The "Formation of a New Man" at the Lens of the Social Theater

The Social Theater was another integrated force within the body of anarchist practices linked to unions and the popular self-education known as Libertarian Pedagogy, which was experimented with in Brazil in the early decades of the 20th century. The concept of the “formation of a new man,” common in the political literature strongly marked by the positivism emerging in the dissident movements of the time, arises from the idea of the integral formation of the individual—that is, their physical health, intellectual abilities, and ethical practices in collectives, understood as moral. It involved breaking with hierarchical models and proposing an education that values autonomy, creativity, and the collective construction of knowledge. Through the exercise of theater, participants are encouraged to imagine new realities and to experiment, on stage, with other possibilities of being and acting in the world. Based on the writings of the French syndicalist magazine L'Art Social, in Brazil, political-social actors such as the cartoonist Miguel Capplonch and the actor Romualdo Figueiredo developed new local forms of social art, propagated, among others, by the Social Theater group, directed by the seamstress and revolutionary Maria Angelina Soares, in São Paulo. Thus, the Social Theater not only stages social issues but also lives and reinvents them with its participants, suggesting that the transformation of social structures is closely connected to the transformation of the individuals who comprise them. This formative approach seeks a new subjectivity that, by breaking free from the chains of passivity and oppression, enables the construction of a more just and free society, in which the “new man” is both a subject and an author of social change.