Leda Maria Martins is the leading philosopher of performance and theatricality in Brazil. In the 80’s her hugely influential work theorised a specifically Brazilian practice of Black theatre—exploring the specificities of its aesthetic, theoretical, and poetic intersections—as well as its connection with African cultures, rituals, and philosophies. This thinking has yet to be translated into English, so this is a rare opportunity to engage with an important current in anti-colonial theatre and performance globally.

This conversation, hosted in collaboration with Take Me Somewhere, is a chance to engage with the thinking and practice of one of the major contributors to South American Black Theatre, and the understanding of theatricality in general.

Overview

Before Leda’s writing, theatre in South America was entirely understood through a colonial, Western set of references. Leda revolutionised this, by reframing Afro-Brazilian and Black theatricality in general through multiple other theoretical frameworks, including African ones, and Afro-Brazilian thinking. Broadening beyond Western hegemony, she was able to map, analyse, and understand more of the traits, traces, and marks that signalled the singularities, aesthetics, and politics of Black scenes and theatricalities. This was done not to essentialise or reduce a theatrical production to a single substance (phenotype or colour); but rather as an affirmation of specificities and differences. We can see here why her friend Denise Ferreira da Silva—who theorised the concept of difference without separability—loves Leda’s work so much.

Context

“The analysis of expressions in Black Theatre leads me to emphasize that its distinction and singularity are not necessarily tied to the color, phenotype, or ethnicity of the playwright, actor, director, or the subject being portrayed, but are anchored in that color and phenotype, in the experience, memory, and place of that subject, these elements being erected as signs that project and represent them. In this reflection, the expression Black Theatre does not delimit or demarcate exclusionary discursive boundaries or monolithic, prescriptive concepts. What I seek is to discern some signifying traits and traces that allow me to grasp the core of difference, thus avoiding the deception of generalizing and universalist conceptions, which often discriminate without, however, understanding and critically pointing out the traits of diversity.

…because it knows itself to be fragmentary, desiring, utopian; it does not become prescriptive, because it sees itself as a possible path and not as a recipe for truth; it depicts the singular, which belongs to the object and the enunciation, because it contemplates plurality; it accentuates the traits of difference and the value of otherness, without eliding similarity, our common humanity.”

-Leda Maria Martins – Black Theatre

Organised in collaboration with Scotland’s radical performance organisation Take Me Somewhere.