Cenivivências: performances e poéticas negras nos processos criativos do Coletivo TEIA

Abstract

This dissertation seeks to reflect on the creative processes of the TEIA Collective – Amateur Interdisciplinary Experimental Theater and its aesthetic interweaving, engendered through the performances of Black corporealities. It highlights TEIA as a space-time for emancipatory Black artistic experimentation and discusses how the Black corporealities that comprise it inform the group's poetics through performance. It also explores how the group utilizes contemporary epistemological perspectives on artistic practice and research in conjunction with African and Afro-Brazilian cosmologies to inform its practices. The research's methodological scope evokes and utilizes the analysis of creative processes, the Somatic-Performative Approach, and writing experiences, examining the collective's experiments in an attempt to elucidate how the TEIA Collective's creative processes, through the application of Afro-referenced and somatic-performative practices, can contribute to the emancipation of Black corporealities in artistic experimentation. All of the Collective's artistic experiments are guided by the participants' experiences, memories extracted from the body in triggering exercises, revealing the gestures of the Black body in performance. Based on reflective practice, some conceptual keys converge in the group's theoretical development, one of the main ones being the notion of "document-body," which presents the Black body as the great receptacle for the stories of the Afro-diasporic people, records that are revealed in performance, in which the main trigger and foundation is movement. Another important concept presented was "Escrevivências," which harks back to narrative creation, a poetics that intertwines history, memory, and experience, the fictional translation of our experiences. This notion inspired the term Cenivivências, which gives its name to our creative processes. We understand Cenivivências as processes of scenic creation that originate from/for a Black body dramaturgy, in a collective-subjective process, considering body, condition, and experience as the main elements of our artistic creation.