Urdimento: Revista de Estudos em Artes Cênicas
Journal of the Performing Arts linked to the Graduate Program in Theater, at the Arts, Design and Fashion Center of the Santa Catarina State University. ISSN: 2525-5304 Frequency: continuous Year of criation: 1997
Universidade do Estado de Santa Catarina (UDESC)
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Information abbaut the theatrical production staged in 2024 bye students from the Centro de Artes (CEART) at the Universidade do Estado de Santa Catarina (UDESC), directed by Paulo Balardim.
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Editorial - Thematic Dossier: Reenactment studies in the performing arts
Information about the content of the Thematic Dossier: Reenactment studies in the performing arts.
Research and Experience in an Artist-in-Residence Program: The ÁHQIS Acting Laboratory in Fortaleza
This material documents the artistic residency conducted by the ÁHQIS Acting Laboratory at the Carlos Câmara Theatre (Fortaleza) as an experience that integrates practice-based research, pedagogical processes, and University Extension. The text, together with the accompanying photographic dossier, records performances, staged readings, workshops, and lectures, offering a reflection on research as the guiding principle of an educational experience developed within the framework of an academic research group.
Becoming Rag: Undisciplined Materialisms and Textile Avatars
The potential of new materialisms and queer theory are mirrored in a performative research methodology applied to the educational field. This inquiry articulates its results around the textile object/avatar YoYoYo, operating through a triple mimesis (Yo Yolanda Yocasta). Through an adult play methodology structured into seven thresholds, the work proposes a rupture with disciplinary rationality in academia. The praxis of becoming-rag enables a corporeal expansion that reorients the pedagogical environment. The use of textile avatars facilitates the emergence of an undisciplined materialism, where the researcher's body becomes an aesthetic and political event in teacher training.
Recreating the Unrepeatable:The Ethics of Recurrence in Performance Art
This article addresses reenactment as a bodily critique of the archive, a rupture of linear temporality, and a catalysing act of return that values ​​both the unrepeatable and the enduring. It is also viewed as a tool for revisiting unresolved issues in performance practice and as an operation that reactivates political tensions, embodied memories, and historical resonances. Insights from Peggy Phelan, Rebecca Schneider, Diana Taylor, and Leda Martins frame reenactment as a process of transforming meaning through variations in bodies, spaces, and contexts, thereby generating new forms of knowledge production.
Dossiê Temático: Estudos do reenactment nas artes da cena
The creation of the play With Love, From Inside by The Dropped Keys Theatre Company: an interview with Ashley Lucas
In this interview, Ashley Lucas, Professor at the University of Michigan and a member of the Prison Creative Arts Project (PCAP) and The Dropped Keys Theatre Company, shares aspects surrounding the creation, performances, and touring of the play With Love, From Inside (recently translated into Portuguese as Daqui de dentro, com amor.
Information about the content of the Urdimento - Journal os Studies in Performing Arts, v.2, n.58, Augusto 2026.
In the expediente we present the Urdimento Editorial Team, that is, the body of editors, associate editors, thematic dossier editors, editorial board and the body the reviewers working in the issue of Urdimento. We also introduced the editorial support team.
With Love, From Inside is an original play created by the Dropped Keys Theatre Company, composed of theater students from the University of Michigan (U-M) and writers and performers who are survivors of incarceration or currently incarcerated. The production originated from the students' regular visits to prisons to facilitate theatrical workshops. The play's program states that it is a response to the sadness felt by the students upon realizing that many people in the outside world will never meet the extraordinary individuals living behind walls. Thus, the life stories, love, pain, humor, and survival of these individuals are presented. The audience is then presented with a dramaturgy-as-a-letter, a call to write about other worlds where these encounters may take place through the materialized word.
Mulheres recontam Brasília: memórias candangas, teatro documentário e fabulação crítica
The research Memories of Candanga Women: between documentary Theater and critical fabulation focused on conducting theatrical experiments based on the stories of candanga women, found in the Federal District Public Archive (ArPDF) interviews collection, utilizing documentary theater and critical fabulation. These experiments aimed to expand the repertoire of memories regarding the diverse forms of female presence in the federal capital's history – presences that had been silenced or, at best, recalled primarily through the lens of suffering and struggle. Thus, the initiative sought to foster a sense of belonging among candanga women through documentary theater and critical fabulation.
In the trace of the souffle: the Prompter as a conceptual operator within the temporalities of reenactment
The idea of Prompter, drawn from the traditional figure who whispers the text, was approached as a conceptual operator that reorganizes temporalities and co‑agency, expanding reenactment as a procedure that operates in the friction between archive and gesture. The study relied punctually on Schneider’s notions of return and persistence, Carlson’s concept of theatrical memory, and Derrida’s notion of the trace to analyze the performances Apokalypse, Ficções, Sopro, and the practices of the Wooster Group and Gob Squad. Regimes of operation of the Prompt, scenic bodies, and modes of mediation were identified. The process revealed an interstitial presence shaped by the gap between archive and action.
Recreating the unrepeatable: the ethics of recurrence in performance art
History and theater, archive and performance: tentacular temporality in Um pássaro não é uma pedra [A Bird Is Not a Stone]
For this article, an analysis was carried out of the play A Bird Is Not a Stone, a solo performance by Lucas Oradovschi, which premiered in Rio de Janeiro in 2024. Drawing on formal choices in staging and dramaturgy, the analysis examined the play as a means of bringing the history of theatre to the stage as a performative practice of inquiry and cross-temporal “contracena”. The research was informed by reenactment studies, considering the dynamics of mutual activation between archive and performance, and explored the idea of ‘tentacular temporality’ for this scene as a means of engagement, knowledge production and experience of a historical moment of theatre in Palestine.
What persists: embodying, performing, historiographing, changing
This essay examined the play História (2026), by companhia brasileira de teatro, bringing the notions of repetition in reenactment and of acting historiography closer to the ethics of psychoanalysis, in order to discuss how the body, language, and trauma operate in the writing of personal, social, and theatrical history. Drawing on Jacques Lacan, Jacques-Alain Miller, Rebecca Schneider, and Daniele Ávila Small, it argued that the embodiment of memory exceeded the production of meaning and acted upon the traces that persist in the performing body, proposing an embodied historiography capable of challenging official narratives through operations of fragmentation, repetition, performative citation, and the opening of meaning.
Traces of the Archive: Imagination as a Creative Procedure and Method of Historical Research
This article analyzes the Illustrated Lecture on a Reimagination of the Ballet Tango (1955), which, through practice-as-research and movement historiography methodologies, examines the work of choreographer Roberto Giachero. The text explores the possibilities of reenactment in the Argentine context as a critical tool for accessing history and piecing together traces of the past. It argues that historical reimagination is a tactic from the Global South for inhabiting the gaps in fragmentary archives and rendering dance present. It concludes that the body is a mediator of knowledge that, through embodied imagination, links the remnants of the archive to the here and now.
Never for the First Time: Ruth St. Denis and the dance of indian immigrants
Drawing on the debates on reenactment proposed by André Lepecki and Rebecca Schneider, the article proposed that works presented as original be understood as reenactments, in order to reveal the invisible co-authorships that inhabit them. The study focused on Ruth St. Denis’s 1906 performance Radha, considered one of the pioneering works of American modern dance. As demonstrated by Priya Srinivasan’s research, Radha was developed through the appropriation of the precarious labor of Indian artists circulating within a global cultural market.
Chuva de Direitos: a tribute to Márcia X.
This paper presents an account of the performance “Chuva de Direitos” (“Rain of rights”) which I performed twice in public spaces in Rio de Janeiro in 2018. The work is a reenactment of the performance “Chuva de Dinheiro” ("Rain of Money"), created and performed by Márcia X. in co-authorship with Ana Cavalcanti in 1983 and 1985. As an introduction, I briefly contextualize the artists' original work, as well as the notion of reenactment underlying the tribute I carried out more than three decades later.
A "symbolic sketch" - Doing again as a historiographic methodology for Argentine dance
This article proposed an analysis of an artistic research workshop, conducted as part of the project Historiografías en movimiento (PICTO-UNA-00007). It reflected on the category of reenactment through work with the ballet Orpheus and Eurydice (1960), by Argentine choreographer Roberto Giachero. A corporeal approach was taken to a series of materials understood as the traces of an incomplete archive. This article proposed the category of "doing again" to account for the historiographic methodology explored in the workshop, through which historical linearity was questioned and a figure omitted from the history of Argentine dance was made visible.
Recreating the past. Reenactment, archives, and tradition in Argentine folk dances
Historically, folk dances worked critically with their past; however, under the notion of reconstruction, they were analyzed as detached from this idea. This article sought to analyze Argentine folk dances through reenactment. Based on three case studies, it argued that the folkloric archive has always been incomplete, selective, and political. Thus, each choreography assumed a distinct expression in which each body reactivated fragmented memories, generating new temporalities. Folklore consequently appeared as a living archive contested between tradition and innovation.
Dance Library: performance telling and reenactment as acts of fiction
This article was dedicated to exploring an articulation between performance telling and reenactment (Machado, 2014), in connection with the choreographic installation Dance Library (Neto Machado, Jorge Alencar, Dimenti), as practices composed of affects, narratives, scenes, and bodily inscriptions elaborated through the intensity of encounters with diverse art works and their resonances. To this end, notions such as artist historiography (Small, 2019), oralitura (Martins, 2020; 2021), and fiction (Le Guin, 2021) are interwoven with a series of other national and international artistic creations.
Posthumous letter to Tadashi Endo: between the breath and the grave – pedagogies of impermanence
This essay revisits the teachings of Tadashi Endo and the practices of Butoh-Ma, proposing the notion of pedagogies of impermanence. It articulates critical reflection with a testimonial character, bringing dance and transmission closer to an ethics of sustaining the fall. In dialogue with Aby Warburg (2020) and Didi-Huberman (2018, 2019, 2020, 2021), it understands dance as an unarchiving operation, capable of raising new survivals through bodily memory, presence, and the sensitive sharing of knowledge. Rather than preserving stable forms, pedagogies of impermanence allow presences, gestures and images to continue operating beyond death and disappearance.
From the bathtub to water tank: the political relationship of reenactment in Susanne Linke and Giselda Fernandes
The article presents an analysis of performances in relation to the practices of reenactment and cultural translation in dance, drawing on the dialogue between the solo Im Bade Wannen (1980), by German choreographer Susanne Linke, and the works Castelo D’água (2002) and Ô Água! (2002), by the Brazilian company Os Dois Cia de Dança. It investigated how the impossibility of a literal restaging triggered an aesthetic and theoretical act of disobedience. The discussion focused on how the material displacement of the work into the urban space consolidated the concept of the object-partner as a fundamental methodological operator. The study concluded that the reconfigurations examined reject the colonial copy, affirming reenactment as a living, anachronistic archive that renegotiates dance historiography through the political urgencies of the present.
Modern Dance Revisited: Reenactment as a Methodological Approach to the History of Chilean Dance
This article addresses the gaps in historical narratives of dance in Chile, which tend to omit modern dance expressions prior to 1940. Based on the notion of revisiting this history, it proposes a methodological approach based on photographic analysis and reenactment practices from a post-custodial archive perspective. Through the study of a 1935 photograph of Elsa Martin by Ignacio Hochhäusler and the work in Proyecto Desenfoque, it shows how the body in motion acts as a living archive (Practice as Research). This practice allows challenging documentary absences, decentering the hegemonic narrative, and making visible the movements that preceded the institutionalization of dance in Chile.
Sound Labyrinth: a Brazilian actress’s experience in a workshop with Meredith Monk and Ellen Fisher
This article reports the experience of actress and PPGAC/UDESC master’s student Kauana Machado in the workshop “Voice as Practice”, led by Meredith Monk and Ellen Fisher. The four-day artistic residency took place in December 2025 in Garrison, New York (USA). The experience combined meditation, singing, dance, and collective creation dynamics. Written by Machado and Miranda, the text connects the exercise routine to concepts such as “extended vocal technique” and “shadow play,” asking how bodily and vocal experiences shape feelings of community belonging and cultural identity.
Information about the theatrical production staged in 2025 by students from the Center for the arts at the State University of SC (UDESC). Directed by Tefa Polidoro and Elaine Nascimento.
Information on the content of the Thematic Dossie: Artes vivas e o Antropoceno/Capitaloceno II
Information about the content of the Urdimento, v.1, n. 57, abr. 2026.
In the Expediente we present the Urdimento Editorial, that is, the body of editors, associate editors, thematic dossier editors, editorial board and the body the reviewers working in the issue of Urdimento. We also introduce the editorial support team.
The montage as research: tragedy, Bumba-meu-boi and formativity in Atenas: Mutucas, boi e Body
The article examines the stage production of Atenas: Mutucas, boi e Body (2025), approaching theatrical performance as a research practice in which dramaturgical thinking emerged through the encounter between the text, the director, and the performers, treating the stage as a space for conceptual inquiry. The methodology was based on the integral reading and spatialization of the text, in dialogue with Luigi Pareyson’s concept of formativity. The performance presented the play's premise while exploring the relationship between contemporary tragedy and Bumba-meu-boi, highlighting the Chorus of Mutucas and the tensions among promise, festivity, territory and violence. By bringing together academic research, artistic pedagogy and scenic creation, the reflection affirms theater as a form of critical reading of the tragic in contemporaneity.
Identity constructions in theatrical improvisation: an analysis of O Machucado de Magnólia
In this paper, we analyze the theatrical performance O Machucado de Magnólia, published on the Barbixas YouTube channel, highlighting how the actors construct the male and female identities of their characters through the dynamics of improvisational theater. We rely particularly on the foundations of improv theater, based on Moscheto and Achatkin; on the tension between mental and perceptual imagery promoted by this form of theater, in dialogue with Bergson, Mitchell, Contrera & Hattori; on the relationship between fiction and non-fiction as discussed by Aranha and Pesavento; and on the notion of Performative Acts by Butler, supported by Louro and Saffioti.