Photo/Foto: Marlène Ramírez-Cancio

Group Theater in São Paulo and the Commodification of Culture

The recent capitalist development in Brazil generated an institutionalization of cultural production in the country. The research in the arts, which previously operated against the grain of dominant logics, now frequently becomes a conformist site of alternative inclusion in capital’s ideological order. Dissonant voices in this process, including the voices of some theater groups in the city of São Paulo, look for critical ways of confronting the general depoliticization and commodification imposed by the bare necessities of survival.

Biography

Sérgio de Carvalho is playwright and director of Companhia do Latão, a São Paulo theater group. He is also Professor of playwriting and criticism at the Universidade de São Paulo. He is the editor of Vintém and Traulito and author of Atuação Crítica and Introdução ao Teatro Dialético (2009). His plays include O Nome do Sujeito (1998), O Círculo de Giz Caucasiano (2006) and Ópera dos Vivos (2010).