Publicação
From home to stage: creative aging through the Teatro Umano method
| Resumo: | This contribution examines practices of creative aging in contemporary theater through the community-based creation method developed by Teatro Umano under the artistic direction of Rita Wengorovius. The study brings together community theater, documentary/autobiographical theater, and body studies with interdisciplinary contributions from cultural gerontology and the neuroscience of creativity, proposing theater as a device of presence, embodied cognition, and the production of social bonds. Based on an action-research approach and qualitative analysis of processes (rehearsals, exercises, biographical materials, emerging dramaturgies, and testimonials), the text discusses how projects such as From Home to the Stage – Creative Aging and Theater by the Phone reconfigure social narratives of old age, shifting older adults from the position of “objects of care” to that of authors/performers and cultural producers. It argues that the aging body, understood as a living and sensitive archive, produces dramaturgy and embodied knowledge, activating a poetics of time that is simultaneously aesthetic, ethical, and political. |
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| Autores principais: | Wengorovius, Rita |
| Assunto: | Creative Ageing Community Theatre Documentary Theatre Poetic Body Performance Neuroscience and the Arts |
| Ano: | 2026 |
| País: | Portugal |
| Tipo de documento: | artigo |
| Tipo de acesso: | unknown |
| Instituição associada: | Universidade Católica Portuguesa |
| Idioma: | inglês |
| Origem: | Diffractions |
| Resumo: | This contribution examines practices of creative aging in contemporary theater through the community-based creation method developed by Teatro Umano under the artistic direction of Rita Wengorovius. The study brings together community theater, documentary/autobiographical theater, and body studies with interdisciplinary contributions from cultural gerontology and the neuroscience of creativity, proposing theater as a device of presence, embodied cognition, and the production of social bonds. Based on an action-research approach and qualitative analysis of processes (rehearsals, exercises, biographical materials, emerging dramaturgies, and testimonials), the text discusses how projects such as From Home to the Stage – Creative Aging and Theater by the Phone reconfigure social narratives of old age, shifting older adults from the position of “objects of care” to that of authors/performers and cultural producers. It argues that the aging body, understood as a living and sensitive archive, produces dramaturgy and embodied knowledge, activating a poetics of time that is simultaneously aesthetic, ethical, and political. |
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