A TIME HEARING

IN 2022, AFTER A LONG PERIOD in which the onsite arts needed to be radically displaced and reconsidered, MITbr seeks to activate the encounter. Face to face. A movement of hope and persistence inspiring desires and dreams despite the cunning political scenario.

With a programme formed of works, pedagogical activities and mediation, the Festival engages in intense issues that resonate and vibrate, but also shatter and consume themselves, prompting spaces for sharing concept and creation in dance, theatre and performance environments.

The process of performing a curatorship in arts concerns a way of organizing certain choices, based on some motivations, for the creation of a context. It is an ethical and compositional practice that has nothing to do with the identification of the “best works” or “preferred works”, but with a time hearing that rubs and strains possibilities. As for MITbr, the call is for works involved in the scenic investigation and in the viewpoints radicality, mobilized by questions attentive to our time, articulating a scene in an expanded field.

In a historical set that makes the country's cultural scene vulnerable, more than 330 artistic proposals received through a public call presented several perspectives, materiality and configurations – some constituted by the dramaturgical weaving which emerged during social isolation due to the pandemic.

In this unusual and more compact edition, the seven works which are part of MITbr programme go beyond the powers of the works themselves, since each participant artist and collective is also a community, embodying a communal singularity. Each person is the crossing of a network of people, places, events, groups, cultures, communities, ancestries, ecologies. To understand different cosmogonies and imaginary, it was necessary to sharpen decolonial, feminist, anti-racist, anticapacitist and anti-lgbtphobic sensibilities – among other poetic and political crossings – to show a Brazil in complexity, which can be accessed beyond its already established geopolitical power bases.

MITbr 2022 programme composes with memories, bodies, struggles, meanings and affirmations valuing a dialogical and autonomous process, encouraging debates 10

on artistic practices and discourses that collaborate to the invention of different territories of social and aesthetic experience, boosting other existences, unraveling stories, embracing dissonances and contradictions.

As a platform for the internationalization of Brazilian works and artists, the experience at MITbr deals with mediation challenges that are not restricted to the dimensions of language, but, above all, to the exercise of mediation of an intensely plural culture, at a time of massive political crises. Turbulence and strangeness practices are constitutive of this process so that it is possible to blur certainties and hegemonic narratives.

We cannot forget: we are inserted in a political moment in Brazil ruled by a systematic project of annihilation of life in which countless rights are collapsed. We, agents of art and culture, have been the targets of a persecution agenda and frontal violence in which our work is cowardly wiped out.

Brazil agonizes and, therefore, enabling routes of resistance and re-existence such as MITsp is a way to create a ground of solidarity, empathy and love.

JANE SCHONINGER AND JORGE ALENCAR