“Pateada”: echoes of an extinct but noisy practice

ABSTRACT

“Pateada”: echoes of an extinct but noisy practice – Historically, the theater spectator has been constituted as a central figure in both theatrical practice and theory, becoming the target of an artistic-pedagogical discourse. Starting from this premise, this article aims to problematize the game play between conduct and counter-conduct in which the theater spectator was entangled. To do so, we propose to observe an extinct practice in Brazilian theaters but prevalent throughout the 19th century – the “pateada” – which involved a noisy stomping of feet by the audience with the purpose of interrupting a performance. Resorting to the analysis of the “pateada”, we present a historical moment in which the behavior and subjectivity of the spectator would begin to be regulated towards a disciplined, moderated, and pedagogized body, and a new type of public-stage address would emerge.

Keywords:
History of Brazilian theater; Theatrical spectator; Theater and police; Theatrical legislation; Pateadas

RESUMO

Da Pateada: ecos de uma prática extinta, mas ruidosa – Historicamente, o espectador de teatro foi constituído como peça central tanto da prática quanto da teoria teatral, passando a ser alvo de uma discursividade de ordem artístico-pedagógica. Partindo dessa premissa, este artigo pretende problematizar o jogo entre conduta e contraconduta, no qual o espectador teatral foi enredado. Para isso, propõe-se observar uma prática extinta dos teatros brasileiros, mas que vigorou ao longo do século XIX – a pateada –, que consistia em um ruidoso bater de pés por parte do público cujo fim era a interrupção de um espetáculo. Recorrendo à análise da pateada, apresenta-se um momento histórico em que o comportamento e a subjetividade do espectador começariam a ser regulados em direção a um corpo disciplinado, moderado e pedagogizado e um novo tipo de endereçamento público-cena emergiria.

Palavras-chave:
História do teatro brasileiro; Espectador teatral; Teatro e polícia; Legislação teatral; Pateadas

RÉSUMÉ

Sur la “Pateada”: échos d'une pratique disparue mais bruyante – Historiquement, le spectateur de théâtre a été constitué comme élément central à la fois de la pratique et de la théorie théâtrale, devenant la cible d'une discursivité d'ordre artistique-pédagogique. Partant de cette prémisse, cet article vise à problématiser l'interaction entre conduite et contre-conduite dans laquelle se trouve le spectateur de théâtre. Pour ce faire, est proposé d’observer une pratique disparue des théâtres brésiliens, mais qui a perduré tout au long du XIXe siècle, la “pateada”, consistant en un bruyant battement de pieds de la part du public dans le but d'interrompre un spectacle. En recourant à l’analyse de la ‘pateada’, un moment historique est présenté où le comportement et la subjectivité du spectateur commenceraient à être régulés vers un corps discipliné, modéré et pédagogisé, et un nouveau type d’adresse public-scène émergerait.

Mots-clés:
Histoire du théâtre brésilien; Spectateur de théâtre; Théâtre et police; Législation théâtrale; Pateadas

Ways of educating spectators

Depressing spectacle.

This is the title of an article published in Veja Rio magazine in May 2014. In it, the author problematizes the events that were taking place in Rio de Janeiro’s theaters at the time and in which a supposedly illmannered public was the protagonist. Based on a survey of 130 theater professionals about their opinions of the spectator from Rio, the article tells us that all of them confirmed that they were distracted on a daily basis by interventions from the audience, such as the lighting and ringing of cell phones, side conversations, etc.

Regular theater-goers know that cell phones are just the brightest and noisiest part of a behavioral trait that manifests itself in various ways in Rio’s theaters and cinemas. The plague of latecomers who procrastinate until the last second to enter the theater and only do so when the lights go down, disturbing everyone else who is already seated, is already part of Rio’s folklore. There are the children who cry, their parents who don’t get a clue and the festival of noises coming from the audience, from people snoring to coughing fits, to the infernal opening of food packages and treats, followed by the symphony that accompanies the act of eating itself. ‘There was one day when they coughed so much that, when it was time to say thank you, I said I wished they’d come down with the flu. The rest of the audience, the part that didn’t cough, applauded’, says Bruno Mazzeo, who recently presented the monologue Sexo, Drogas e Rock’n’Roll. In fact, some episodes are so unbelievable that they seem like a joke or part of the act to the unwary. Recently, actress Letícia Isnard found herself in a surreal situation during a performance of the comedy Como É Cruel Viver Assim, showing at Casa de Cultura Laura Alvim. ‘A lady in the front row opened a jar of margarine that she had made as a lunchbox, took the fork and knife out of her handbag and ate her dinner right there’, she says (Teixeira, 2017).

Snores, coughs, children crying, packages rattling, voices coming from the darkness. Even applause, the only noise the artists interviewed wanted to hear, was difficult to hear because of the noisy spectators. For these people, a solution: fines for those who disturb artists. In fact, this was a proposal already made by then councilor Marcelo Arar (PT), who enacted a bill in which theaters and cinemas would have to penalize those who used smartphones in these spaces by up to R$ 1,000. The bill, however, never came to fruition.

On the eve of the 2011 edition of the Curitiba Festival, another article – Lições de bom comportamento no Teatro, published in the newspaper Gazeta do Povo (Azevedo, 2011) – lists tips for its readers to learn the correct way to behave in theaters. Liana Justus and Clarice Miranda, teachers of the audience training course at the Solar do Rosário Cultural Center, offer nine valuable pieces of advice:

1. a well-mannered viewer should find out what they’re watching beforehand, so as not to risk laughing at a drama or a tragedy;

2. a well-mannered spectator should always arrive on time;

3. a well-mannered spectator shouldn’t use a cell phone or camera, because he “might take a picture with the actor afterwards. Wait for the play to finish, go to the dressing room and ask permission. It’s not that complicated and it doesn’t disturb anyone” (Azevedo, 2011).

4. a well-mannered spectator should not wear a hat or a high hairstyle;

5. a well-mannered spectator should not talk during the play or mess with the actor when he is on stage;

6. a well-mannered spectator shouldn’t eat at the theater;

7. a well-mannered spectator shouldn’t kick the chair;

8. a well-mannered spectator shouldn’t go to the theater just for the social event: “you go to a spectacle to hear and learn new things. The gratification is there, it’s unparalleled, unique and yours. Without the vanity of being seen and thinking that this makes you a cultured person” (Azevedo, 2011).

9. a well-mannered spectator should always applaud, because “you have to understand that behind what you’ve seen are years of study, education, art and technique. It’s a gift from the artist” (Azevedo, 2011).

If the anti-noise claim made by the artists from Rio in these depressing spectacles sounds exaggerated in the same way that theatrical etiquette manuals seem rather nonsensical to us, we cannot lose sight of the fact that from the point of view of democratizing public policies for culture, as well as academic research and artistic production in the country, the figure of the spectator, seen through their behaviors, presence and continuous training, has also become central, at least since the beginning of the 21st century.

According to Flávio Desgranges, a researcher dedicated to the relationship between theater, education and spectator studies, the mode of production of theater collectives in recent decades has ceased to be restricted to the staging of spectacles, and is now also concerned with something that is called spectator in process. Some artists have begun to invite the public to take part in creative processes or to work on other fronts, such as workshops, experience laboratories, etc. According to Desgranges (2012, p. 220), “the practices proposed by the groups can take on a formative character, by providing access to theatrical performance for the part of the population that knows little or nothing about the subject”. In this direction, ideas such as spectator pedagogies, spectator schools, audience training programs, post-spectacle debates and mediations and other initiatives of this kind have started to organize a formative web around the theatrical spectator, ending up tutoring their experience as theater-goers in various ways.

In 2001, for example the Escola de Espectadores de Buenos Aires was inaugurated and its model was implemented in Montevideo, Mexico City, La Paz, Santiago de Chile, Medellín, Lima and, finally, Porto Alegre. According to the school’s founder, Argentine researcher Jorge Dubatti, the creation of a spectators’ school would be justified by the broadening and enrichment of spectators’ cultural, emotional and intellectual horizons, as well as contributing to the production of their critical thinking.

Dubatti (2009, p. 246) points out the eleven principles that guide his school’s mission:

1. Valuing the place of the spectator as a laboratory for the perception of theatricality, at the same time witness and protagonist of the event and co-creator in the receptive poesis.

2. To stimulate the autonomous activity of the spectator as a creator who is a companion of the artists, technicians and other spectators (and when we say stimulate – we insist on this – we mean: not to lead, not to homogenize, not to unify, just to offer tools for multiplication so that each spectator can build their own relationship with the spectacle).

3. To consolidate the institution of orality – the word of mouth – and its complement, the new figure of the spectator-critic, which constitute the most important source of production of theatrical critical thought today and keep the theater of Buenos Aires alive.

4. Considering theater as an unlimited seedbed of knowledge and thought, whose intellection requires specific training and complementary disciplines, as well as many hours of study and analysis and the availability of archival materials. [...]

5. In the midst of diversity, selecting and guiding on the basis of critically developed valuation criteria.

6. To have access to the subjectivity of the artists in a space of encounter and dialog parallel to the theatrical event.

7. Making theatrical study not just another subject in formal education – curricula to be completed, quizzes, exams, monographs, etc. – but rather a pure space of pleasure that recovers theater as pleasure, joy, leisure, dialogue, thought, knowledge, meditation, problematization and transformation of reality makes other pedagogical instances less bureaucratic [...].

8. Attend the theater regularly and contribute to a history of the present.

9. To create a space for permanent historical and theoretical training, aimed at the renewal of Argentine theatricalogy.

10. Distinguish the categories and practices of taste from analytical and argumentative practices.

11. To work for the revelation of the historical or empirical spectator through dialog, interviews, statistics, testimonies from socializing and autobiographies of the spectator (emphasis added).

Whether it's through etiquette, training or the penalty for touching a cell phone, the spectator's body is constantly under the tutelage of a series of practices and discourses that haunt it in contemporary times. The aim of this tutelage generally seems to be the same: to reduce as much as possible any noise that may occur in the relationship between stage and audience, or to postpone it to spaces that are supposedly more appropriate for debate. However, behavioral norms that require silence, concentration and training on the part of the audience are much more recent than they seem.

The aim of this article is to take a historical look at the current discourse on the theatrical spectator, focusing on the existence and extinction of an important theater practice: the pateada, a noisy demonstration by the theatre audience to interrupt the course of a play in progress. To do this, we will mobilize descriptions of evenings at the theater published in the national press¹ throughout the 19th century, more specifically in periodicals published in Rio de Janeiro, then capital of the Empire, and in São Paulo.

Although later than in other American colonies, it was at the beginning of the 19th century that the press emerged in Brazil. From then on, periodicals became an important tool for co-producing statements whose purpose was both to formalize and explain a certain society that was being forged in the country. According to researcher Gisela Maria do Val (2016), the newspaper would have been one of the privileged means of governing the daily lives of Brazilian populations, constituting ways of managing ways of life and fostering the creation of a manageable social environment². Some newspapers also circulated theatrical theories, reports on the events of the night’s spectacles, criticism of the artists and prescriptions about the direction this artistic modality should take. Here, the production of this knowledge about the theater – whether in the form of analysis, description, chronicle, pasquim (a satirical pamphlet) or pamphlet – is seen as a historical document not just of memory, record or opinion, but as practices that produce meanings, responsible for actively introducing theatrical practices into the game of true and false, constituting the theater as an object of thought in its historical time.

If we mobilize historical sources, our aim is not to present a linear, chronological narrative of the process of the extinction of pateadas from the national theater. By bringing this practice to light, we are perhaps trying to provoke shifts in our imaginations in relation to contemporary ways of being spectators and thinking about this position. Starting with the presentation and analysis of the pateada through this descriptive (and somewhat fable-like) archive collected from the nineteenth-century press, this article aims to highlight the game between conduct and counter-conduct in which the theatrical spectator finds themself entangled. By highlighting the problem of how the spectator’s body is governed – and the ways in which it resists – we are highlighting the encounter between two distinct technologies: one police and disciplinary, and the other pedagogical and normative.

The Pateada

The world is nothing more than a theater,
where everyone acts out a farce.
On the high stage, in dramatic habits,
bishops, ministers and warriors shine.
As for us, the lowly people, in the audience, the futile troop,
despised by the great,
we watch the play from a low seat;
but we pay to be spectators;
and with our money we acquire
(when the farce is badly acted)
the right to give it pateada.
(O Brasil, Jan. 4th, 1844).

José Agostinho de Macedo was a Portuguese priest, writer and passionate theater-goer. In the anecdotal field of his biography, he is remembered for having been a quarrelsome person and for his eccentric undertaking of wanting to be a greater poet than Camões. Of his textual production, full of mockery and polemics, one philosophical treatise stands out in particular: As pateadas de teatro investigadas na sua origem e causas, published in 1812.

In this compendium, José Agostinho de Macedo (1812, p. 13) defines the practice:

What is pateada? Pateada is a spontaneous movement of feet, sticks, boards, whistles, made in the audience by the gentlemen spectators which results in a blow, butchery and confused smack on the cheeks given to the comedians to tell them in all civility that what they are representing, or have just represented, is complete nonsense, a manifest shamelessness, or a solemn distemper.

The text is marked by irony and, already in its first lines, Agostinho is aware of the folly of devoting so much time and space to meditating on such a low subject:

[...] since we have Elements of Chemistry, Pharmacy, Therapeutics and Pathology, why shouldn’t we also have a book on Elementary Pateadas? I am not so presumptuous as to dare say that I want to do the human race the favor of giving it a complete Elementary Treatise on Pateação; this is not the work of an only man or an only one century (Macedo, 1812, p. 16).

The most astonishing thing about reading the above passage is less the priest’s bizarre theoretical undertaking and more his belief that pateada would continue as a social practice throughout the centuries to come. Little could the clergyman have imagined that, a hundred years after the publication of these lines, pateada would already be a practice on the verge of disappearing. That is because, throughout the 19th century and the first decades of the 20th, the practice of pateada was the subject of a series of debates that questioned its legitimacy, and its execution became increasingly rare, to the point of practically disappearing. In 1873, a newspaper published the following reasoning aimed at explaining the existence of the practice of patear to the literate inhabitants of São Paulo:

A notable French orator, Dupin Jenne, said that each people has a special way of presenting its grievances: the complaints of the English bull are expressed with loud bellowing; the people of Constantinople present their petitions torch in hand; the French people show their anger with soft songs and cheerful stomps. The audience also has its own special way of complaining: its eloquence is the deafening scream and the infernal voice; its gesture is the stamping of the feet (Diário de São Paulo, May 6th, 1873, p. 3).

And, in the newspaper A manhã, the chronicler establishes, albeit somewhat exaggeratedly, a brief history of the practice that had almost disappeared from Brazilian daily life by the time the article was published:

When did the pateada appear? There is no precise date. However, it can be said that pateada is as old as theater. In Greece, pateada was already practiced in the early days of the performing arts. And the pateada of modern times is not so different from the Greek pateada. Nowadays, audiences who clap, in addition to the noise of shouting and stomping their feet, throw potatoes, onions and sometimes rotten eggs onto the stage. In Greece, when an actor or some actors displeased the audience, they would throw figs, olives, grape pomace and the skins of other tasty fruits at them (A Manhã, August 6th, 1914, p. 3).

It is remarkable that some of the main historiographies of Brazilian theater make no mention of pateada, or only mention its existence as an anecdote. The Dictionary of Brazilian Theater, published in 2009, has a brief and insufficient entry:

It was at this time (1853-1858) that the passions of the spectators for those [artists] whom they chose as their favorites intensified, and they demonstrated their preferences with an enthusiasm that often exceeded all limits of restraint. The opposite also happened and audiences, through noisy, inelegant and aggressive demonstrations, showed their dislike for a particular artist, sometimes because they considered him or her to be a rival to their favorite divas. They formed what were known as parties and, among other attitudes, marked their discontent by noisily stomping their feet on the ground. These were the famous pateadas (Faria; Guinsburg; Lima, 2009, p. 261).

The entry limits the existence of the practice of pateada to just a few decades of the 19th century and that it took place, above all, in lyric theaters and opera performances. However, the nineteenth-century press tells us that pateadas took place in almost every theater in urban centers, regardless of the type of work performed there: recitals, operas, plays (in their broad spectrum: dramas, comedies, tragedies, revues, etc.), lectures and political events were the targets of noisy demonstrations. In addition, the French news in Brazilian periodicals of the 19th century indicated that the practice also existed widely in European universities, and was therefore not restricted to the field of the performing arts.

Since the pateada was part of theatrical life throughout part of the 19th and 20th centuries and, above all, a rule of play given to the spectator for their intervention in the space of the stage, one can only wonder how a practice so ingrained in the theatrical life of a certain era could have disappeared to the point of sounding completely alien to us?

On November 9^th, 1872, the jocular-serious illustrated pamphlet A vida fluminense presented a detailed description of a usual night at the theater in the city of Rio de Janeiro, which can tell us about a very common scenario in the theaters of large urban centers throughout the 19th century in Brazil. The description of what happened takes the form of acts from a play. It is important to emphasize this formal choice, as it is not uncommon for theatrical descriptions to appear in the periodicals of the time, bringing up the metaphor that is meant to indicate the existence of a theater within a theater.

From the outset, the author of these lines states that he is much more interested in the scenes watched from the point of view of the whole evening’s events than in the play’s plot. Not just on stage, the emphasis of his observation was on the actions of the audience.

The prologue introduces the intrigue: four young men are said to have courted the actress Suzana Castera, who has spurned them. Vowing revenge, they plot the actress’s next appearance on stage. The Act I of the story presents an assembly in which “the four rats decide to tear off little by little (so that the martyrdom is longer) the queen’s crown that adorns Mrs. Suzana’s forehead” (^{A Vida Fluminense, Nov. 9th, 1872, p. 1117}). Act II describes the arrival of the pateadores at the theater and the first offensive of the soles towards the actress. According to the excerpt, “the four initiators have already made four followers; total of eight people, wearing a total of sixteen English boots... with thick soles and tacked heels³. The guarantees are suspended and the assault begins” (^{A Vida Fluminense, November 9th, 1872, p. 1117}). The thunderous pateada begins and the performance is suspended. Act III adds another character to the scene who is essential to the game of pateada: the subdelegate. In fact, even belatedly, he decides to interfere in the public rejection of the actress and reminds her, from the top of the box, that “the law severely punishes all those who make rioting, throw projectiles onto the stage and utter sharp words in the room” (^{A Vida Fluminense, Nov. 9th, 1872, p. 1117}). Act V presents the general confusion of the evening. The climax of the play, we transcribe it in full:

ACT V. Everything is wasted. The idea is moving forward: the government of the people by the people in the theater, that is what the insurgents want! The subdelegate is worthless, authority is of little importance. The subdelegate regrets the incident and, based on the law, reports it to the delegate. The delegate takes to the field with enough strength to resist any insult to the police. Thunder rumbles; the storm rages, strong at first, horrific at the end. While the pateada rages on alone, impassivity is the rule of conduct adopted by the delegate. Suddenly, potatoes begin to cross in different directions, threatening to reduce Mrs. Suzana’s face to the proportions of a filet sanglant aux pommes sautées. The delegate orders the commander of the force to warn the offenders, who, as a reward for the warning, has a chair slammed into his back. Conflict ensues. The policemen pull out their old swords, the insurgents armed themselves with balusters and on both sides some injuries, although slight, but regrettable in any case, show that exaltation, wherever it appears, is always harmful (A Vida Fluminense, Nov. 9th, 1872, p. 1117).

The sixth act also shows the surprising arrival of the emperor, who acts as a deus ex-machina. Everything calms down and the spectacle is aborted. Everything, “except the chairs and the balusters, whose corpses, horribly mutilated in the middle of the room, insist on not leaving that position” (^{A Vida Fluminense, Nov. 9th, 1872, p. 1117}). Even though the performance was interrupted, the action of the spectators in conflict with the actress and the policemen continued outside the theater, taking on the dimension of the street and gathering around them a crowd that was not inside the theater. The following Epilogue is presented:

The gas goes out. Darkness everywhere. The theater is evacuated and Rua do Espírito Santo becomes an encampment... without tents. There are onlookers, insurgents, police and troops. The first want to see, the second still insist on killing Mrs. Suzana, the third want to moderate their impulses, and the fourth just want to go back to their barracks, because it’s late. Based on the law that forbids gatherings, H.I.M. addresses the groups in the hope of dispersing them. No one moved. A quarter of an hour, twenty minutes go by... Despite all the logic employed by the police, the groups do not dissolve. H.I.M.’s patience runs out and, suddenly, about twenty gentlemen appear from Rua da Carioca, mounted on galloping horses, to join the pedestrians who were already at Rua do Espírito Santo and its surroundings. The commander turned to H.I.M. and, after a few seconds of waiting, was ordered to disperse the groups, without mistreating anyone. They then started running down the sidewalk, bringing to mind the horseback entrances of the Chiarini circus; the clang of swords was heard against the iron railings guarding the Rocio promenade [...]. Curiosity seekers and insurgents disappear, it is not known where; the author of these lines curls up in one of the trees on the promenade to better witness that simulated combat, and, minutes later, the silence of the riots succeeds the hubbub, the cries for revenge and the protests of death! (A Vida Fluminense, Nov. 9th, 1872, p. 1117).

Such was the strength of the understanding of the pateada as an inalienable right of the spectator at a given moment in history that tensions between the public and the police inside the theaters often ended with the triumphant victory of the large crowds. The police, for their part, like the artists, were bitter about the humiliation suffered by the pateadores.

Many actors, actresses and playwrights have suffered been pateadas throughout history — Racine, Sarah Bernhardt, João Caetano, Eleonora Duse, Mme. Charton, Elisa Barbieri, Xisto Bahia, Martins Pena, Furtado Coelho, Cinira Polônio, Artur Azevedo, Itália Fausta, among others —, and very few have managed to escape the great humiliation throughout their artistic lives. In this respect, the case of actor and tenor Eugenio Oyanguren became famous in the pages of the Court’s newspapers. Called the king of the pateadas, it is said that there were very few times when, having stepped onto the stage, he wasn’t brutally rejected:

The play was Marina, a translation by Artur Azevedo. It was a disaster. Eugenio was too shy. Nature had only given him a voice. He didn’t know how to step, he didn’t know how to walk, he didn’t know how to sit, he didn’t know what to do with his arms and hands. What’s more, when he spoke, his Spanish was so garbled that no one understood a word. As soon as the tenor came on stage, or rather, as soon as he began to speak, the audience started to clap. It was with pateada that Eugenio Oyanguren began his theatrical life. Anyone else would be discouraged, not him. The pateada was to be the inseparable companion of his artistic career (A Manhã, June 27th, 1945, p. 3).

It is remarkable that cases like Oyanguren’s are not the exception, but the rule. On January 4^th, 1877, the Diário de São Paulo (1877) exposed the case of the French pateada against the famous tragic poet Racine, in order to console the sad fate of Brazilian performers. If the tragic of tragics had been pateado in the illustrious French lands, why shouldn’t the artists of this backward republic be pateados too? According to the note, Racine’s bestknown play, Fedra, suffered terrible reactions from the public in their first presentations. The reason? The Duchess of Bouillon, known for promoting many poets of her time, would have acted differently towards Racine. This was because the poet was premiering a tragedy whose plot was the same as another work written by one of her protégés. In order to make the work of the notorious tragedian a huge failure, the duchess bought all the tickets to the theater where Racine’s Fedra was performed for six performances and gave them to hired pateadores.

In his treatise published in 1812, José Agostinho de Macedo points out that feet don’t always, or rather almost never, make a noise on the floor spontaneously. In other words, a pateada given to a piece in general should not be considered a translation of the spectator’s true opinion. Such was the priest’s scientific zeal to distinguish and define every type of noisy manifestation he observed in Lisbon’s theatres that he listed seven different types of pateadas, developing variations from each of them: a) simple pateada; b) mixed pateada; c) round pateada; d) purchased pateada; e) real pateada; f) chopped pateada; and g) rival pateada.

Evidently, the aforementioned case of Fedra’s initial failure is equivalent to the type of purchased pateada, according to which a large part of the audience, if not all of it, was prepared in advance to patear a certain performer or the work being staged. This was a common practice, and the people who ordered it were the most diverse figures: actresses who hired other people’s feet to sound off against their stage rival; theatrical entrepreneurs who wanted to have a public reason to expel a performer from their theater; merchants who wanted to punish a certain theater employee for debts in their business, etc.

Agostinho also notes the particular violence resulting from the purchased pateadas, since they triggered the organization of theatrical parties around the artists. The division of spectators into theatrical parties in Brazilian theater audiences was common throughout a certain period of the 19th century. The parties would organize around one artist or another and strive to show their support with great enthusiasm, often causing scandals and fights in the theatre itself (Faria; Guinsburg; Lima, 2009). It was the parties’ job to protect their elected artist and humiliate other possible rivals. Thus, there were many cases of bloodthirsty disagreements in theaters that culminated in the destruction of the theaters themselves and went on to the streets, ending only in prison. Needless to say, in the case of pateadas, it was rare for plays to end. Nineteenth-century theater, therefore, was always situated in a troubled zone, running the risk of being interrupted before its scheduled end.

Before going into the analysis of the institutions that, from the mid- 19th century onwards, operated to coerce pateadas in Brazilian theater, it is worth highlighting some characteristics of the scandalous practice.

The first point is to note that the practice of pateada does not seem to require any mark of authenticity on the part of the spectators, as evidenced by the examples of demonstrations that were orchestrated beforehand. As various articles describing it in periodicals have noted, there was also something theatrical about it, because the pateada set up a game of tricks around it. The simple list of its various modalities, as well as the roles occupied in its execution, made pateada a kind of game presupposed by a certain era and delimited by specific forms of intervention. In the Correio da manhã of May 19^th, 1935, the truthfulness of a pateada is questioned:

The pateada, however, doesn’t explain anything, because it doesn’t irrefutably prove that the play is bad or that the actor is bad, for the same reason that big ovations don’t signify the excellence of the spectacle or its performance. The bad mood of the audience and, above all, their bad manners is what gives rise to the rude protest. How many plays that have been pateadas at the first performance have gone on to have brilliant careers, and how many comedians, singers and conductors have received expressions of displeasure one day and then delirious triumphs the next? (Correio da Manhã, May 19th, 1935, p. 13).

At the same time, it is clear that patear meant making some kind of judgement about what was being observed on stage, even if it didn’t involve any intimate truth on the part of the spectator. And it is precisely at this point that this practice seems to stand out as a peculiar and not overly tutored attitude of the audience’s judgment of the scene. In this way, we can observe in the pateada an attitude that differs greatly from the one that began to emerge from some intellectual movements in the 19th century and which led to the emergence of something like theatrical criticism. The position of judgement in a pateada would therefore be unregulated, given its instability and performativity, since it would be the result of a unique and unrepeatable scene-public encounter. This bad-mannered audience would increasingly be opposed by another ideal of spectator, formed on the basis of a certain judgment that would be sustained by its truth and in constant development of its own capacity to discern and more precise ways of positioning itself critically.

Still meditating on this singular gesture of judgment established by the pateada, it is worth reaffirming that what was at stake there was often not restricted to the spectacle, but to 19th century daily life itself. The case of the purchased pateadas already tells us about this type of event: the conflicts of city life were also potentiated or resolved in the theater. Such were the cases of rival actresses who fought each other through the intervention of the audience, or the case of an actor who was known to have repeatedly beaten a child and who was publicly pateado, or even the numerous pateadas received by the police themselves in their first interventions when trying to silence the theater.

Regarding this last case, in the ^{Correio da Tarde of March 15th, 1860}, we read a description of a theatrical performance in Rio de Janeiro that had 32 artillerymen occupying the theater galleries in order to keep an eye on the pateadores. In the middle of the performance, someone from the audience shouted “Long live the force! Out with the pateada!”, to which other spectators immediately replied “Long to the pateada! Out with the force!”. Nevertheless, the whole audience joined the pateada and the performance ended. The amazing thing about the description of that night is that

[...] the guards ordered the arrest of several individuals and almost the entire audience then went outside, wanting to surrender the entire prison. However, three people were ordered to be arrested. One of them is a National Guard officer and block inspector, the same one who, a few days ago, arrested slaves in the act who were indulging in gambling and the greatest immoralities, had the displeasure of seeing these slaves released by this Mr. Police Delegate, even before receiving the respective part (Correio da Tarde, March 15th, 1860a, p. 2).

The result of the night was as follows: after the prisoners had been escorted to jail, a crowd of civilians tried to free them from the police and celebrated their victory in many of the city’s alleys during the early hours of the morning, forcing the officer to tell the delegate that the prisoners had been taken from them by the population. Furthermore, if the issues that led to the pateadas did not necessarily emerge from the spectator-stage relationship, the conflicts also went beyond and overflowed the theaters, resulting in long days of clashes or celebrations on the streets of the city.

From the excerpts presented, we can see how the relationship between stage and audience in the 19th century took on a tone of impermanent and radically singular judgment: it depended on a series of factors for its consecration, including some rather trivial or petty ones. According to one anonymous author’s precise observation in an article in the Correio da Tarde, the motives behind some of the pateadas were actually quite vulgar. According to the author, the pateadores in question

[...] they form a small oligarchy that aspires to all the rights of feudality, including that of lord. They pateam the artists off because the director displeases them, or because the first actress isn’t condescending enough, or to spite a happier rival, or to satisfy a spiteful friend, or to take revenge on an enemy, or because the director won’t let them into the ladies’ dressing room, or finally to inculcate themselves as intelligent and difficult (Correio da Tarde, Jan. 19th, 1862, p. 4).

In this way, instead of a precise way of judging a particular play, there was a succession of events, often distinct from each other, which suspended any possibility of the ultimate truth of judgment and taste.

The second point to be considered is the fact that pateada was seen as an inalienable right of free citizens. In the November 25^th, 1857 edition of Correio Mercantil, one can read yet another defense of pateada against the successive police interventions in the theaters of the Court. Using as its main argument the fact that “in all civilized countries, the right to manifest the taste of the audience would be a sacred right, guaranteed and respected by their own legislation” (^{Correio Mercantil, Nov. 25th, 1857}), the article goes on to point out that both clapping and stamping would be the legitimate manifestation of the personal taste of any citizen living in a free country.

A case of popular uprising in Brussels is narrated by Quintino Bocaiúva, with the aim of defending the Brazilian pateadores. On a particular night when the police occupied a theater in order to curb any aggressive demonstrations, the audience (described by Bocaiúva as the people) reacted as follows:

The people, who also understood that they could not submit to this unjustifiable abuse of authority without breaking their dignity, and who at the same time wanted to give irrefutable proof of their praiseworthy moderation, stood up en masse, as if it had been agreed, went out quietly, asked for their tickets and demanded their money. Only those who were part of the Court remained in the theater that night. In this way, the Belgian people are punishing the police authority and the company beautifully and without stick or stone; the latter in its purse, and the former in its pride (Diário do Rio de Janeiro, Oct. 19th, 1854, emphasis added).

And at the time of the first arrests of unruly spectators, the actions of the police were so strange to all citizens that many notes questioning the massive presence of the institution in everyday life in the city were published:

Mr. Chief of Police deserves our consideration, both for his position and for his personal qualities. But as the representative of a free people, we must point out to him that the police are not a sovereign and capricious power, but a secondary power whose primary duty is to protect the dignity of the citizen and not to offend it. The theater is not an establishment of the State, nor is it the patrimonial house of any person: it is a recreation to which all the people contribute, either through lottery tickets or by paying for admission tickets. When the theater is the patrimony of individuals or privileged classes, then the taste of the spectators should be guided by the pleasure of those who regulate them; but if the public enjoys itself at their expense, the police should not be so bellicose in a peaceful place, where they receive them free of charge to perform the functions of a conciliatory justice of the peace and not that of an inexorable recruiter (Correio Mercantil, Nov 25th, 1857).

In addition to the refusal of strict policing in theaters, there was the idea of a theater that could be attended by many sections of the population. However, it was from the denial of this quasi-democratic ideal that, throughout the second half of the 19th century, critical currents were formed that began to call for the restriction of theater attendance to only certain groups of cultivated spectators. The ideas of recreation, amusement and distraction promoted as the aim of the performances were also displaced in favor of an art that could educate, civilize and moralize the people, through the discussion of so-called serious issues. These transformations, as will be seen below, would end up creating an artificial split between popular and elite theatrical forms⁴, they also served to organize attempts to discipline the behavior of spectators, regardless of which of these theatrical environments they were in.

The third and final point regarding the possibilities for action opened up by a practice like pateada is that its social presence could situate the very idea of art in the spectrum of a tension.

The Diário do Rio de Janeiro (1852), on October 17^th, 1852, reports on how artists were not figures of authority and general respectability until then. One of its articles presents the case of the foreign actress Madame Stoltz who, while on tour in Brazil, was allegedly cornered in the theater after attempting to escape because she had been pateada. The police prevented her from leaving and she had to return to the stage to finish the performance, despite being booed by the audience. There were many cases like that of the pateada actress, and the rule was clear: at the audience’s request, any actor, playwright and theater manager had to stand in the spotlight, silent, to receive the audience’s rejection.

It was also a practice that put the theater itself at risk, generating numerous economic losses. During a pateada, it was rare for the theater’s chandeliers, seats, carpets and lights to remain intact. In fact, this kind of vandalism that followed the public rejection of the plays would even have been socially authorized for some time as another of the spectator’s rights. Throughout the first decades of the 19th century, there was nothing surprising about the fact that, at the expense of the poor service provided by theatrical entrepreneurs, some cushions, crystal and furniture were completely destroyed as payment for the torturous performance:

When their fondest wishes of bringing Talma do Rocio to the stage were thwarted, the admirers of this genius felt they had to take revenge in any way they could: the poor chandelier paid the costs, by breaking a few panes of its glass; the chairs were also damaged; and the general was not forgotten. – The lamps in the corridors also deserved public attention, and one waiter was slapped half a dozen times so that the day would remain imprinted in his memory (Diário do Rio de Janeiro, Feb. 5th, 1841, p. 3).

Whip and Thunderbolt

Some theatrical events led to weeks of opinion articles published in 19th century Brazilian periodicals. Their editors often gave space to both defenses and accusations of certain subjects in order to allow these issues to be debated from various perspectives. That said, it is important to remember the question that guided many of these theatrical debates and which was precisely defined by an anonymous author in ^{Correio da Tarde (January 19th, 1862)}: “Should pateadas in the theater be tolerated or effectively repressed?”. From the 1850s onwards, we can see the intensification of publications arguing against the legality of noisy demonstrations.

The fact is that pateadas had become a major problem. Firstly, because they were taking over theaters in urban centers. They often made it impossible for performances to reach the end and, in situations where it broke out right at the beginning of the spectacle, they made the whole audience go home earlier than expected. Any progress in the field of dramatic arts, as many artists complained, was threatened by the day-to-day dealings with rowdy audiences.

Also, as noted in the articles describing the destruction of theater interiors, this event caused economic losses for theater entrepreneurs. It was a practice that gradually came to be understood as a gesture that was purely a waste of energy and urgently needed to be regulated.

As an alternative to suppressing the incidence of pateadas, the idea was to transform the theater audiences into something like a “well-disciplined regiment, applauding and disapproving only when authority permits” (^{Correio Mercantil, Feb. 2nd, 1856}). Even so, a new impasse arose with this resolution: the question arose as to what would be the best means, or what practices, institutions and social actors would be the most appropriate to activate in order to achieve the disciplinary objective.

Of course, in order to transform habits so ingrained in audiences, cooperation between certain institutional and discursive forces would have to be more effective and intertwined. Now, a short text, Contra as pateadas, written by a bachelor from the Faculdade de Direito do Largo São Francisco (a Law School) in 1860, precisely defines the two institutions that would vertically invest their forces targeting the body of the theatrical spectator throughout the 19th century:

To the audience (many are the excepted):

Good men hide when they reach the stage where insults are committed with impunity. There are men who try to attack every character or individuality without exception, for a joke they make: they are as evil as the insects that the earth produces in its hours of labor! – In their seditious assertions, in their reprehensible acts, they aristocratize the same virtue in order to have the right to trample on it; they democratize outrage and sometimes crime in order to be able to perpetrate it without fear of justice. [...] What we are saying is not reducible to a hyperbole: what has been happening lately in the theater deserves other words. Conceal the force of the thunderbolt that only hurts, but not that of the whip that crushes down: the thunderbolt is the press – the whip is the police. When obscurity approaches the focus of light, its annihilation is its victory. It is impossible for the truth to be in such a limited group – which is the machine of the pateadas (Revista Dramática, June 3rd, 1860b, p. 33, emphasis added).

The whip and the thunderbolt; the lash and the lightning bolt; the education of the body – discipline – and of the soul – normalization: it would be through this coupling of forces that the extinction of a practice that was once so present inside Brazilian theaters could be carried out. Enter the pateada stage, then, the police, understood here as an institution whose action is vertical and disciplinary, and the press, whose manifestation is more precisely through an emerging practice, theatrical criticism, and whose strategy is a kind of subjective and pedagogical normalization of the spectators’ behavior.

In addition, the figure of the pateador himself would come to be seen as the epicenter of moral inferiority and taste. This new moralizing place is made explicit by the precise metaphor used by the author of the aforementioned lines, who compares the rowdy spectator to the worms that come to light, making earthquakes evident. Refuting the very being of the pateador, both institutional forces – the police and the press – would work together to forge a new body of true knowledge about theatrical practices and the consequent formation of a new type of cultural subject.

In December 1827, the general intendant of the Police of the Court of the Empire of Brazil, Francisco Alberto Teixeira de Aragão, was responsible for issuing an edict to regulate the operation of theaters and the behavior of the public, specifically the so-called “popular” public (Giron, 2004). Under this decree, it was forbidden to enter theaters with weapons, canes and hats, as well as the sale of products in the audience and the spontaneous reading of poems by spectators during performances. The aim was to protect the artists from any uncomfortable attitude that could be directed at them by the public. For this reason, it was also forbidden to disturb the “tranquility of the spectators with loud voices or boos before the curtain is lifted or during the entrances; during the performance, it is free to moderately show one’s pleasure or displeasure at the merits of the spectacle” (^{O Spectator Brasileiro, Dec. 3rd, 1827, p. 1}).

On June 1^st, 1833, an imperial notice entitled Instruções para a Polícia do Teatro São Pedro (Instructions for the Police of the São Pedro Theatre) was published, expanding on the articles already present in the rules decreed by Aragão. Researcher Amilton Monteiro de Oliveira (1993) transcribed them in their entirety in his doctoral thesis entitled O teatro, as normas e a imagem do ator. Here, however long the excerpt may be, we have opted for the same strategy of verbatim transcription, with the aim of bringing to light the regulatory weight that was coming to bear on the theaters of large Brazilian cities:

Article 1st – No spectacle other than the one announced shall be staged, and it shall begin promptly at the appointed time; however, if for unforeseen reasons it is necessary to change the spectacle or start it later, the audience shall be given due satisfaction: the same shall apply when the intervals extend beyond the usual and indispensably necessary time and, in this case, in order to make the delay less noticeable, the orchestra, by order of the Inspector, shall perform a piece of music;

Article 2nd – During the performance, the spectators will be seated and uncovered; however, if a member of the Imperial Family is present, they will not only be uncovered, but will also be standing and facing the Imperial Box; Article 3rd – It is permissible to give moderate signs of approval or disapproval, but not to disturb the tranquility with loud voices and boos, nor even to talk in a way that could distract attention. No speeches or poetry may be recited from the boxes or the audience, except on solemn days during entrances, with the permission of the Inspector, who must order the orchestra to play when such recitals must cease for any reason;

Article 4th – If any actor, by gestures or words, offends public decency on stage or commits any abuse contrary to the morals and respect due to the Public, they will be arrested as soon as they go backstage and sentenced to prison after finishing the part they have to perform;

Article 5th – For the duration of the spectacle, all persons who do not belong to the spectacle’s staff are prohibited from entering the stage;

Article 6th – The ushers will not allow any person to enter the audience with a truncheon, cane, umbrella or weapon; there will be a place near the entrance for such objects to be deposited, and the owner, or the person specially responsible for their safekeeping, will be given a numbered slip, after which they will be returned to them;

Article 7th – The Inspector will employ in the Theatre Police, according to the scale he organizes, the Officers of the Judges of the Peace and the Police Officers, assigning those he deems necessary to guard the Audience, the corridors and the rooms; they will carry a medal with the insignia – Police – which they will only present when it is necessary to make themselves known;

Article 8th – No people will be allowed to stand in public entrance or exit doors, stairways, corridors or aisles;

Article 9th – If any of the articles of these Police Regulations are infringed in the audience or outside the theater, the Police Officer will civilly summon the offender to immediately accompany him to the Inspector’s office. If he refuses, he will show him the medal mentioned in article 7th, reiterating the summons; if he does not obey, he will arrest him on the Inspector’s orders; if he is outside the stage or box, he will immediately make the arrest effective by the means that the Law has made available to the Justice Officers for this purpose; however, if he is inside the stage or box, he will wait for him to leave, keeping an eye on him at all times;

Article 10th – Shortly before the time appointed for the spectacle to begin, the corridors and halls will be illuminated; and after it has ended, they will remain so for as long as is reasonably necessary for spectators to leave without haste. All doors that facilitate exit must be opened;

Article 11th – No more spectators will be allowed in than the number corresponding to the seats in the audience; nor will surplus tickets or tickets for a higher price than advertised be distributed;

Article 12th – The Inspector shall designate in advance the place where the carriages and horses are to be stowed so that they do not obstruct entry and exit, and shall assign a patrol to monitor compliance with this article;

Article 13th – The Inspector will request a more or less reinforced Military Guard according to the circumstances, which will be stationed in the usual place, and will distribute sentries wherever convenient to maintain good order according to the Inspector’s instructions;

Article 14th – The Theater Manager must have the necessary utensils ready in a convenient place in case of fire; if this precaution is not taken, the Inspector will order the theater to be closed;

Article 15th – In everything that concerns the regularity, decency and punctuality of the Spectacle, the Actors and others employed at the Theater must promptly comply with the Inspector’s Orders aimed at the proper performance of their duties;

Article 16th – Actors and others employed at the Theater who do not comply with the Inspector’s orders, as well as any other persons who violate the provisions of these police regulations, will be prosecuted as disobedient, in the form of articles 203 and 204 of the Code of Procedure, and will incur the penalties of article 128 of the Criminal Code (Aragão apud Oliveira, 1993, p. 79).

It is clear to see how police regulations were intended to affect the bodies of spectators as well as actors and other theatrical employees. Whether efficient or not, it is clear that the police presence in theaters and their task of disciplining the behaviors aimed to contain the violence committed in the audience-stage relationship. This presence was also aimed at forming a new understanding of the figure of the theatrical spectator, who should have increasingly docile habits. In this way, the police institution would be a germinal force for the rarefication of theatrical scandals throughout the 19th century.

The police, however, due to their vertical and generally violent actions, proved to be an insufficient force to protect the 19th century public. In the game between conduct and counter-conduct, policing actions generated, as we have seen, rebellious responses. Forms of pedagogical intervention, however, whether via the press or from the perspective of forming a cultivated and moderate outlook in the 19th century public, fulfilled the purpose of normalization more effectively and without extravagant expenditure of energy.

Guiding and directing the spectator’s conduct became a continuous task: guarding them from their body – their behavior and noises – to the field of their reading, their thinking, producing a certain type of specialized gaze in favor of a more dilettante one. The impact, therefore, of a disciplinary force combined with the work of governing souls. As stated by Michel Foucault (2006; 2008a; 2008b), this was a process of population governance that modern societies went through, understood not only as societies whose end of power was only discipline, but also normalization (which does not imply a normalized society, since gestures of resistance and counterconduct remain). According to the French thinker, the difference between the law and the norm is as follows: while the law (prohibition of conduct) affects from the point of view of vertical regulation, the norm (valorization of conduct) would affect from a horizontal point of view, in the key of selfregulation of individuals, often through an educational approach.

It should also be noted that one of the main targets of this type of proposal issued by the combination of the police and the pedagogical training of audiences was the poor. It was this audience, made up of the lower strata of society, that posed a new problem for the theatrical discussions of the time. It was the resistance with which a portion of the population positioned itself when confronted by police harassment or vertical moralizing attitudes. In this sense, the problem of the cultural management of this section of the population gives rise to the answer to the following question: what would differentiate police practices from those of a pedagogical nature? An article in ^{Revista Dramática (May 6th, 1860a, p. 7)} expands on this problem:

In ancient times, two very different, very distinct things were – theater and police: today, to say one or the other is the same thing. If, then, the theater is so closely linked to the police, if the latter has taken such great care to curb abuses, to curb the turbulent; if the people, knowing reason, today abandon the savage use of reproaching with insults; what is the reason why the police do not cure everything for the benefit of the theater, why they do not ban newborns in the boxes, the assaults that shouldn’t be allowed? The police will reply that they have done this; we agree, but we disapprove the means. The police, on many occasions, have been prudent, we justify it, but on others, they have made fools of the spectators; for example: – What do the police intend when they send two policemen to the theater door – with guns and silenced bayonets? What were they up to when they sent ten armed men in March, including a soldier who climbed up on benches and hurled insults at the audience from there? Is this soldier, sent by the police when an actor was called to the scene, a faithful example of what the police are? – Because he showed nothing of gravity or respect!

Over the following decades, the pateada became less and less frequent and its process of extinction became clear. Actress Luiza Nazareth, interviewed by the newspaper Diário da Noite in the 1930s, corroborated her support for the extinct pateadas, lamenting their disappearance in 20th century theater. According to the actress, in the old days of the pateada

[...] the public knew how to separate the wheat from the chaff... And the artists worked harder, even more ardently. The booing, the pateada, shouldn’t ever be abolished, because their existence provided an even greater stimulus to the artist. The prospect of being booed forced the artist to study their part and represent it with a certain amount of care. Today, the very indifference of the public makes the artist shy away from an effort that they already know beforehand will result in pure loss, because the audience no longer has the eyes to see and judge the value of an interpretation (Diário da Noite, Aug. 6th, 1930, (Diário da Noite, 6 ago. 1930, p. 5).

Fear of losing his place

Perhaps it was because he feared the formation of this audience of disciplined and normative judgment that José Agostinho de Macedo wrote some euphoric and enthusiastic last lines of the pateada at the end of his treatise:

And you, oh people, oh judge always whole, before whom no theatrical pedant is or can be defined, neither by Lúcio Crasso nor by Marco Antônio; you, oh people, who by indestructible instinct always applaud what is good and scandalize what is bad, I ask you [...] to assault the theater with pateadas: don’t shiver, [...] let’s purge the theater, just as it should serve to purge the passions. Show then the rules. [...] Pateadas and more pateadas; and as long as there are no good plays, original or translated (and by a good hand), regular, honest, decent, that instruct while delighting, that can be seen by the good man, the serious matron, the honest maiden, the morigerous father of the family, the curious young man, the sensible poet, the circumspect magistrate, the stern foreigner, declare, oh people, eternal war on the socalled brighteners: pateada with them, pateada, and more pateada, and forgive the limitation (Macedo, 1812, p. 131).

There are reports that pateadas were resumed in Lisbon theaters as a response to the censorship of the Salazar dictatorship. An article written by Portuguese director Joaquim Benite, entitled A pateada e a saúde do teatro, was censored in Lisbon newspapers in 1970 for debating the constant opposition to the return to the practice of patear circulating in the Portuguese press. A defender of the practice, Benite mocked some of the population who argued that the theater should behave differently from soccer stadiums. The author also insisted on rejecting any search for criteria that could justify the act of patear: there would be no possibility of establishing an arbiter of taste. Thus, everyone would have the right to patear as much or as little as they wanted. According to Benite (2007),

[...] for years our theaters quietly breathed the routine of applause at the end of spectacles, the routine of intervals, the routine of commonplaces, the routine of staging à la D. Maria II, the routine of lack of ideas and immobility. And what happened? What voices were raised calling for the spectators’ right to applaud to be curtailed? What criteria were put forward to justify this applause? No... The plays were bad, the spectacles were bad, the critics agreed, the actors also agreed – but the audience applauded (and continues to applaud, by the way...) and nobody protested. On the contrary, everyone was very satisfied. So why isn’t the same true of the pateada? In principle, shouldn’t we assume that people’s behavior towards applause should be the same as their behavior towards (legal) expressions of disapproval? Well, let’s answer out loud what everyone knows and doesn’t have the courage to say: it’s fear that drives those who attack public irresponsibility in this way. The fear of losing their quietly and diligently earned places in the sun.

Perhaps it would be useful, once again, to address the noise coming from our history and our paws in order to throw some questions in the direction of contemporary theatrical practices, making them waver in their desire for tutelage, be it police or pedagogical.

Notes

• 1
  The journalistic excerpts presented here are part of a larger archive assembled in our master’s research (Pimentel, 2018), in which we conducted a search for the word pateada in the system of the Hemeroteca Digital of the Biblioteca Nacional, in order to get in touch with some of the issues surrounding the existence of this practice within theaters. The practice of pateada, generally told as an anecdote in some historiographies of the national theater, was not at all lateral from the point of view of its daily impact in nineteenth-century Brazil, appearing in hundreds of writings about the spectacle nights of the time.
• 2
  Regarding the people who had access to this journalistic production, researcher Priscila Renata Gimenez (2019) observes that, although the Brazilian reading public at the time was restricted to a white, male and literate elite, the texts printed in these periodicals circulated more than we might imagine. With regard to the entertainment headings, not only did an average group of budding readers who frequented public reading spaces have access to these texts, but periodicals were also read aloud in social spaces frequented by illiterate people, provoking debates and discussions in the city’s daily life about the events of spectacle nights.
• 3
  The soles of some pateadores’ shoes were covered in metal studs so that they made even more noise when they hit the ground.
• 4
  The so-called teatro ligeiro (fast theater) was intended for the lower classes of the population, while the teatro sério (serious theater) was supposed to be the cultural home of the literate and participants in a supposedly civilized world. Despite this division, in general, elite audiences frequented the lower entertainment theaters and vice versa.
• Availability of research data: the dataset supporting the results of this study is published in this article.
• This original paper, translated by Thuila Farias Ferreira, is also published in Portuguese in this issue of the journal.
• The approval reviews for the publication of the article are available at: https://seer.ufrgs.br/index.php/presenca/libraryFiles/downloadPublic/1001

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• TEIXEIRA, Rafael. Espetáculo deprimente. Veja Rio, Rio de Janeiro, p. 1, 2 jun. 2017. Disponível em: https://vejario.abril.com.br/cidade/uso-celular-teatrocinema-falta-de-educacao-rj Acesso em: 24 jan. 2024.
  » https://vejario.abril.com.br/cidade/uso-celular-teatrocinema-falta-de-educacao-rj
• VAL, Gisela Maria do. Um terremoto, uma biblioteca, um jornal: a emergência de uma nova ordem social pelos impressos luso-brasileiros nos séculos XVIII e XIX. 2016. 170 f. Tese (Doutora em Didática, Teorias de Ensino e Praticas Escolares) – Faculdade de Educação, Universidade de São Paulo, São Paulo, 2016.

• Editors in charge: Ana Wegner; Rafaella Uhiara

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  20 Dec 2024
• Date of issue
  2024

History

• Received
  26 Jan 2024
• Accepted
  31 July 2024