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Since the 1960s, a vigorous and original modern Brazilian theatre has continued to expand its ethical and aesthetic limits, despite or even because of the crises it has faced. I refer to the present, urgent, unflagging political and economic crisis that culminated in the impeachment of President Dilma Rousseff, which continues during the government of her vice president, Michel Temer, whose agenda consists of (1) pushing through the reforms (political, fiscal, social security etc.) enacted in the most rapid and conservative way possible and (2) finding a legal and political solution to save both companies and politicians from the Lava Jato (Car Wash) prosecutions.Footnote ¹ The other crisis to which I refer is the one that endures as the permanent backdrop to our history as a former colony, including patrimonialism and the heritage of slavery.

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The political and economic crisis through which Brazil has been passing since 2014 is more profound and serious than it may seem at first sight. It signals more than the failure of the left, the return of right-wing repression and a demophobic, morally supine middle class. It is also the worst economic depression we have seen since the end of the social pact signed at the end of the military dictatorship and enshrined in the Constitution of 1988.Footnote ² Faced with the permanent shortage of public financing, this crisis has led to reductions in the limited financing previously available for the arts. In Rio de Janeiro, the economic crisis is even more serious than in the nation as a whole, given that the state government is currently insolvent. Notwithstanding, groups like Cia. dos Atores, Armazém and Nós do Morro have not stopped producing new works. The necessary infrastructure for supporting theatre production was always shaky in Rio: the number of performance spaces and grants, and even audiences, are smaller compared to São Paulo. This makes the reality of theatre collectives even more precarious.

In all major centres of theatre production – from Porto Alegre in the far south to Belém in the north, passing through Curitiba, Belo Horizonte, Recife and Salvador – the outlook is the same: while commercial productions may find corporate support, a shrinking state budget leads to the draining of financial support available for new works.Footnote ³ There is no arts market; the box-office income is not sufficient to support theatre groups, nor are there any effective government grants. E pur si muove. We came from dust, and we remain so close to it that we barely notice each time we fall to the ground.

Numbering in the hundreds, groups created under Federal Law for the Support of Culture are legally affiliated under the umbrella of the Cooperativa Paulista de Teatro (São Paulo Theatre Cooperative). Ideologically, they share a common starting point: a reading of Brazilian reality in light of Marx, Brecht and Roberto Schwarz on a spectrum extending from anarchism to Stalinism.Footnote ⁴

In 2016, Marxist groups produced works in dialogue with the crisis that culminated in the impeachment of Rousseff. The Companhia do Latão debuted O Pão e a Pedra (Bread and Rock), directed as usual by Sérgio Carvalho. Without explicitly naming the players of this recent chapter in Brazilian history, the play, in the key of Brecht, revisits a workers’ strike in the 1970s that first brought the political figure of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva into the public arena.Footnote ⁵ The play seeks signs of the unfolding of the political alliance that diverse currents of the left, including leftist Catholics and the charismatic leader, and with the exception of the workers and the communists, would signal in the establishment of the Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT) (Workers’ Party).

Directed by its artistic director and founder Marco Antonio Rodrigues, Folias D'Arte presented Solidão (Solitude), a play by Sérgio Roveri. By establishing Latin America as the world of the play and emulating the fantastic style found in authors such as García Marquez, Cortázar and Juan Rulfo, the production catches a glimpse of what is perennial in the backdrop to Brazil's current situation, pointing to its roots in capitalism and neocolonialism themselves.

After reminding us in 1924: Uma Revolução Esquecida (1924: A Forgotten Revolution) that the commonplace that there was never a civil war in Brazil is not actually true, the Ocamorana group staged Shakespeare's Coriolanus to explore how the theme of violence runs hidden beneath our apparent normalcy – in Brazil, this hidden violence erupts in tragic episodes such as the massacre of more than a hundred prisoners in penitentiaries in several capitals in January 2017.Footnote ⁶

The most powerful and beautiful creation of 2016 was also the one most in dialogue with our current moment – and we should note that, unlike those just mentioned, it was created by a collective that is not openly political. PROJETO bRASIL (with a lower-case ‘b’) is a creation of Companhia Brasileira de Teatro, directed by Márcio Abreu. Developed during a year of travel around Brazil and out of the inescapable and recurrent question ‘Who are we – here and now?’ the play mixes performance and visual rigour in an explosion of energy and dismay. As Caetano Veloso's song goes,

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The other crisis, even more serious because it is not circumstantial, is a crisis in theatrical language and, by extension, of a public for whom that which is theatrical – the assertion of presence, the work with verbal language even when it interconnects with other fields – does not align with their daily consumption of the virtual. In an era dominated by the virtual, the theatre is fundamentally an art form of liveness and presence. It is an art of the body, and we are all separated from our carnality. It is the art of the polis, and depoliticization is its tonic. But mainly it is a collective art, yet social atomization is almost total in these times of constant false communication.

In the spectrum of Brazilian arts, the theatre occupied a central place during the democratic interregnum from 1945 to 1964, and even until the end of the dictatorship in 1985.Footnote ⁸ By dialoguing with artists and intellectuals in all areas through the work of directors such as José Celso Martinez Correia and Augusto Boal, the theatre was able to bring together tendencies and trajectories of many other artists and movements, from Cinema Novo to the artistic experiences of Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica, from the social realism promoted in 1948 by Communist Party secretary Andrei Zhdanov to the influence of groups such as the Living Theatre.

By the beginning of the 1990s, the capacity for dialogue and interaction that had been dominant from the 1950s up to the coup d’état of 1968 (a rightest coup within the coup d’état of 1964) was exhausted. Non-commercial theatre once again organized itself into permanent companies and built a new audience, but was unable to restart the dialogue with Brazilian society as a whole. Brazil's best artists have given different answers to the question of public dialogue. Starting in the 1980s, the theatre public that had come together since the modernization of the 1940s fell apart. There were now different publics for different types of theatre, a public that was numerically reduced and subdivided into niches: the leftist public, the one that seeks only entertainment, and another which prioritizes aesthetic experience.

The result of this split in audience interest and the crisis in theatrical language is what I have called a crisis of dialogue with the public.

Rio de Janeiro's Christiane Jatahy mixes theatrical and audiovisual languages in a radical experience enhancing what is specifically performative, rather than diluting it. Her response to the crisis is to not relinquish the theatrical, even though she pursues a kind of theatricality that is capable of dialoguing with the audiovisual. Her hybrid performances do not dilute the languages they use; on the contrary, she plunges into the specificity of each one, even expanding the field where they coexist. She does not seek a synthesis, but rather an ongoing dialogue among diverse art forms and their languages in such a manner that the outcome of the friction generated by their coexistence does not annul their autonomous development. Thus in Júlia (2011), an adaptation of Strindberg's Miss Julie, cameras, projections and movable projection surfaces condition the spectator's gaze to make it oblique and partial. The spectator of E Se Elas Fossem para Moscou (What If They Left for Moscow (2014)) must choose one theatre or another in which to watch the same performance, either simulcast or in a version performed live. A Floresta que Anda (The Walking Forest (2015)) mixes installation, documentary film and theatre, without subordinating one mode to another. It is no accident that Jatahy garnered much attention on the European circuit and is currently preparing two works commissioned there, which is a sign that the crisis in theatrical language is not exclusively Brazilian.

Grupo Galpão, leader of the Belo Horizonte scene, reinvented itself during the 2016 season with Nós (Us), presented under the leadership of Márcio Abreu. Since its founding in 1982, Galpão has not had a permanent director. It works with invited directors or, sometimes, one of its actors may direct a show. The aesthetic trajectory and ideological coherency charted by Galpão over several decades is unique, particularly because it does not count on the leadership of a director figure. By inviting Abreu they took a leap in the dark, because he is an artistic director who does not usually work either with playwrights or with traditional performance, as most directors would. Exposing the seasoned group's doubts and weaknesses in performance and in personal statements created a dialogue with the audience that only the physical presence of the actor can foster.

Founded in the late 1950s, the group Oficina is older yet its work is a direct answer to contemporary questions of theatrical representation. Without changing the principles of the aesthetic that he has developed since its productions in the 1960s, José Celso Martinez Correa, Oficina's director, has recently chosen to revisit his own productions from the 1990s, seeking to update his discourse for an audience that is composed mainly of adolescents and young people. Para Dar um Fim no Juízo de Deus (To Have Done with the Judgment of God) by Antonin Artaud and Euripides’ As Bacantes (The Bacchae) were thus resurrected for new audiences as if they had been conceived today. Martinez Correa works with crowds onstage, and he demands a dedication that includes rehearsals lasting more than twelve hours and an almost full-time commitment – it is almost like belonging to Ariane Mnouchkine's Théâtre du soleil without the guarantee of room and board. The casts are by necessity heterogeneous, but what is lacking in rigour is made up for in vigour. Martinez Correa offers a collective experience that evokes the happenings of the 1960s, as he brings the Greek agora and Dionysian bacchanals to the everyday sprawl on streets and screens. In 2017, José Celso is restaging O Rei da Vela (Candle King) in the United States and Brazil, a production based on the play by Oswald de Andrade that Oficina premiered in 1967.Footnote ⁹ The original set by Hélio Eischbauer will be rebuilt, and the lead will be played by Renato Borgui, who created the role in the 1967 production.

Antônio Araújo and his Teatro da Vertigem, the most important ensemble from the 1990s and 2000s, have been in hibernation since their last performance, Bom Retiro, 958 Metros (Bom Retiro, 958 Metres) in 2013.

Enrique Diaz, Newton Moreno, Cibele Forjaz, Eric Lenate, Grace Passô, Aderbal Freire-Filho, Yara de Novaes, Roberto Alvim, Pedro Granato, Rodolfo Garcia Vásquez, Rafael Gomes, Leonardo Moreira and Amir Hadad are directors and authors from various generations on the front line in this search for a theatre that, without abandoning its main traits and characteristics, can promote dialogue with their contemporaries.

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The newest feature of Brazilian theatre in the last few years is the rise of the SP Escola de Teatro – Centro de Formação de Artes do Palco (SP School of Theater – Center for the Development of Stage Arts). Its theatre programme addresses a great demand for the formation of a new generation of artists interested in collectively producing theatre, whether they choose to work in a collaborative fashion or not. Affiliated with the State of São Paulo's Secretaria de Estado da Cultura, SP Escola de Teatro was created and is directed by the Satyros company. The faculty in the programme is not limited to members of this group, though of course it reflects the company's aesthetic and ideology. The Escola offers courses in acting; directing; set, costume and lighting design; playwriting; and technical direction. The curriculum is structured into non-consecutive semester-long modules that are organized around a common theme. Students produce a theatrical piece in the second trimester of each module.

The Escola de Arte Dramática at the Universidade de São Paulo (EAD-USP) continues to be the principal actor-training conservatory in São Paulo. Its rather traditional pedagogical course offerings are unparalleled. Still, and over a very short period, the SP Escola has become a key theatre school for the city of São Paulo's alternative and radical stage and beyond: its technicians, actors and creators can be found in a range of productions, from the commercial to the experimental. SP Escola's daring pedagogical model has found partners in Sweden (Stockholm Academy of Dramatic Arts – SADA), Finland (Helsinki Academy of Fine Arts) and Mato Grosso, a state in the far west of Brazil: the first class of the Mato Grosso Escola de Teatro starts in the first semester of 2017.

As for dialogue with theatrical production in the rest of the country, it is interesting to observe how the creation of SP Escola de Teatro's first course in playwriting catalysed a demand that had been repressed – and that coincides with a moment of reflection in the groups associated with collective production, whether collaborative or not. Working or aspiring playwrights from around the country have moved to São Paulo in search of training. In the pedagogical approach of the SP Escola, the study of playwriting does not necessarily approach the typical teachings of dramatic literature; that is, ‘outdated’ notions about character, dramatic arc and so on. Rather, the school prefers to broaden its pedagogical scope to equally include forms that go from the epic to the performative, along with other possibilities. All the same, the playwrights who have graduated from its programme leave with a broad understanding of the craft and the ability to pursue many different models of creative production.

After at least two decades of production in which individual playwriting was relegated to a less respected place, a new generation of theatre-lovers, who in a counterpoint to the trend of collective creation are unashamed to pursue their own voice, are emerging. They do so without abandoning the possibility of collaborative processes, collective dramaturgy, actor dramaturgy, performative theatre and so many other directions.

This resurgence of the quest for an individual voice, which is often accompanied by a reassessment of what is essential in drama, indicates a new, more powerful phase in Brazil's theatrical trajectory. This is a moment in which individual and collective voices can unite in a fruitful dialogue, rather than suffocating one another.

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History can be read as a chronicle of an interminable crisis, a crisis of the human being in society. It is no different with Brazil. What distinguishes us, perhaps, is that we always behave as adolescents. We have been living our first real experience with formal democracy only since 1990 – the first one, lasting from 1945 to 1964, faced limits such as the banning of the Communist Party, censorship of performances and the media and so on. We experience alternating periods of great euphoria and megalomania, with times of depression. And, even as adults, we never reach a satisfactory answer to the question, who are we?

Our theatre, of course, is a reflection of this historical experience. Always in the vanguard and always looking to fill the gaps in our background, we find in the stage the perfect vehicle for transmuting our permanent identity crisis in its volatility and corporeality.