Corolários das perdas: um teatro para tempos alegres (repressão e resistências nas peças de Hilda Hilst)

Abstract

The eight plays that compose the Complete Theater of Hilda Hilst had been written during the 60's, more precisely between 1967 and 1969, and configure an aesthetic experience that the author did not repeat at any other moment of her poetical work. Beyond doubt, the choice for theater is a political response to the context of that time since, not only the later scenery of the World War II, but also the Brazilian Military Dictatorship had characterized a picture of coercion of the subjectiveness that by promoting a process of alienation in society, began to suscitate an attitude of engagement in arts. Despite this, the Hilstian theater is not like the kind of engagement which was disseminated in Brazil at that time; in contrast to the CPC and arena theater, just to mention two examples, the essentially lyric diction of Hilst never looked for the intelligibility of didatics or the explicitly Brechtian patterns. As in all her literary work, the theater is a reflection about the dimension of the word, or to be more accurate, about which kind of word is possible in art on a context of exception- and, therefore, it does not become outdated. When the theater of Hilda Hilst delineates the social context where it was inserted, it promotes a reading of the human being statute in order to evaluate its potentialities, in the Nietzschian sense, and questioning the iluminist project of a man who at the same time doubts of a certain metaphysical perspective: in Hilst, the reason is insufficient to think the world the same way that faith does; the image of God, recidivist in many parts, is a metaphor to think the emptiness of the human desire and the loss of its critical sensitivity that supports the same fascism that they are victims. However, it is not about a dystopic view of the world in Hilst, but it is about a “possible utopia”, understanding the proper act of writing as a way of resistance to the reification process and barbarity and, therefore, the act of engagement that, by itself, already means the transforming hope that keeps the Hilstian work with current theater as experience of language and the human being approach.