Collapse tactics in performing arts: on the urgency of surviving and standing up

Abstract

This article evokes The Tower tarot card as an allegory to discuss collapse tactics within a specific performing arts project: the research staging process of the play The Vagabond, a One-Woman Music-Hall Show, developed during the Covid-19 global pandemic and produced by the Xama Teatro group (Maranhão state, Brazil). It reveals possible alternatives for a combined writing process of both script and staging, based on experiences of vulnerability and drawing on collapse as a tactic to provoke a process that constantly feeds back into itself. The procedures that stand out in the process are: improvising in an atelier environment; choosing references and mapping thematic fields; exploring problems; and experimenting with performative programs as a means to insist on surviving the Covid 19 global pandemic.