Playwright and director João das Neves (1934-2018) was a unique and multifaceted artist. In this sense, this article highlights a little-examined aspect of his career: his research and efforts to disseminate modern German dramaturgy in Brazil and, more specifically, the radio drama (hörspiel) during the 1970s. It is worth mentioning that the period was marked by the hardening of the military regime, resulting from the enactment of Ato Institutional No. 5 on 1968, and the intensification of censorship and repression. And that, at this time, João das Neves took over the administrative and artistic maintenance of Grupo Opinião (RJ), created in 1964, after the departure and imprisonment of some of his fellow founders. Intermediated by João das Neves, Opinião hosts activities related to the most recent experimentation with the radio drama of its time. But first, a brief historical overview aims to present and contextualize the genre where it first gained strength of expression: in Germany.

A brief history of the hörspiel

A derivative of literature, theater, and cinema, the history of radio drama is marked by the debate surrounding its autonomy, its recognition as a new artistic category, sometimes claimed in the literary field, sometimes in the field of electroacoustic performance. In this sense, one of its definitions refers to a genre “composed of four basic elements: a literary text presented by the human voice, the sound of noises and music, and the pause, that is, the temporary suspension of sound” (Eggensperger, 2009, p. 92). But there are also those who argue that “the features of the radio drama are not literarily deducible” (Sperber, 1980, p. 125).

What may seem obvious – the fact that the existence of the radio drama is conditioned by a technical invention, the radio, and is configured as an artistic proposal within a mass medium – is actually what determines many of the aesthetic discussions, such as how to interweave its elements and explore the acoustic medium. Because what this genre has done is to position theorists and artists in relation to conceptions of the purpose of radio. And, from the outset, this has been the underlying issue behind its different and divergent assessments over time. For example, some, like Richard Kolb in the early 1930s, argued that: “The radio actor does not speak [...] to a compact mass of hundreds of thousands of people, but to the individual listener” (Sperber, 1980, p. 121). Others, like Hermann Pongs, a contemporary of Kolb, believe that:

These positions reveal the tenor of the debates that marked the first experiments with the radio play and that underpin its history. In the wake of what Pongs has said, Brecht produced “a set of brief articles on this thennew means of communication, written between 1927 and 1932 [...]” (Frederico, 2007, p. 217). And, according to Margret Cordes-Kraft (1973, p. 19): “It wasn’t until the late 1920s, when Bertolt Brecht developed his ‘Radio Theory’, that an independent dramaturgy was outlined in radio plays”. Therefore, according to a certain periodization, its first phase would extend from 1929 to 1933, even though, years earlier, isolated experiments inaugurated the genre in Europe, such as Danger, by Richard Hugles, broadcast in London in January 1924, and Zauberei auf dem sender (Magic in the Station), by Hans Flesch, premiered in October of the same year in Frankfurt and considered the first German radio drama.

Five articles¹ make up Brecht’s theory, in which he “unmasks the political significance of the bourgeois use of radio” (Peixoto, 1980, p. 6). According to Celso Frederico (2007, p. 224), the most important of these is O rádio como aparato de comunicação”, (Radio as a communication apparatus), translated into Portuguese by Tercio Redondo and published in 2007 in the journal Estudos Avançados. Brecht’s main argument (2007, p. 228) in this text is that “radio must stop being a distribution apparatus and become a communication apparatus”. This also means that it must “organize the listener as a supplier” and “give public affairs a truly public character” (Brecht, 2007, p. 229). In other words, “make what matters interesting”, enable exchange, “allow the public not only to be taught, but also to teach” (Brecht, 2007, p. 231).

In this way, “Brecht proposes the democratization of radio, also advising the transmission of works exclusively for this medium of expression”, and “stresses the need to seek a new expressive structure, to experiment with a language that would gain its own new grammar, from its own narrative resources” (Peixoto, 1980, p. 6-7). Following in the footsteps of Walter Benjamin (1985) – who also ventured into the field of radio dramas – Brecht wanted the advent of technical reproduction and mass dissemination, the foundation of his production, to be done in favor of its collective character and not in the interests of a minority of owners. However, as the ultimate goal of his theorizing, Brecht “didn’t just want to ‘democratize’ access for consumers to broadcasting, but ‘to shake the social base of this apparatus’” (Frederico, 2007, p. 224). From this perspective, he’s play “O voo sobre o oceano² [1929] was not a material intended to be used by radio, but something that was supposed to change it” (Peixoto, 1980, p. 6).

Different phases of a new genre

The advances that marked the first phase of the German radio drama, which, in addition to Brecht’s efforts, included authors such as Alfred Döblin, were brutally interrupted by Nazism, which exiled or murdered many artists committed to their experimentation. For this reason, his second phase began in 1945, but gained strength in the 1950s and lasted until the early 1960s. This moment is referred to as “the golden age of the radio drama”, but in relation to the purpose of radio, the democratizing impulses lost ground to a “form which, although it allows many people to be spoken to simultaneously, does not do so with them as a mass, but as individuals” (Sperber, 1980, p. 130). In this sense, the radio drama then loses its collective character, to address “the individual in his isolation, in his private ‘little room’” (Sperber, 1980, p. 142).

The illusionist character of the radio dramas of the 1950s, which sought to annul the distance between the device and the listener in the search for an identification with the transmitted text, began to be questioned in the early 1960s. And the hegemony of what became known as the “interiorization” aesthetic or “stream-of-consciousness dramaturgy” was definitively abandoned in the mid-1960s, when the third phase of the German radio drama began, also known as the “new radio drama”. In addition to the commitment of certain authors, the advent of stereophony contributed to the critical assessment of traditional forms, when the new conditions of technical progress required dramaturgical reflections. In concrete terms, the difference between the traditional mono recording and reproduction process and the stereophonic one is that: “Instead of the single-channel system, there is a two-channel system, that is, instead of having reception with only one ear, we now have reception through two ears” (Klippert, 1980, p. 17-18). From an aesthetic point of view, this technical advance means that the listener can perceive certain spatial locations, such as to the left or to the right, even favoring a certain notion of depth. And from the inner world of the traditional radio drama, the acoustic event is transferred to the space in front of the listener.

With these innovations, the previously exclusively dramaturgical circumstances are now acoustic and, what’s more, do not depend on the reality of the recording. Because “the sound engineer [...] can determine the spatial stereophonic effects, widen or narrow the position of the base and can, independently of the position of the sound source during recording, modify the directions in any way he wishes [...]” (Klippert, 1980, p. 20). The acoustic director, be it the sound engineer, the director or even the producer, then gains the status of co-author, and the text, the spoken word, becomes one of the elements to be combined with other acoustic signals; this is when “dramaturgical work is transferred from the desk to the studio” (Sperber, 1980, p. 170). In this context, what is known as “new realism” emerges, which is divided into two trends: “metatheatre” or, in the radio case, “spoken dramas”, and “documentary theater” or “original sound radio dramas”.

Both tendencies have in common, as Margret Cordes-Kraft (1973, p. 28) writes, “[...] a distrust of a traditional, standardized language”. One of the most prominent representatives of spoken dramas is Peter Handke, who, according to Anatol Rosenfeld (1973, p. 13), “analyzes or criticizes both the theater itself and its verbal and gestural language, as well as the audience and its behavior”. The other trend, the radio drama with original sound, which is of most interest here, has some of its precursors in documentary theater, which goes back to Erwin Piscator, and more recently Peter Weiss. For Anatol Rosenfeld (1973, p. 15), Weiss had achieved the best results in documentary theater up to that point, and his play O interrogatório, by uniting defendants and victims, achieved “an artistic resource that distances itself from the extremely emotional and dramatic occurrences of the real process”. Also adapted for radio broadcast, O interrogatório “had a much greater impact in Germany on the radio than on the stage, when it is not a question of witnesses giving their testimony, but when voices address the listener’s capacity for imagination” (Cordes-Kraft, 1973, p. 23).

The original sound radio drama presents two possibilities for using its source material: one that “uses texts that have already been transmitted”, such as those from research in official archives, and the other “that seeks to publish unpublished language”, based on interviews or testimonies from those excluded from the communication process (Cordes-Kraft, 1973, p. 28). This conception of original sound, which uses “elements collected ‘live’”, seems to go some way to answering Anatol Rosenfeld’s (1973, p. 13) question about documentary theater, which for him “seeks to eliminate, as much as possible, the fictional element”. Diante disso – e de seu inegável interesse pelo que ele também chama de “reportagem cênica” –, o crítico questiona se não haveria vantagens na liberdade ficcional de tratamento dos temas, tendo em vista que na forma documentário “se tratará forçadamente sempre de mimesis ou representação desempenhadas por atores, isto é, de ficção, por mais que baseada em documentos” (Rosenfeld, 1973, p. 13). Given this – and his undeniable interest in what he also calls “scenic reportage” – the critic wonders whether there might be advantages in the fictional freedom of the treatment of themes, given that in the documentary form “it will always be a question of mimesis or representation by actors, that is, of fiction, however much it is based on documents” (Rosenfeld, 1973, p. 13). In this case, the new radio drama with original sound, in its need to historicize the language, leads the author to share his authorship with others and pushes him to take to the streets with his tape recorder, in search of an evergreater authenticity that escapes the superficiality of the facts.

Thus, the radio drama that “uses texts that have already been transmitted” and the one that “seeks to publish unpublished language” makes use of documents that refer “to reality and are real” in order to read, interpret, compare and judge them (Sperber, 1980, p. 160). For this reason, “the means of this verification is the collage”, which “represents the manipulative and artificial activity that discovers the concrete authenticity of the document (which carries content), insofar as it subjects this document to new relationships” (Sperber, 1980, p. 159). But the adoption of these materials and their forms of articulation were also only possible as a result of the exploitation of a technical principle, magnetic tape recording – “the transfer of electrical information into magnetic information” (Klippert, 1980, p. 28) –, which made it possible to reproduce stored acoustic material and not just live broadcasts. This opened up the possibilities of montage – “collage in sequence of selected parts of the tape” (Klippert, 1980, p. 29) – which keeps the function of cutting and mixing alive. And although a certain pole was also dedicated to formalist research, the new radio drama assumes a fundamentally critical position, due to innovations that reflect formal and expressive viabilities.

The diffusion of the radio drama in Brazil

With a view to spreading the genre in Brazil, João das Neves, director of Opinião at the time, brokered a collaboration between the group and, above all, the Instituto Cultural Brasil-Alemanha (ICBA), but also the Instituto Goethe and the Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR)³. The first event resulting from the partnership between Grupo Opinião and the ICBA was held in 1972 and was entitled Seminário da Nova Dramaturgia Alemã (Seminar on the New German Dramaturgy), aiming to provide an overview of post-war German theater, highlighting the importance of radio drama in Germany. The program included lectures by: Anatol Rosenfeld (O Teatro Documentário/ The Documentary Theater); Willy Keller, Romanian playwright, essayist and translator living in Brazil (A Base do Moderno Teatro Alemão/ The Basis of Modern German Theater); and Margret Cordes-Kraft (Peças Radiofônicas na Alemanha/ Radio Dramas in Germany). There were also dramatized readings of two plays – Uma visita, by Martin Walser (1973), and Insulto ao público, by Peter Handke – and a screening of Antithese, by Mauricio Kagel.

A summary of the Seminar on the New German Dramaturgy was published in Revista de Teatro SBAT (Sociedade Brasileira de Autores Teatrais), in December 1973, sponsored by Grupo Opinião and the Goethe Institute. The issue features an introductory text by João das Neves (1973), as well as articles by Willy Keller (1973), Anatol Rosenfeld and Margret Cordes-Kraft, which bear the same titles as their speeches at the Seminar. Accompanying this material are two brief profiles of the playwrights Peter Handke and Martin Walser, which include a chronology of their work and some excerpts from interviews or statements by the authors. And, to close the issue, the full publication of Martin Walser’s play Uma Visita, read at the Seminar and written in 1961, which, according to the author himself, is “an essay in dialogues after having written many years in prose” (Walser as cited in Cordes-Kraft, 1973, p. 24). In addition, according to Magret Cordes-Kraft (1973, p. 24), the play “is a succession of works from the 1950s”, whose conflicts “revolve around marriage and the relationship between commitment and sexual freedom”, represented in this case by representatives of different social strata.

This process, started by João das Neves at the beginning of the 1970s, led to new activities in 1976, this time centered on the actual debate about the radio play and spreading to São Paulo. Both in Rio and São Paulo, the event was entitled Seminário Sobre a Peça Radiofônica (Seminar on Radio Drama), showing a greater effort to publicize the genre in Brazil. The first of these events was held at Opinião, in Rio de Janeiro. Promoted once again by the group itself and ICBM, it now gained government support, not only via the Serviço Nacional do Teatro (National Theater Service), but also from the Departamento de Cultura da Secretaria de Educação e Cultura (Department of Culture of the Secretariat of Education and Culture). In the case of São Paulo, it is sponsored by the Fundação Anchieta, by Instituto Goethe and by the Associação Brasileira de Teleducação. Paul Schultes, director of the radio dramas department at Cologne Radio (Germany), spoke about the international panorama and the conditions for producing hörspiel. Other conferences took place, as the Ulrich Lanterbach one, from Frankfurt Radio (Tendências Contemporâneas – Texto e Realização/ Contemporary Trends – Text and Realization), by Margret Cordes-Kraft (O Aproveitamento Pedagógico da Peça Radiofônica/ The Educational Use of the Radio Drama), by Brazilians Julio Medalha and Iberê Cavalcanti (O Cenário Cultural Brasileiro no Rádio/ The Brazilian Cultural Scene on Radio), and Fernando Peixoto and Maria Helena Küchner (O Cenário Cultural Brasileiro no Teatro/ The Brazilian Cultural Scene on Teather).

On this occasion, a Portuguese-language version of 1975 Hubert Wiedfeld’s radio drama Cruelândia (Crueland), which was awarded the Prix Italia⁴ 1972. Produced by WDR and translated by Nice Rissone and Willy Keller (1975), it was performed by Altair Pimpão, Fernando Peixoto, Guilherme Dieken, Henrique Gnypeck, João das Neves, Luzia Griethe, Sandra Dieken, Vanilda Paiva, Victor Haegeli and Zulma Pimpão, as well as some children in a children’s choir. João das Neves also assisted Klaus Mehrländer, as his assistant director, while Günther Half was in charge of sound and technical work. The bilingual manuscript of Cruelândia was published in 1975 in Brazil by the Goethe Institute.

The publication of Cruelândia and the special issue of Revista de Teatro SBAT mentioned above show the commitment to presenting and spreading the genre in Brazil, which was embraced and encouraged by João das Neves. As well as the play being a concrete example of stereophonic experimentation, the manuscript is also accompanied by a Production protocol for the radio drama Cruelândia, by Margret Cordes-Kraft (1975), in which she details the recording process in its organizational, technical and artistic aspects, using illustrative photos. The Introduction, by Paul Schultes (1975), gives a historical overview of the radio drama, and the Bibliography, although in German, provides ample research for those interested in delving deeper into the genre. These publications are of great importance, as they are the few sources on the German radio drama translated into Portuguese, containing renowned works in that context, acoustic experiments, reflections and a historical overview of the genre.

João das Neves’ radio project

In view of João das Neves’ involvement and efforts to promote the radio drama in Brazil, the Konrad Adenauer Foundation⁵ awarded him a scholarship in 1977 to research the genre at the Westdeutscher Rundfunk in Cologne. Neves (1979, p. 63) explains about this internship, to which he was accompanied by theatrical designer Fernando Peixoto and set designer Germano Blum for the same purpose:

The internship at the radio station provided João das Neves with a broad theoretical and practical knowledge of the radio drama, including the most recent experiments carried out at the time. On his return, and with a view to taking a new step in what had already been built in terms of the presentation and dissemination of the genre in Brazil, he took on the commitment of adapting what he had learned to the local scene. According to his radio project, Neves intends to develop it on a small radio station and use the mono recording and reproduction technique, whose artistic possibilities have already been pointed out. Even though he recognizes that “you can do a lot of things in stereo, FM and even quadraphonic heads⁶, like they do there, we really want to work in mono [...]”, insofar as it “can be picked up by the little battery radios in the interior of Brazil⁷” (Neves, 1979, p. 65). As we can see, the choice of the mono process in the case of João das Neves is not linked to its aesthetic constraints, but rather to a material dictate, guided by a proposal to communicate on a large scale and reach, above all, populations far from the major urban centers.

As Brecht envisioned (2007, p. 229), João das Neves aims to create alternatives for the “forces of disconnection”, seeking to communicate with the “disconnected”. In this sense, he also adds that his intention “is to work and study a language that is accessible to this type of listener, but without making any concessions, without belittling this listener’s capacity for understanding, reasoning, intelligence, which is somewhat the tendency of all communication work in Brazil” (Neves, 1979, p. 65). To this end, as Brecht also understood⁸, he opposes the debasement of language, affirming the need to search for new forms that are appropriate to this medium, which will allow the content it aims to convey to be conveyed.

Its democratizing spirit is evident, in the sense of popular reach and representation, manifested in the desire to favor access. To this end, and even though, according to João das Neves, contact has been established with the public network Rádio-TV Cultura¹⁰, he recognizes that the German subsidy model “wouldn’t even be ideal for a country like Brazil” (Neves, 1979, p. 64). Not least because, when talking about his internship experience in Germany, Neves vehemently brings up the issue of censorship. As such, he considers it imperative to carry out his radio project in a small station, which might “want to risk a kind of work that is somewhat innovative, in the sense of gaining an audience that it would have no commercial means of reaching” (Neves, 1979, p. 64).

Assuming the unfeasibility of state funding for the purposes of his project and understanding radio as a medium as much managed as television, João das Neves sought to convert the logic of the market in his favor, planning his partnership with a small radio station, capable of being seduced by programming that would bring in more listeners. The same can be seen in his prospects, at least initially, which do not include incorporating the consumer as a producer, much less “shaking the social base of this device” (Frederico, 2007, p. 224), but rather raising the quality of the broadcasts, “in the sense of [...] more in-depth literary research” (Neves, 1979, p. 65). These aspects, which highlight the distance between Brecht’s thinking and that of João das Neves, are, above all, about absolutely different circumstances. However, it is interesting to note that, despite the historical conditions, the analysis of João das Neves’ thought shows that Bertolt Brecht’s epic-dialectic theater, in its political and politicizing objectives, continued to be one of the main references for left-wing artists in the 1970s¹¹.

Within the limits of the Brazilian context, it can be concluded that Neves’ radio project aimed to produce experimental content and forms of national representation. If this perspective brings his vision closer to the ideal of many artists – including some of his militant colleagues – who joined the television work based on the argument of emphasizing national programming that would stand up to foreign programming, it is also possible to see a fundamental difference, which refers to what he calls the “fixation of regional languages”. Made possible mainly by the integrating action of the Globo network, the 1970s represent the determination of new entertainment and consumption habits on a national scale. As Fernando Peixoto (1985, p. 175) comments, this integration took place from the Southeast to all over Brazil, and was favored by the adoption of videotape:

For this reason, João das Neves’ concern with cultural particularities is of great importance. The intended working structure – at a small radio station – also contributes to this, as it would certainly guarantee him greater freedom of realization. And even though the partnership with a radio station and, consequently, his radio project did not come to fruition, its examination makes it possible to make tangible the author’s relationship with the cultural industry, which grew stronger in the 1970s.

Although the themes will be explored on another occasion – given the focus of the proposed scope – it is believed that the research process on the radio drama was very significant for sharpening João das Neves’ dramaturgical tools. From that moment on, he began to explore new possibilities for approaching the themes to be investigated artistically, with an emphasis on documentary theater, which are believed to have been processed from his experience with the original sound radio drama.

It is also worth mentioning his commitment to the reverse process of dissemination, which made it possible to get to know the Brazilian pieces in Germany¹². In doing so, he not only contributed to the international dissemination of Brazilian productions, but also encouraged playwriting and pointed out alternative paths to censorship. His play A pandorga e a lei¹³ is an example, since a radio version was broadcast by Westdeutscher Rundfunk in 1987, under the title Der drachen und das gesetz, after its staging had been banned in Brazil.

Had it not been for João das Neves’ research and efforts to disseminate it, the radio drama, as a genre or as a framework of creative procedures, might only have been known to us through reports of a distant existence. In fact, the few works that deal with the subject, as already mentioned, are mostly the result of his intermediary work. In this sense, this article has also tried to bring together these references, in order to help those who are likely to be interested in the debate on the subject.

Notes

References

Publication Dates

History