Backyard Theater: stagecraft processes in Unaí (Minas Gerais, Brazil); from a new utopia to the insurgency of poetics
Backyard Theater, Unaí, Minas Gerais, Brazil, Cia. Pé na Estrada, creative process, theatrical poetics, theater company, right to the city
Cia. Pé na Estrada is a theater company of which I am part. Since 2015 they have produced and staged their plays in Unaí, a rural town in Minas Gerais state located 150 km from Brasília. There are no art galleries, theaters or performance spaces there. Having nowhere else to work, we began to rehearse and perform in one of our members’ backyard, in a marginalized neighborhood of Unaí. At first seemingly a provisional alternative for the group, this circumstance gradually presented itself as a possibility for the aesthetics and ethics of our creation. It was there that we eventually started the Backyard Theater. Since this was a theatrical space with both many peculiarities and limitations but also potentialities, it has guided us towards a form of stagecraft of its own. My research included the history of Unaí (works by historians Maria Torres Gonçalves and Oliveira Mello), the history of theatre practices in that town (historians’ reports and interviews with local artists), Cia. Pé na Estrada’s own trajectory as well as the analysis of their creative processes. The material thus collected leads to the finding of the Backyard Theater not only as an alternate performing space for the company, but also as their political poetics, their domestic and communal form of stagecraft. Ultimately, it was a cultural insurgency in a parochialist town ruled by the demands of agribusiness. I base my considerations on Rosyane Trotta and Patrícia Fagundes, who have researched theatrical collectives in their challenge of the neoliberal state of affairs that impairs symbolic work at every turn in Brazil. Other refeences were Augusto Boal. Henri Lefebvre, David Harvey and Michel Foucault, as well as utopian instances throughout theatre and the world. As agribusiness pushes for demographic growth in rural settlements, its economic and political clout overreaches into cultural affairs. Against that background, I aim to demonstrate how, even faced with precariousness, Cia. Pé na Estrada’s Backyard Theater breaks new ground in Unaí’s geographical, historical, and workaday conditions and becomes a struggle for the right to the city and to the enjoyment of theater in rural areas of central Brazil