MIRADA—Ibero-American Performing Arts Festival is coming to its seventh edition. The biennial festival held by Sesc São Paulo takes place between September 5th and 15th, 2024, occupying Sesc Santos and several spaces around the city and its surroundings. The program includes 33 shows, training activities, concerts, immersive installations, and Mirada Pro, a meeting of performing arts festival programmers and directors from Brazil and abroad.
The festival features contemporary productions from Latin American countries, Spain, and Portugal, bringing a diversity of languages, topics, and bodies to the stage. The works are pervaded by relationships with nature and Indigenous and decolonial issues, sparking reflections about violence, gender, migrations, displacements, and power relations.
The honored country this time is Peru. Focusing on new and renowned creators, as well as on discussions about identity and social and political realities and crises, eleven Peruvian works are presented—eight shows and three musical and performative pieces. There are also productions from Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Spain, Mexico, Peru, Portugal, and Uruguay, all of them making their debut in Brazil, plus premieres and plays from Brazil.
Connected with the works presented during MIRADA, the Training Activities aim to foster critical thinking with a number of actions dedicated to the exchange of knowledge and reflection. In the 2024 edition, this program was conceived by the guest curators Márcio Abreu and Cristina Moura, working with the Sesc team, to offer seven programmatic sets guided by the idea of meeting and the festival’s curatorial design.
This is woven together through workshops, conversation circles, public interviews, laboratories, sessions for sharing practices, book launches, and a preview performance of a show. The activities aim to make the performing arts experience flow over to other audiences and territories in the city, expanding the opportunities of fruition and encouraging the participation of diverse social groups, always in tandem with artists, thinkers, and makers working with multiple languages.
Meanwhile, the program for the Meeting Point turns the evenings at Sesc Santos into an extensive space of artistic fruition. Peruvian performances and concerts set the agenda, conceived for an environment that celebrates diversity and is an invitation to the exchange of ideas.
Enjoy MIRADA, everyone!
In 78 years operating as a nonprofit private institution serving the public interest, Serviço Social do Comércio—Sesc reiterates its commitment with the development of programmatic actions in line with the values that guide its work. This purpose translates into the pursuit of excellence in everything it does, in the incorporation of sustainability practices in its production processes, in diligent transparency, trust, and strengthening of institutional relations, and in the improvement of innovation technologies and techniques to meet social demands. These aspects are combined with equally important elements including the careful welcoming of the public for sharing accessible experiences and the respect for social-cultural diversity on the many different fronts that shape the Sesc management.
In this context, MIRADA—Ibero-American Performing Arts Festival, now in its seventh edition, stands out for the national and international contributions of its artistic and educational programming, attuned to institutional practices. This action is beneficial to performing arts professionals from Brazil and other Ibero-American countries, offering all audiences experiences of fruition, freethinking, and democratized access to a variety of activities. Not only that—with every new edition, management and sustainability procedures are improved, and proposed actions are expanded to promote accessibility and communication with different social agents.
In this sense, we must highlight the partnership with the Santos City Government in the production of the festival and the cooperations with Brazilian and international institutions, which contribute to expand conversations and optimize resources to make this project possible. This set of efforts reaffirms Sesc’s commitment to its sponsors, represented by the business class in the commerce, goods, services, and tourism industries, and to society at large.
Abram Szajman
Chairman of the Sesc São Paulo Regional Board
Recent excavations at Zaña Valley in Peru revealed traces of a roughly 5,000-year-old religious architecture. Inside, there are signs of a structure that resembles a theater, with a backstage area and a stage to hold special ceremonies. This finding from a time before colonizers corroborates the existence of sophisticated cosmologies among Andean peoples, pointing to other definitions of the concept of scene, as space and language, in Latin America.
Understanding this sense of ancestral belonging reinvigorates the curatorial investigation around performing arts today, as it broadens the historical, anthropological, geographical, and ecological views on artistic creation, favoring the formulation of new contexts and practices of thought. This world-sense can be a path to overcome, through art, supposed hierarchies between the peoples, enabling reciprocities and new symbolic rapprochements.
MIRADA—Ibero-American Performing Arts Festival, which has been held by Sesc for the past 14 years, is now coming to its seventh edition, encouraging these confluences through its curatorship, conceived around pillars about dreams, forests, and hope, providing a way toward looking into scenarios. This way, it puts diverse historicities and realities into perspective, while also fostering exchanges and language movements between guest countries.
This year, in addition to Brazil, the countries taking part in the festival include Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Spain, Mexico, Portugal, and Uruguay, and Peru is featured as its honored country. Through this deference, the focus is on providing a significant art overview, as it is represented by different generations of creators and scenic conceptions from such a relevant country crossed by the Andean Mountain Range and where memory was consecrated thousands of years ago on a theatrical temple.
Hosted in Santos, the festival extends to the cities of Cubatão and São Vicente, with a comprehensive program of shows from Brazil and abroad, educational actions, and meetings between programmers, including other activities dedicated to audiences of different age groups. Occupying theaters, alternative rooms, streets, and public squares, these actions offer a state of the art of dramaturgical procedures and different ways of enacting and performing the human.
With this new edition of MIRADA, Sesc reiterates the relevance of social-cultural and educational actions in its nearly 80-year-old history, bringing them together with sustainability, accessibility, and national and international cooperation practices that validate that which is born as imagination and dream.
Luiz Deoclecio Massaro Galina
Sesc São Paulo Director
A year and a half before the beginning of the 7th edition of MIRADA, it was decided that Peru was going to be the honored country this time. While at first it looked like an extended amount of time, it then became clear it was a good measure to make up the assortment of Peruvian works with diversity and comprehensiveness, including theater, performance, music, and dance, and, from that, weave together the entire international and national program. The focus became fulcrum. The country of a threefold geography, with its ancient tradition of weaving coming from the Andes, the Amazon, and the Pacific coast, extended three branches that supported the curatorial research conducted to compose the new program: dream, forest, and hope.
It would take further investigation into the meandering paths that have led part of humanity to link the dream with what is unattainable, desired, yet distant, intangible, and, therefore, the threshold, the opposite of life. This is not the case for the Yanomami, an Indigenous ethnic group from the Amazon living on Brazil-Venezuela border. For this people, the difference between dreamed facts and lived facts is mainly the moment when they happen. After getting off their hammocks in the morning, they gather to share what they have dreamed at night, and that is decisive for the decisions made during their waking time.
Perhaps theater is, for the Western world, the way that eventually replaced the ancestral ritual of sharing dreams. Maybe it is a reaction to the dwindling dream, and this is where all its political power comes from, because it is decisive for what will be done after leaving the theatrical space – whether for the audience or the artists. The dream chooses the night, theater chooses the stage, and, as a perfect metaphor, it takes the audience there, to the center of the encounters between people and the unpredictable events that ensue. These interpersonal relationships, familiar, ordinary, recognizable, or absurd and strange, which present themselves as a dream in face of the audience and can be relived, talked about, and discussed by them, are hanging from this branch of the festival that we have called dream. Here there is also the scene that appreciates theater, that struggles for the right to dream, as well as the theater that voices criticism about itself. Drama, tragedy, and comedy, more consolidated forms in the West, put humanity in front of itself.
Forest, in turn, is the grain. It is in the middle of the entire program of the festival, which offers 11 days of an experimentation of a different way of living, when performing arts can define the daily script of the audience. Indigenous presences play the main roles in works advocating for nature and the forest ecosystem, in which every and all earthly beings are vitally connected to others. Florestania, a term coined by the Acre-born poet Antonio Alves, a transvaluation of “citizenship,” proposes ways of having a relationship with the other and with the planet based on the knowledge of the forest peoples. These alternatives are present—sometimes subtly—in the shows that are part of this branch. We already had, before Brazil was colonized, what we call today performance conferences and postdramatic theater, making humanity face something greater, broader than itself, renewing sustainability commitments.
With this intention, and as a consequence of MIRADA’s own maturation, this edition expands creative actions, with national and international premieres, and also early training actions and artistic residencies, which started three months before the festival and engage the audience from Santos and metropolitan area in the production of the shows. Investing in actions that are developed around the festival means investing in the continuity of research and the creative potential of the city. The meeting of programmers working in different national and international festivals – MIRADA PRO – also renews MIRADA’s ability to foster theater.
So many such meetings, amid an intense program of more than 50 actions that will take place in 17 venues in more than 80 sessions, are pervaded by the sentiment of future justice – hope. Such an arrangement helps us think about, in the sense of caring about, pressing issues for humanity, in search of solutions. To this end, the festival becomes a spiral in time, a meeting of pasts, presents, and futures that face and challenge each other. Addressing on the scene gender identities and violence, political wars, and the enduring marks of colonization is an invitation to hope instead of wait. Epic theater is only complete with the audience playing the part of the most important chorus, the one that will decide the paths of the city based on the empathy exercised in the theatrical session.
While these three branches constitute the backbone of the festival, the most interesting thing is how they are intertwined through the shared topics between Latin America and Iberian countries. The goal is the diversity of theatrical forms, bodies, identities, races, and ethnicities at MIRADA, because when these terms are combined, they offer greater transversality.
The audience is invited to collaborate in weaving a stronger network by creating and sharing their own forms of intertwining the threads available in the program.
Similarly, a proposed way of reading this publication is to exercise moving actions to their neighboring branches, always leaving room for new makeups.
May MIRADA 2024 offer an opportunity to dream, to forest, and to hope.
Alessandra de Assis Perrechil
Fabrício Floro
Tommy Della Pietra
Rani Bacil Fuzetto
Curatorship Team
Sesc Santos
Rua Conselheiro Ribas, 136 – Santos | SP | Brasil | CEP 11040 900
+55 13 3278 9800
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