Half-opened Doors: an ethnographic account from a drama play with prison inmates – beyond the show…

Abstract

This paper aims to ethnographically report an experiment from a workshop entitled Playing with Theater, which was developed in a prison context from 2008 to 2009 as an observer-participant in a shed known as Escola do Presídio (Prison School), in the countryside of the State of São Paulo, together with the cultural group monitors inmates. It urges us a gaze to the field of Theatre Pedagogy: theater-education as a learning process which provides an artistic-aesthetic-pedagogical experience as a possibility to contemplate the creation, the imagination, the feelings, the motions, the passions, the tragedies, and recreation as an adventure to broaden an open and sensitive knowledge of this area, and then make it an educational experience.