O teatro possível durante a pandemia de COVID-19: as criações digitais do Grupo Galpão entre 2020 e 2022

Abstract

This research proposes an analysis of the digital creations of Grupo Galpão, one of the most important and long-standing theater groups in Brazil. Initially, it presents an overview of the use and appropriation of technologies by the Theater, and then investigates languages and tools used during the period of social isolation imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic. In this period of time in which physical meetings have become a threat to health, theater artists – as well as professionals from other areas – had to reinvent their ways of work and living to adapt to the internet. Throughout this time, Grupo Galpão created nine projects, being one of the most digitally active Brazilian theatre groups. In 2022, the troupe completed 40 years of uninterrupted work and, before the pandemic, they had not experimented with ways to replace interaction between actors, technicians and spectators with digital technologies in its shows. Those years was of abrupt and forced change of territory: from the physical to the virtual, from the convivial to the techno-vivial, from space to cyberspace. From this point of view, the use of audiovisual and internet languages is analyzed, as well as the procedures and strategies adopted in the experiments carried out and also the results of this change are investigated and how they reverberated in subsequent creations and in the Group's digital presence to date.