On the useless' wave: an online experience with theater and reading at school

Abstract

The Covid-19 pandemic has abruptly changed our routine and we cannot yet fully measure its long term effects. In this perspective, there is much to discuss about our advances and throwbacks  in this two-year period with regard to education, especially when it is based on the relationship between subjective construction and expression, as when working with theater at school. This essay is an invitation to see experiences of distances, instabilities and simultaneous presence/absence. This experience takes place on the island of Florianópolis, on the islands of our isolated houses, and has the sea as a premise: the slow weather of the beach in the winter, the knowledge of the fishermen. It is this other time that invited us to bring reading and listening coupled with theater to synchronous and asynchronous theatrical experimentation based on a condition that presupposes untying the knots of expectations, productive glimpses and therefore we surround ourselves with what is generally considered uselessness. In this text, we follow the steps of a character intrigued by the possibility of not being useful, or, if so, being useless, and we introduce her to other authors who have also asked themselves if there is a place for the useless, and how, being in confinement, to bear the will to comply with the production demands that surround us, pasteurized, packaged and polluting production. The character accompanies us in the discovery of creative and theatrical possibilities in a personal, collective, accessible and extremely important practice nowadays: reading and listening.