Brazil's constitutional crisis that culminated in the impeachment of President Dilma Rousseff in 2016 triggered a series of popular protests throughout the country. Starting with a brief analysis of the current political situation, this text identifies the characteristics, tools and forms of these political protests, drawing connections between them and debates in the arts.

Brazil is going through a political and economic crisis of major proportions – an unprecedented recession and the rise of an illegitimate government following the impeachment of the elected president. Theatre responds to this crisis with a timely production of reflection and, eventually, militancy. It also responds to another crisis: that of the pertinence of language and of modes of theatrical production in the context of a society in which relationships take place in a virtual environment, to the detriment of real social and political action. The objective of this text is to identify the general lines of this kind of production.

One has a feeling of extraordinary pleasure when attending a performance confirming the maturity of Brazil's theatre: Conselho de Classe (Faculty Meeting), by Jô Bilac, performed at the Mezanino of Espaço SESC as part of the commemoration of the twenty-fifth anniversary of Companhia dos Atores, is an articulate, relevant play, agreeably modest in its form and even more interesting for being pleasant, without exaggeration or artifice. The text presents a meeting attended by five out of eleven members of a faculty council, which must debate all aspects of public high-school life in the unexpected presence of a new principal.

Since 2002, when he created the monologue Uma flor de dama (A Lady's Flower) based on a short story by Caio Fernando Abreu, Silvero (Pereira) has developed the (character) Gisele, a travesti, resulting from his investigation within the theatre collective As Travestidas, in the state of Ceará. Like a patchwork quilt of real and remembered situations that he experienced during his research in the south of Brazil in 2012, BR-Trans changes Silvero into a body marked by Gisele and by many other ‘girls’ encountered on the journey.

The first words of Caranguejo Overdrive, spoken by ‘a crab who one day had been a man named Cosme’, encapsulate the fundamental principles guiding the work's creation. Based on an unorthodox ingesting of Josué de Castro – the geographer who proved that hunger is not the fruit of any natural disaster, but rather of an unjust social organization – Glauber Rocha, the filmmaker who made hunger not his theme, but the very engine of his aesthetic – and Chico Science, the musician who revived the Baudelairean image of the ‘rag-picker poet’, Oswaldian anthropophagy, and tropicalism – the contemporary figure of the ‘man-crab’ emerges.

The play Cidade Correria (City Rat Race) from Rio de Janeiro is my point of departure for a study of tragedy in contemporary theatre from the perspective of decolonization. A colonial mentality blanketed the New World with a white, male, heterosexual rationality whose universalizing pretensions would usher the native peoples ‘who had no writing or history’ into ‘civilization’. Dismantling this structure today requires connecting heterogeneities and dissonances. In the theatre, narratives demolish dramatic structure, proposing unstable compositions where figures pass by charting a cartography for today. Accordingly, Cidade Correria brings those from the periphery and the favelas, who have historically been excluded from mainstream narratives, into the urban fabric.

Using Chico Buarque's novel Leite Derramado (Spilt Milk), the director Roberto Alvim perfects his formal system as grand theatre. Nothing is gained by trying to define the place that the protagonist Lalinho occupies in his family, or the years covered in his story over the course of 195 pages in Chico Buarque's novel. In the stage version written and directed by Alvim, generations and eras are embodied by the voice of the actor Juliana Galdino, transfigured in the centenarian Eulálio D'Assumpção. Grandparents, parents and children, who are indistinguishable from the delirium of his hospital bed, populate the schizophrenic dialogue.

The actress whose European beauty recalls Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring expresses through her facial expression the bloody side of Brazil's historic persecution of its indigenous peoples. The sculpted features of Adassa Martins in the one-person play Se eu fosse Iracema (If I Were Iracema) transfigure the condition of the other, of the first inhabitants.

PROJETO bRASIL (PROJECT bRAZIL) is the new theatre performance by Companhia Brasileira de Teatro. It should be seen mainly for its political agenda and its aesthetic merit, yet the manner in which the production presents the arc of its debate is even more relevant.

This issue was published online with the section “DOSSIER: SNAPSHOT: BRAZIL” missing from the issue and contents pages. The dossier has subsequently been published with the issue and the contents page and covers corrected. The publisher apologises for this error.