Scene, Memory, and Retelling the Irreparable

Critical Regards

Aesthetic-Political Reflections

Scene, Memory, and Retelling the Irreparable

WITH Renata Tavares and Janaína Leite

MODERATED BY Naloana Lima

SYNOPSIS

Renata Tavares and Janaína Leite come together to reflect on theater’s capacity to retell stories not as illustrations of the past, but as reorganizations of memory in the present. The discussion examines how performance constructs versions, activates intimate and collective archives, and transforms remembrance into shared experience. At the heart of the conversation lies a difficult question: how can violence be represented without producing further violence or turning pain into consumption? The dialogue addresses choices of language and address: what the stage exposes, what it protects, what it returns to the audience as a responsibility of listening, and where the ethical limits of retelling begin.

BACKGROUND

Renata Tavares is a stage director and multidisciplinary artist awarded the Shell and APTR prizes for Best Direction. With 26 years of experience, she trained at UNIRIO and ETET Martins Penna. A Black woman from Bangu, her multidisciplinary poetics merge acting, musical direction, and dramaturgy in works such as Nem Todo Filho Vinga and Das Dores – Opereta Favelada. A reference in arts education and cast preparation, she teaches at Entre Lugares Maré, reaffirming the stage as a space of resistance and formation.

Janaína Leite is an actress, director, playwright, and postdoctoral researcher at ECA/USP. In works such as Stabat Mater, Camming: 101 Nights, and Story of the Eye, she investigates the relationship between theater, pornography, and hybrid languages from the perspective of the “ob-scene.” She has developed projects exploring digital performance and virtual reality, including Deeper and The Material and Immaterial Body in Its Borderlines, presented in Brazil, Chile, and Portugal. She works internationally and is currently developing The Black Box or How to Hide the Turtle.

Naloana Lima is a theater and film actress, singer, composer, theater director, and arts educator. She holds a master’s degree in Humanities, Rights, and Other Legitimacies from USP. Cofounder of Grupo Clariô de Teatro and the musical group Clarianas, she has worked for over 20 years in São Paulo’s periphery, articulating theater, music, and education through decolonial and Afro-Amerindian perspectives, with award-winning work in theater, music, and audiovisual both in Brazil and abroad.