De-Essentializing Gender Through Teatro Essencial: Denise Stoklos's Polymorphous Mimetics

"O que me encanta no Teatro e essa possibilidade de escolher [...]. Odeio a maior parte das regras de nossa organizacao social. Considero antivida, com cheiro de mofo, todos os canones comportamentais, o gosto da estetica burguesa, a despersonalizacao de colonizado. A morna attitude de nossa nacao mediocriza nossa experiencia vital. [...] Nao dispenso a chance de manifestar-me na expansao do meu feminino, que e peculiar, que e unico" (Denise Stoklos, "Manifesto do teatro essencial") (1) Down with middle class apathy! Freedom means more than comfort! Femininity must not be a cage! The message of Denise Stoklos's "Manifesto do teatro essencial" seems to almost shout at the reader. At first glance, or better, at first hypnotic abduction, Stoklos strikes orle as a blend of a bleached-hair Guevara and a neo-hippie dressed in the blackness of 80's minimalism. Yet, the more one explores the work of Brazil's most internationally recognized solo female theater artist, the more one is intrigued by its complexities, political commitment, rigor and iconoclasm. Due to her successful excursions into the New York performance scene, she has--not unproblematically--been considered "the first solo performance artist of Latin America" (see Taylor 15). Still, Stoklos does not align herself under the umbrella of performance art. A self-proclaimed utopian, she calls herself the founder, producer, director, choreographer and actor of her Essential Theater. In her thirty-five-year career she has performed in thirty-one countries, in seven languages, and has won numerous national and international awards. (2) However, her recognition within Brazil is relatively limited and there is almost nothing published on her work, except for her own books, newspaper articles and a brief section in Lucia Romano's O teatro do corpo manifesto: teatro fisico (144-53). There are also a few master's theses (Paiva, Moura, Silva) that explore her unique style of performance, but none of them have been published. Inspite of winning some national awards, the momentary official recognition of her work in the late 80s, since it followed its success in New York seems to have been largely fueled by its international acclaim. Otherwise, why wouldn't her creation of a new style of performance have had a greater impact on the development of new languages for the Brazilian stage? Why, unlike male counterparts such as Gerald Thomas and Antunes Filho (whose works also generated signature styles and gained international recognition in the 1980's), hasn't her work been included within national narratives of theater history? Is this simply due to a lack of critical attention towards the solo performance genre within Brazil? While in the U.S. the boundaries between "theater" and "performance" have been productively blurred in the last two decades, in Brazil, performance art is often understood solely within its visual arts' genealogy. On the one hand, Stoklos's self-positioning as a theater artist might be moved by the desire for inclusion in accounts of theatrical experimentation. On the other hand, it is also important to consider her self-definition as more than a political gesture, for it indicates a strong theatrical formation from which she deliberately departed to create her own brand of theater. In this sense, it is interesting to note that scholars in the U.S. do consider her work as representative of theater produced after the "liberalization" of the military dictatorship. Severino Albuquerque, in an article for Latin American Theatre Review, places Stoklos alongside Gerald Thomas and Antunes Filho as an important voice in the relative revitalization that took place in the Brazilian theater of the 1980's (29-33). The Encyclopedia of Latin American Literature edited by Verity Smith also lists her as well as the above mentioned male theater artists as exponents of the period (787). While this comparative glance suggests that the factor of genre classification may play a role