NOWM I WAS, NOW I AM: THE CHILD ACTOR'S POETRY OF STAGING
Keywords: children’s theater, imagination, artistic-educative processes, staging pedagogy, play
“Now I was, now I am: the child actor’s poetry of staging” is a research inserted in the line of Poetic and Acting Processes of the Postgraduate Program in Performing Arts of the Federal University of Bahia’s (UFBA) Theater School. It’s about a theoretical and practical study which aims to develop the understanding of a child as a creative and creator agent in the perspective of the Arts, in particular, the Theater. The researcher-director-educator promotes relationships and reflections between practical aspects of her path by leading the theater group “Companhia Novos Novos”, created in 2000, at Vila Velha Theater (Salvador, Bahia), and theoretical aspects which articulate and update Principles-Proposals-Meanings to making theater with and for children. In regards to the work by “Novos Novos”, there is a cutout in time which takes into consideration the creative processes of the performances done between the year that the company was created and the year 2017. The efforts seek to bring closer two pathways – of the Theater and of the now I was, establishing correlations between the notion of non-representationality of the child’s way of being and the theatrical art. The apparent contradiction is a fertile place to the development of this research, which focuses on unique aspects of being a child regarding, particularly, their spontaneity and natural openness to play and live the play, condition that gives them the power of acting (how to be on stage) and of assistance (how to be as they watch the scene, as the audience). The relationships and discussions that present themselves throughout the research seek interlacements with the poetic pedagogy proposed by the artist-researcher-teacher Sonia Rangel, with the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty and his impressions about a child’s singularity, and with the poetics of reverie creator of Gaston Bachelard, which sets itself as a password to open doors to the impossible imagined. The researcher-director-educator’s practical experience approaches itself to these scholars’ in the trace of a pathway yet little investigated in theoretical works, but rich in possibilities and propositions from various artists-educators-investigators, like Viola Spolin, Peter Slade, Renato Ferracini, Jorge Larossa, Gilberto Icle, Matteo Bonfitto, Josette Féral, among others.