Casa do Povo

In many ways, the Teatro de Arte Israelita Brasileiro (TAIB) is an underground theater. Operating from the 1960s until the late 1990s, it was hidden in the basement of Casa do Povo, a clandestine refuge for Jewish immigrants and activists, a fortress of resistance during the Brazilian dictatorship, a center for experimental performance, and a crucible of the artistic revolutions of the 1960s and 1970s. Its history is rich in political and popular theater, choral work, and experimental forms that always pushed the boundaries of performance, between the amateur and the professional. After a flood in 2000, the theater fell silent for years, and its stories remained submerged.

Ensaio geral is a performance program within the 36th Bienal de São Paulo, developed and rooted in this very space. The theater is not only a framework but a proposition: an invitation to question and reimagine what theater can be, rehearsing it at full scale, hence the program’s name. Reopening TAIB is not just an act of reclaiming the space, but of reigniting the question: what is theater and what can it do?

Embracing the legacy of Casa do Povo, Ensaio geral focuses on practices often excluded from canonical histories of theater and institutional stages. The program dives into paratheatrical forms—moments when theater merges with the performativity of parades, sports events, and the subversive energy of cabaret. The invited artists bring their own explorations of these hybrid practices.

Each gesture in the program is conceived as a collaboration between international artists and local initiatives, fostering a porous and evolving dramaturgy. The metaphor of the estuary, where sea and river meet, guides this return. Workshops and shared gatherings with the community allow practices to surface, opening space for new connections and exchanges.

TAIB becomes a ground where practices, communities, and temporalities converge. A space where the focus is not only on the outcome but on the living, ongoing process of creation. It has always been a place where time, history, and community meet. Here, what has passed and what is yet to come come together again in a collective moment. Ensaio geral offers a space to reopen the theater, not with forms already inscribed in its history, but with those that were left out of its book. It is the inauguration of a theater still to come.

Benjamin Seroussi is a curator, editor, and cultural manager in São Paulo. He is the artistic director of Casa do Povo, an autonomous Jewish-Brazilian art space.
Daniel Blanga Gubbay is a performing arts curator and writer. Since 2018, he has been part of the artistic direction of Kunstenfestivaldesarts in Brussels.

Act I
with Marcelo Evelin

The rhythm begins low. A touch on the skin, a murmur of friction, then another and another. Little by little, a collective syncopated pulse emerges—insistent, impossible to ignore. In Marcelo Evelin’s hands, the batucada is not just rhythm. It is an encounter, a summons, a call from the body that refuses silence. Everything begins in the darkness of TAIB, the underground theater of Casa do Povo, its walls still saturated with echoes of the past, before overflowing outward in a movement that is at once choreographic and political. This inaugural act opens the program of the 36th Bienal de São Paulo at Casa do Povo and reopens TAIB with an unrestrained gesture.

Born in Teresina, Marcelo Evelin is one of the Brazilian choreographers with the greatest international resonance. His work interweaves performance, activism, and collective practice, starting from the body as a territory of social inscription and resistance. In Batucada, created in 2014 and presented in several countries, Evelin does not propose a fixed piece but a living experience: an accumulation of rhythms, presences, and gestures converging toward disobedience.

There is no script or hierarchy. Batucada is a porous score, reactivated each time by fifty local participants. The drums—sometimes real, sometimes simulated by hands, feet, bodies—become weapons of joy and refusal. The performance grows not through spectacle but through contagion, inviting the audience to listen not only with their ears but with their breathing, with the nearness of others. What begins as a gathering of beats in the darkness of the theater soon bursts into the open air. Batucada rejects theater as enclosure; the work proposes it not as a refuge from the world, but as its chamber of resonance. The city does not remain on the other side of the door—it is the continuation of the performance, its necessary horizon.

Although Evelin held workshops at Casa do Povo during the creation process of Batucada more than a decade ago, the piece had never been performed in São Paulo until now. Its arrival is both a return and a rupture. To inaugurate this Bienal’s program with Batucada is a commitment—a refusal to begin in silence. In this encounter between Marcelo Evelin, Casa do Povo, and the bodies and rhythms of São Paulo, Batucada ceases to be just a performance and becomes a new beginning.

Act II
with Boxe Autônomo and Dorothée Munyaneza

Boxing has always been more than fists. In the hands of Dorothée Munyaneza and Boxe Autônomo, it becomes listening, a language for the unspoken, a way of being together in both tension and care. This shared night brings into dialogue two distinct yet attuned practices—one born from the diasporic poetics of the stage, the other from the everyday pedagogy of Casa do Povo.

At the center is Version(s) (2025), a work by Rwandan-British artist Dorothée Munyaneza, created in conversation with Christian Nka, a former boxer from the suburbs of Marseille, and musician Ben LaMar Gay from Chicago. Between portrait and invocation, the piece navigates a charged space of survival and transmission. In the ring, in motion, Munyaneza seeks what history left unrecorded: gestures passed in silence, knowledge stored in muscle memory, the contradictions of masculinity forged under pressure. The fight is not staged—it is dismantled, re-signified, embraced.

If in Version(s) the ring becomes a stage, at Casa do Povo the opposite took place. Since 2016, Boxe Autônomo has transformed the cultural center into an anti-fascist gym. Born from the desire to rescue boxing from machismo and institutionalization, the group began with itinerant classes in occupations and favelas until becoming a living part of Casa do Povo’s architecture, with daily training sessions harmoniously merging into the building’s rhythm, echoing its history of radical pedagogy and collective practice. The ring becomes a democratic space: open, porous, and self-managed, where bodies renegotiate their place.

The encounter with Munyaneza does not seek to fuse these practices but to place them side by side, observing what resonates in the shared silence before movement, in the breath after contact. Everything unfolds through a few days of workshops and two evenings in which Version(s) will be presented in a special version, infused by Boxe Autônomo and followed by collective dialogue. Boxing, so often associated with domination, is transformed into something else: a territory of relation, rupture, and repair. Between the suburbs of Marseille and the Bom Retiro neighborhood in São Paulo, between art and daily practice, between personal history and collective reinvention.

Act III
with Alexandre Paulikevitch and MEXA

A shoulder turns, deliberate; a lingering gaze, then broken. Cabaret does not begin with fanfare, but with a shift of attention: to the body, its codes, its refusal to stay in line. Often dismissed as a lesser form, cabaret historically became a theatrical territory of dissent, of gender exploration, and of what could not be said otherwise. At Casa do Povo, cabaret carries its own lineage, rooted not only in the house’s history of political theater but also in the traditions of the Jewish diaspora, where satire, song, and stage became forms of survival and critique. In this singular encounter, Alexandre Paulikevitch and MEXA bring their contemporary work on cabaret, sustaining the energy of this form not as seduction, but as disturbance.

Paulikevitch, born and based in Beirut, is one of the few male artists working within the tradition of baladi, often reduced by the colonial gaze to “belly dance,” making it an act of political reclamation. His dance is slow, sinuous, attentive to the gaze that tries to pin it down. Through hips, breath, and repetition, he unravels the layers of orientalism and homophobia that historically sought to discipline his form.

His work opens space for softness as strategy, sensuality as resistance, and ambiguity as truth. To watch his performances is to recognize how deep the body’s archive is and how much needs to be danced out of it.

Born from the streets and shelters of São Paulo, MEXA is a collective forged in urgency. Investigating the creation of fictions from their own identities, the group—composed mostly of trans and queer people—was shaped by the negligence and violence of the Brazilian state. MEXA creates theatrical forms, both at Casa do Povo and on international tours. Singing, lip-syncing, performing, they craft loud and unruly reworkings of personal and collective myths.

In this project conceived for the 36th Bienal de São Paulo, the result of a shared residency, Paulikevitch and MEXA present two nights of intertwined practices and narratives: bodies that withdraw or insist on being seen; identities transformed into choreographies—improvised, relational—with the awareness that theater must remain unfinished, porous to desire and to the noise of the present. Together, they reframe cabaret as a form born on the margins of institutions, always excessive, queer, and too loud. With them, cabaret becomes what it has always threatened to be: a rehearsal for another way of being together.

This act is supported by the Goethe-Institut.