Towards the Post-Modern Art Week: Anthropophagic Reflexes in the Brazilian Larp Scenes

This essay by Tadeu Rodrigues Iuama applies Oswald de Andrade's concept of anthropophagy, the cultural metaphor of critically digesting the Other, to larp (live-action role-playing) in Brazil. Its central thesis is that anthropophagy is inherent to larp: character construction is itself a process of digesting media and biographical references, and the bleed between player and character reinforces this exchange. The argument is framed through the Brazilian Modern Art Week of 1922 and its legacy across literature, theater, cinema, music, and education, and it draws on Vilém Flusser's communicology and Augusto Boal's Theater of the Oppressed to argue that larp's dialogical structure can challenge hierarchical power relations.

The theoretical core rests on a comparison between larp and Boal's theater, and between Flusser's four communicational structures (circle, amphitheater, pyramid, and bundle). Larp is presented as essentially dialogic, a counterpoint to the discursive imbalance of mass media and authoritarian communication. Boal's concept of metaxis, the interplay between fictional and social worlds, is identified as the mechanism through which players rehearse changes to social reality. The essay acknowledges that its approach is not a panacea and that the distinction between Boal's theater and larp, notably the role of the director or game master, requires care.

The empirical component is a single case study, the Brazilian larp Evangelho 2020, created in 2021 in response to the social and political crisis of 2020. The game uses a live-streamed talk-show format in which players, as evangelists, build characters from real social media profiles of supporters of the president, and it blurs the boundary between players and audience. The author presents it as a parody and an instrument of political awareness.

The essay is a qualitative, theoretical, and autoethnographic inquiry rather than an empirical study, drawing on bibliographic research and the author's own participation in the Brazilian larp community. It acknowledges that documentation of Brazilian larp scenes is scarce and fragmented, which limits the generalizability of its claims, and it presents its conclusions explicitly as an opening for further discussion rather than a closed argument.