Do circo escola à escola de circo: caminhos pedagógicos e cenários políticos na história da implantação da Escola Nacional de Circo Luiz Olimecha

Abstract

This study aims to understand and contribute to the composition of theLuiz OlimechaNational Circus School creation history, and to investigate the teaching-learning process of circus art practiced within circus families, prior to the creation of the school, and, furthermore, analyze how this “pedagogy” was applied in the implementation of ENCLO (Escola Nacional de Circo Luiz Olimecha), since the teachers invited to compose the teaching staff were mostly from traditional circus families. To this end, I begin with a bibliographic review about the origins of circuses and circus artists, an overview of how this art has evolved over time, highlighting the arrival of the circus in Brazilian territory, as well as the importance of circus families as an environment of belonging, training and maintenance of circus art. This work also provides an analysis of the survival and evolution of circus art and the need to create circus schools, mainly the National Circus School. When telling the story of the creation of ENCLO, the research highlights the main agents responsible for its idealization and implementation, and also the most striking historical and political facts that influenced its creation. Through interviews carried out with ENCLO teachers and students, I was able to learn about the teaching-learning process of circus art practiced in the environment of circus families and, by analyzing the foundations of thisempirical, ritual and ancestral “pedagogy”,I was also able to learn not only about the relationship between circus performers and formal schools, but also the story of how these interviewed teachers were invited to teach at ENCLO. In this way, the study addresses the pedagogical challenges faced in the transition process from the family circus-schoolteaching modeltowards a new one, characterized by the inception of circus art pedagogy within an institutional structure such as the National Circus School.Finally, I seek to analyze the transition in the way of teaching circus, and ENCLO structure itself, from two perspectives: memory and history. In both perspectives, the relationships between orality and institutionalization, between tradition and renewal in the teaching of circus arts stand out, and the study of these relationships intends, then, to offer subsidies for a reflection on the development of ENCLO, from the perspective of history focused on to the past, with a view to safeguarding its ancestral links and its living memory, as well as from the perspective of history focused on the future, as a way of understanding the impulse of this development towards the future.