Staging Memory

Proponencies and Figurations of the Collective in Milagre Brasileiro

Abstract

This article analyzes the play Milagre Brasileiro (“Brazilian Miracle”), by Márcio Marciano, through its stagings by the Coletivo Alfenim and by the Quartas Dramáticas project, aiming to reflect on the challenges of representing the collective in contemporary dramaturgy. Structured through narrative fragmentation, voice collage, and Brechtian techniques, the play destabilizes the centrality of the subject and offers a powerful critique of the official narrative of the Brazilian military dictatorship. The inclusion of the figure of Antigone, placed in a metatheatrical space transformed into an arena of memory, broadens the political dimension of production by tensioning the boundaries between the intimate and the public. In dialogue with Sarrazac’s notion of “rhapsodic drama” and Nelson Rodrigues’s “unpleasant theatre,” the staging reaffirms theatre as a space of ethical, political, and aesthetic proposition. Both versions are available on YouTube: Alfenim’s is a recording of a live performance, while the Quartas Dramáticas version was originally conceived as a virtual reading, in 2022, in response to the restrictions imposed by the pandemic context. The article seeks to demonstrate that, in times of denialism and historical erasure, contemporary dramaturgy – with Milagre Brasileiro as a case study – endures as an aesthetic gesture of denunciation and collective reimagination.