From Radio play to audible play: echoes and tuning in theatrical pedagogy

Abstract

The virtual scenic experiences that have been developed in Brazil by groups of people with visual impairment in cyberspace, entitled by them as audionovelas (audio soap operas) or montagens (montage), abet reflection about the scenic creative processes and about the theatre in contemporaneity in symbiosis with new media, considering, thus, alternative forms of copresenciality and receiving. Brought to the school environment and articulated to improvisation games, such experiences based the artistic creation processes of three theatre workshops developed in a public school in Natal/RN in 2018 with twenty 8th grade primary school students aged between 13 and 17 years old. Some students had visual impairment, while others did not. The observation of the movement in the research took place in the transition from the axis of the presence in the theatrical scene (visibility) to the axis of audibility, incurring, therefore, what we have designated as sound play. Thus, we must admit that such incursion might instigate new forms of receveiving, from an itinerary that provokes the creative imagination through a listening process, leading to the theoretical reflection about these pedagogical practices in theatre teaching. Such approach takes into account, in turn, the approaches that recover the matrices of oral tradition allied to storytelling (ZUMTHOR, 2007; BUSATTO, 2013), with reference to the radio plays developed by Bertolt Brecht and Walter Benjamin from 1929, in the perspective of a culture of listening and re-signifying the very concept of the body that becomes voice, resized in these processes focused on the power of the oral word.