●  Biography · Rio Grande do Norte, 1973 — Barcelona

Between body, space and atmosphere

Playwright, director, actor and visual artist, he has been developing a language marked by territorial tensions, class relations, racism, LGBTQIAPN+phobia, machismo and existential and political questions.

Over the years, he has built a body of work organized not by fixed disciplines, but by crossings. Between body, space and atmosphere, his practice inhabits zones of transdisciplinarity, where the boundaries between languages become permeable and the artistic process asserts itself as an experience of passage, friction and risk.

Social Greenhouse and Arte-Passagem

PhD candidate in Artistic Creation at the University of Aveiro (Portugal), he is developing the research SOCIAL GREENHOUSE: Body, plastic and Systemic Oppression in a transdisciplinary artistic practice, investigating contemporary mechanisms of control, conditioning and erasure of bodies.

Along this path came performances such as Opressão em Escultura, O Nome do Corpo Plastificado, Arte-Passagem, Ao Redor, Entre e Além and Social Greenhouse – O.S.

Within this research, he develops the concept of Arte-Passagem, understood as a practice grounded in the crossing of artistic experience, refusing repetition, fixed scripts or formal stability. His practice operates in a continuous state of displacement, where body, action, environment and materiality become inseparable parts of the creative process.

What resists

In the visual arts, his paintings do not seek to represent the idealized body, but what resists. Incomplete faces, deformed figures, fragmented and patched-up bodies run through series such as Corpo-Retalhos, where desire, disappearance, affective precarity and survival coexist on a single surface.

Words for the stage

With a Master’s in Stage Direction from the Escola Superior de Teatro e Cinema in Lisbon (2018) and trained at the Escola de Teatro Ewerton de Castro in São Paulo (1999), as a playwright he has written more than 70 plays, with over 40 productions staged in Brazil, Portugal and Spain. He published Cinzeiro – 17 Obras de João Fábio Cabral (NVersos, 2013), which gathers part of his dramatic writing.

AMesMa Cia and other stages

He is a founder of AMesMa Cia, alongside Andreia Garcia, Vinicius Calamari, Lê Fazzio, Laura Salvatore, Clodd Dias, Cleyton Nascimento, Alice Stamato, Sheyla Makeda, Shalana Costa, Danielli Guerreiro and Giovana Quinto, creating works such as Bob e Negro, Cidade Silenciosa, Algumas Laranjas and Janeiro.

He has also written and directed productions such as Tanto, Aguardo Notícias da Polônia, Monólogos Sobre Você Enquanto o Horror Mastiga Flores, Eu Não Sou Daqui, Casulo Bárbaro, Border Body and, now, Social Greenhouse.

In front of the camera

As an actor, he has taken part in theatre and film projects, appearing in films such as Jonas (2016), A Busca (2013) and Getsêmani (2011). He also wrote the screenplays for audiovisual works such as Darluz (2009), Lugar pra Ninguém (2016), Casa de Família (2020) and Habitación (2021).

During the pandemic, he wrote O Inferno Não Tem Travesseiro, a series about femicide and violence against women, and co-directed, with Andreia Garcia, the episodes filmed across São Paulo, Los Angeles, New York, Natal, Lisbon, Barcelona, Curitiba, Salgueiro and Paris.

Creating with others

His path also includes founding Cia Café Poesia – Teatro Adolescente, alongside Fausto Brunini, Fabiana Carlucci, Vander de Sousa, Camila Grazzano, Maurício de Barros, Thaís Barros and Roberta Soares.

He also created Espaço Cultural Fuá, with Fabiana Carlucci and Rogério Harmitt (São Paulo, 2011–2012), a project that brought together theatre, music, visual arts, poetry and performance. He also conceived Leitura de Boteco in São Paulo, an initiative devoted to readings of plays in bars.

The first novel

Today, besides developing Social Greenhouse and the Corpo-Retalhos series, he is writing his first novel, a work that blends displacement, fictional autobiography, non-belonging, loneliness and social critique as an extension of the same artistic inquiry into existing as the contemporary body.