This presentation was delivered on October 21, 2022 at the Transformative Play Initiative Seminar 2022: Role-playing, Culture, and Heritage.
Description:
The Brazilian Modern Art Week, a milestone in the Brazilian artistic avant-garde (Nascimento 2015), completes its centenary in 2022. The intention is to bring reflections on larp from the concept of anthropophagy – a cultural metaphor created by Oswald de Andrade, one of the members of the Art Week from 1922. As Xavier (2017) points out, Andrade’s reflections crossed time: they influenced theater through José Celso Martinez and Augusto Boal (one of the participants in José Celso’s Teatro Oficina); painting through Hélio Oiticica; cinema through Glauber Rocha; and music through Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil, to name just a few. By also listing non-explicit influences, this list also includes Paulo Freire’s pedagogical thinking (Silva 2021). According to Silva (2020), Oswald de Andrade, when carrying out a critique of Brazilian culture, offered an anthropophagic poetics, characterized by the de-hierarchization of the hegemonic places of culture and by the critical digestion of the Other. In summary, an assimilation of values guided by otherness in artistic work. Applied to larps, the concept of anthropophagy becomes relevant, both in the ethical (the otherness inherent in this media), political (the participatory and communitarian notion that permeates this practice) and aesthetical (assimilation and resignification of different cultural references) aspects (Miklos and Iuama 2020). The ethical, political and aesthetic dimensions appear as communicational characteristics, according to the communicology of Vilém Flusser, another of those influenced by Andrade’s thought (Iuama and Silva 2021). Among those influenced by anthropophagic thinking, Augusto Boal (one of the participants in José Celso’s Teatro Oficina) also stands out. In this way, this paper seeks to reveal the aesthetics of the oppressed (Canda 2014) present in larps, putting it in dialogue with the role-play of Jacob Moreno (Oliveira and Araújo 2012).
Bio:
Tadeu Rodrigues Iuama has PhD in Communication, with a post-doctorate in Communication and Culture. Professor in undergraduate courses at the Belas Artes University and at the University of Sorocaba, where he is co-leader of the Playful Media research group. As a researcher, he is dedicated to the interface between the analog role-playing game studies (with an emphasis on larps) and the field of communication. He is also interested in the relationship with Narratives and the Imaginary studies. Author of “The art of the encounter: critical gamification, larps and ludocommunication” and “The mask’s verse: communicational processes in larps and tabletop RPGs.
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This seminar is hosted by the Transformative Play Initiative in the Games & Society Lab at the Department of Game Design, Uppsala University Campus Gotland. This seminar is made possible by financial support from the Sustainable Heritage Research Forum (SuHRF). The Transformative Play Initiative explores the use of analog role-playing games as vehicles for lasting personal and social change. Click here to see the complete program.
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Graphic Design by Liliia Chorna. Music by Elias Faltin. Video edited by Rezmo (Mohammad Mohammad Rezaie).