The Black Theater of Bahia: among absences, presences and resistance

Abstract

Regarded as the blackest Brazilian territory – with an 80% black population – Bahia is marked in its cultural and artistic constructions by the effects of the transatlantic diaspora, giving origin to a black theater guided by the Afro cultural heritage in its scenic and textual compositions, focused on a liturgical referentiality going beyond religiousness. From the historical references of the Brazilian Black Theater and its reverberations, this essay aims to present a brief historiography as well as to reflect on how the black theater produced in Salvador and Alagoinhas (Bahia / Brazil) articulates within a collective logic, which can be thought of as a practice of theatre production, but, mainly, as a form of solidary and strengthening operation among groups. The episiteme gathered by the Black Theater refers to the relationship between the Afro culture of resistance and collective production. The proposal is to think the black theater in regards to its aesthetic production, which provokes the dialogue between Afro-centered and occidental knowledge as an intrinsic political proposal to its yet peripheral modes of production within the Brazilian scenario. The group NATA (Alagoinhas) will be used as an example and allusions will be made to the Bando de Teatro Olodum (Salvador / BA).