Janaina Leite
Actress, director, playwright and post-doctoral student at USP's School of Communication and Arts. She is one of the founders of Grupo XIX de Teatro de São Paulo, with whom she has created several award-winning shows that have toured all over the country and abroad. In parallel to her career with the XIX, she conceived the plays Festa de Separação: um documentário cênico, Conversas com meu Pai, Stabat Mater (winner of the Shell award for dramaturgy in 2020) and published book Autoescrituras performativas: do diário à cena by Editora Perspectiva, consolidating her research on autobiography and documentary in theater. She also published the dramaturgy of the plays Conversas com meu Pai (text by Alexandre Dal Farra) and Stabat Mater with the publishing house Javali.
Continuing her research into theater and ponography, which began with Stabat Mater, she created Camming 101 nights (a virtual show created through PROAC LAB) and Story of the Eye - a porn-noir fairy tale, which was awarded the 13th Zé Renato Theater Prize and co-produced by MITsp. On 2024, premiered Deeper with the support of Itaú Cultural's “Arte no Metaverso” call for proposals. The work had already been presented, in the work-in-progress format, at the Edinburgh Festival in Scotland, the Santiago a Mil Festival in Chile and the Mix Brasil Festival in São Paulo. Also in 2024, she premiered the show The trials and passions of unfamous women at Brixton House in London with co-production by Lift Festival and Clean Break Companhia.
She also guides study groups, courses, lectures and curatorships throughout Brazil, as well as the “Authorial Laboratories” she has been developing since 2012, having already guided dozens of artistic processes. She was the researcher in focus at MITsp 2020, with several actions focused on her research.
STORY OF THE EYE
a loose adaptation by Janaina Leite
based on the work of the same name by Georges Bataille
In a loose adaptation of Georges Bataille's famous novel “Story of the Eye”, Janaina Leite continues her research into theater and pornography. With 12 performers on stage, including amateurs, professionals and sex workers, the show, a hybrid between fiction and non-fiction, adopts the very structure of “Story of the Eye”, divided into “fable” and “reminiscences” to tell the story of three teenagers in their sexual discoveries. Between the ostentatious theatricality and the explicit pornography, the show recreates this noir fable between the vulgar and the sublime, the mundane and the cosmic, the ordinary and the abyssal.
Deeper
"Deeper" is an immersive experience that combines art and 3D reality to explore and question the body and consciousness in extreme situations. The territories of madness, sex, psychedelia and proximity to death show an extensive plasticity of what we understand today as human consciousness, which also happens in the investigation of technologies that use virtual reality. The project launches hypotheses about a new language, which has unexplored potential in the dissociation between the physical body and the virtual body, real space and digital space. The experience takes place mainly through 3D glasses and includes an installation by visual artist Leandra Espírito Santo.
