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• 1 2024-01-12T08:09:51-08:00 Black Power in the Face of Violence 1 plain 2024-01-12T08:09:51-08:00

  The actors of Teatro Terreiro Encantado call upon images, sounds, and movement that reference Black power in Auto de Negrinho in the face of genocide. While violence and death are a central theme of the play, resistance in the form of racial solidarity politics underpins the play's narrative. 

  During one of Negrinho's deaths as one of the actor's gently lays the puppet on the ground, the other actors stand in the background with their fists raised in the air.  The image they create with this scene directly calls upon the Black power movements of the 1960s and 1970s and the Black Lives Matter movement today that use the fist as a means of protest, pride, and solidarity. They are coming together in a solemn act of solidarity to mourn the loss of Negrinho and protest the killings of Black youth in Brazil today. Their use of the fist is not just a symbolic representation of Black rights movements in the Americas they are interpreting for the stage. The actors are engaged in a literal protest of the lack of rights that they, the audience, and Black youth in the periphery experience daily. They are using their bodies to communicate that they belong to this larger racial political movement in Brazil that started in the 1970s with the Movimento Negro Unificado (Black Unified Movement) and continues today with movements like Reaja ou Será Morta (React or Die).
  
  
  Another powerful image comes at the end of the play when the actors sing and dance to a religious song about the Black saint Saint Benedict. This scene is very political due to the fact that a Black saint is being revered to center and celebrate Black survival and life. One of the actors holds a banner with an image of Saint Benedict holding the baby Jesus.  He calls for audience members to come to the stage to hold the banner and to crown them as the king or queen. Most the people being called to the stage are Black youth and children because not only are they the target audience for the play, but they are seen as the future of the community that will need to take up the mantle of celebrating Black life and sharing Black pride as a way to counter the necropolitical mechanisms of the state that will continue to perpetuate genocide.