On January 7, 2020, CBTIJ/ASSITEJ Brazil held its first public activity in celebration of its 25th anniversary. In this meeting, held at the emblematic Arena Theater of Porto Alegre and coordinated by Cleiton Echeveste, CBTIJ chairman, and Viviane Juguero, representative of the Rio Grande do Sul unit, the three axes that guide its actions were addressec: cooperation, qualification, and contextualization. The intention is to encourage collaborative actions that are under the contextual realities of each performance and that are based on the specificities of theater for children. In this sense, it was defined that CBTIJ’s first action, in 2020, is to raise awareness of the qualification required for both artists and mediation professionals, whether as cultural agents, commissions to evaluate programs, festivals and awards, or educators who choose the pieces to which children will have access. Theater for children demands the same artistic knowledge required for theater for adults plus the reflections on the specificities of childhood. The people responsible for the creation and evaluation of the plays must have qualifications about the child’s ways of communicating and understanding life as well as about the importance of art concerning children’s elaborations that echo in their ways of expressing emotion and interacting with the world surrounding them.
Similar meetings will be held all over Brazil during the celebrations of CBTIJ/ASSITEJ Brasil 25th anniversary, involving other theatre practitioners from other Brazilian cities and states.
