Panel 1: Shakespeare in Brazilian Popular Culture

Schedule / Horaire

Thursday 24 April 2014, 11h-12h30.

Room V106B.

Leader / Organisatrice

Aimara da Cunha Resende, Centro de Estudos Shakespeareanos (Brazil)

Participants

  1. Livia Segurado Nunes, Aix-Marseille Université – LERMA (France)
    Shakespeare à la Brasileira: A comical and folkloric Richard III
  2. Aimara da Cunha Resende, Centro de Estudos Shakespeareanos (Brazil)
    Shakespeare on the Brazilian Screens

Abstracts / Résumés

1. Livia Segurado Nunes, Aix-Marseille Université – LERMA (France)
Shakespeare à la Brasileira: A comical and folkloric Richard III
Recent Brazilian productions of Shakespeare have endeavoured and managed to transpose the foreign text to their specific cultural realities, reclaiming Shakespeare to represent national and regional identities. Sua Incelença, Ricardo III, produced by Clowns de Shakespeare, is an example of this reappropriation that mixes the English matter with Brazilian colours, combining clown and circus techniques, as well as elements of street theatre with a strong regional and popular accent. Focusing on a farcical approach and making a point in blurring hierarchic notions of culture, this production is not afraid of turning the historical drama into a folkloric Brazilian universe.

2. Aimara da Cunha Resende, Centro de Estudos Shakespeareanos (Brazil)
Shakespeare on the Brazilian Screens

After a brief overview of Brazilian appropriations of Shakespeare for the screen (both TV and film), this paper will discuss two Brazilian appropriations, O Cravo e a Rosa, a 2000/2001 TV “novella” inspired in The Taming of the Shrew, and the 1972 film, O Jogo da Vida e da Morte, a “slum Hamlet”. Elements of popular Brazilian culture will be highlighted, showing how a bridge between the canonical foreign text and the contemporary Brazilian reality is created permitting the general audience unused to going to theatre to have access to the erudite cultural product.