Paper short abstract:

This paper takes some notes from a reality TV show named “Dançando na Broadway”. Broadcast by a Brazilian channel in 2012, it exhibited six young Brazilian actors and actresses living in New York competing to find out who would be the most prepared artist to join Broadway’s stage.

Paper long abstract:

Theatre is generally taken to be a local phenomenon, limited to a specific region, yet shows, artists, and scripts have transited intensely around the globe ever since at least the seventeenth century. In this paper, I take some notes from a reality TV show named “Dançando na Broadway”. Broadcast by a Brazilian channel in 2012, it exhibited six young Brazilian actors and actresses living in New York competing to find out who would be the most prepared artist to join Broadway’s stage. Every day, they learned a song and choreography of a musical and performed for a jury of professionals from American musical theater. At the end of each episode, they would choose a winner. Whoever had the highest number of victories would be the season champion. This paper will examine the uses of the notion of “truth” in this reality TV show. The research has a double objective: identify the social references mobilized to produce what could be “true” and “false” on the scene; and analyze which bodies were able to materialize the “truth” of a song/character. Criteria of gender, race, and sexuality relate to aesthetic conventions to guarantee “verisimilitude” to the theatre scene and to the reality of the tv show, particularly when considering standards from different countries such as Brazil and the US.