Mineral Ibsen
In 2024, Teatro da Fumaça was awarded an Ibsen Scope Grant for the project Mineral Ibsen.
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In 2024, Teatro da Fumaça was awarded an Ibsen Scope Grant for the project Mineral Ibsen.
In «Mineral Ibsen», the Brazilian theater group Teatro da Fumaça revisits one of Henrik Ibsen’s best-known plays, “An Enemy of the People”, addressing, through it, issues with a strong impact on contemporary times – such as disinformation, denialism and the impact of human action on nature. Bringing those discussions to the present days of the Global South, the process will explore artistic and pedagogical methods developed by the Brazilian director and playwright Augusto Boal (1931-2009), included in the scope of the so-called “Teatro do Oprimido” (Theater of the Oppressed), with a strong social and political character. Through Boal’s methods, «Mineral Ibsen» develop, in direct contact with communities threatened by mining activity in the state of Minas Gerais, in Brazil, parallels between their context and the questions presented by Ibsen.
Mining, in addition to being an extremely environmentally damaging activity, radically transforming entire ecosystems, also results in the production of toxic waste, usually stored in dams. In 2015, the history of Minas Gerais was marked by the collapse of one of these dams. In November of that year, the small Bento Rodrigues – a district of one of the oldest cities in the state of Minas Gerais, Mariana -, was hit by 62 million cubic meters of toxic waste, which devastated the village, caused at least 19 direct deaths and contaminated the entire biome, reaching the Rio Doce river hydrographic basin and even the Atlantic ocean. The environmental disaster, considered by many as a negligence crime on the part of the mining companies Samarco (Brazil) and Anglo Gold (UK), caused a strong social reaction at the time. However, less than four years later, a new rupture a few kilometers away surpassed the severity of Mariana’s tragedy. In January 2019, a tailings dam under the responsibility of Vale S.A. dumped tons of toxic waste into the Feijão River, in the basin of one of the most important hydrographic sources in the metropolitan region of Belo Horizonte (Minas Gerais’ capital) and claimed at least 267 lives in the city of Brumadinho.
Brazilian territory has almost 200 industrial waste dams from mining activities with similar characteristics to those that collapsed in Bento Rodrigues and Brumadinho. Minas Gerais, especially, is marked by the proximity of mineral exploration centers to urban centers. What happened in 2015 and 2019 highlighted the risk which all these urban centers are subject, as well as the negligence of large mining companies. The exposure to this eminent risk in contrast to the economic dependence on mining activity places entire communities facing a conflict that is very much in line with the one described by Ibsen in his “An Enemy of the People”: sacrificing the economy for the sake of lives or risking our lives due to the economy?
Therefore, we argue that Ibsen’s notorious work seems destined to meet the reality of the communities of Minas Gerais. Much of what the Norwegian playwright pointed out in the 19th century today materializes, concretely, on the other side of the world, from here, in where this project is being written. «Mineral Ibsen» a project that can update the work of this universal artist called Henrik Ibsen, revealing its relevance and, at the same time, contributing to entire populations recognizing their own conflicts and debating their own destinies.
If Augusto Boal demolished the spectators’ passivity, giving them a voice, it seems important that Ibsen gets to know Minas Gerais through the echo of his words and from the voice of Brazilians. In the same way, the latent problems faced by communities in Brazil can, perhaps, find in Ibsen some way, some answer or, at least, some mirror.
Teatro da Fumaça
Teatro da Fumaça is a theater group created from the reunion of five artists who live in Belo Horizonte, state of Minas Gerais, Brazil: Domenica Morvillo, Ítallo Vieira, Jean Gorziza, João Santos and Júlia Oliveira. With different creative experiences and all of them students at the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG), they teamed up to investigate the flow of theater with other languages, jumping over the fences of the university to research contemporary ways of creating broad communication and explore themes of common interest of them all, related to diversity, youth and dissident identities.
With its main characteristic being associating artistic creations and research in the performing arts, Teatro da Fumaça has been developing projects for the stage and for digital platforms. In 2023, they premiered the audiovisual experiment «Os Benefícios do Tabaco», a conference play that addresses the theme of disinformation based on the tobacco industry and the text «On the Evils of Tobacco», by Russian playwright Anton Chekhov.
In December 2023, the group presented a dramatic reading of the text, “O Mundo Está Em Chamas, o Teatro Também Tem De Estar” by playwright Jean Gorziza, with artistic and creative contributions from fellow playwright João Santos. The reading was done by the actors Domenica Morvillo, Ítallo Vieira and João Santos, directed by Jean Gorziza and Júlia Oliveira. The premiere took place in December 2023, at Galpão Cine Horto.
Furthermore, at the beginning of 2024 two Fumaça’s projects were approved by public funding mechanisms to finance the creation of “Canção de Engate”, a play by Ítallo Vieira. Also, in 2024, the group will be developing experiences of Teatro Fórum on communities and territories directly threatened by the activities of mining companies in the state of Minas Gerais, in Brazil, as part of the process of «Mineral Ibsen.
