming students and teachers into performers and spectators.

It is in this sense that school and university become nowadays a kind of agent of resistance in times of erasing memories, either in its historical conservative cultural dimension - as stated by H. Arendt (1979ARENDT, Hannah. Entre o Passado e o Futuro. São Paulo: Perspectiva, 1979.), by emphasizing our responsibility for maintaining the intelligibility of the world - either as a propitious space-time to create social interstices, subversive performativities (Caballero, 2010CABALLERO, Ileana Diéguez. Cenários expandidos. (Re)presentações, teatralidades e performatividades. Urdimento - Revista de Estudos em Artes Cênicas, Florianópolis, v. 15, p. 135-148, 2010.) and other modes of existence (Quilici, 2014QUILICI, Cassiano. O campo expandido: arte como ato filosófico. Revista Sala Preta , São Paulo, v. 14, n. 02, p. 12-21, 2014.) in the world.

As a sensitive, reflective, political body, traversed by the present time, making my teaching practices possible artistic actions in the daily processes of the training of theater teachers - either at university or at K-12 school - is a tactic of acting and producing other possible forms of existence in the historical moment in which we are living.

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  • 1
    The research project in question is called Corporalities, Theatricalities, Performativities on the Scene and in Contemporary Education - Global Views, Network Actions, Local Actions, covering the period from 2017 to 2021.
  • 2
    T. N.: (Ide)action is a neologism created in order to preserve the author's proposal of combining the senses of idea and action in the word (Ide)action, which is possible in Portuguese by the very composition of the word (Ideação), but not in English (Ideation). It was then chosen to translate in this way for a better adequacy of the original meaning of the text.
  • 3
    I am referring here especially to Getúlio Góis de Araújo, from the UFU K-12 School, whom I thank for the partnership we have built and for the authorization to cite the experiences we have carried out together and presented together in other texts.
  • 4
    The audiotour composition process was shared in text in Revista Urdimento v. 1, n. 34 (Caon; Araújo, 2019CAON, Paulina Maria; ARAÚJO, Getúlio Góis de. Caminhar, desacelerar - uma experiência com audiotour e fotoperformance na escola. Urdimento - Revista de Estudos em Artes Cênicas , Florianópolis, v. 01, n. 34, p. 224-235, 2019.).
  • 5
    Victor Turner (1920-1983) deepened his studies on these notions in the classic book in the anthropological field, The Ritual Process, translated and edited in Brazil by Editora Vozes. The scholar develops an approach articulating elements of anthropology and theater for analysis of what he started to call social dramas.
  • 6
    Tim Ingold (1984-) is a British anthropologist, with studies in Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology who has been developing what he calls ecological anthropology, based, among other things, on the questioning of the categories of nature and culture.
  • 7
    Entitled Scenes and writings: memories, learning and creation procedures. Still in 2019 I also offered a discipline in undergraduate studies (Pedagogy of Theatre 3), sharing working procedures connected to walking as aesthetic and political practices.
  • This original paper, translated by Suzana Schmidt Viganó and proofread by Ananyr Porto Fajardo, is also published in Portuguese in this issue of the journal.
  • Editors-in-charge: Verônica Veloso, Maria Lúcia Pupo e Gilberto Icle

Publication Dates

  • Publication in this collection
    09 Mar 2020
  • Date of issue
    2020

History

  • Received
    19 Sept 2019
  • Accepted
    29 Nov 2019
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