Memory and inclusion at the century-old Martins Pena Theater School

Abstract

This article records and describes a documentary research study conducted by observing data related to Persons with Disabilities (PWD) in historical documents from the 1950s, concerning students of the then "Martins Pena Dramatic School," now "Martins Pena State Technical School of Theater" (FAETEC), belonging to the "Luiza Barreto Leite Memory Center." The research specifically focuses on medical certificates required for admission to the institution and exams for the subjects "Art of Acting" and "Characterization." The objective is to address an issue that arose during the cleaning of the aforementioned historical documents: to verify whether these writings indicated that a person with disabilities, in this specific time frame, was not considered fit to attend the school. To elucidate this question, information was collected and a database was composed from these sources. The analysis of this data was conducted both quantitatively and qualitatively, primarily dialoguing with the studies of Stuart Hall and Romeu Kazumi Sassaki.