In order to understand the education of sensibilities that occurred during these presentations, we analyze the motivations of the amateur group in choosing the operettas presented and distributing the roles to the actors.
The sources used were newspaper clippings, concert programs, operetta manuscripts, and books that belonged to the Clube Teatral Arthur Azevedo and to the amateur Antonio Guerra. We observed that girls and marriageable young women showed their skills during the performances, which can be understood as an extension of school and salons. They reinforced hegemonic sensibilities, ways of qualifying the world, to understand and experience gender relations.
This analysis has provided evidence of the set of hegemonic and collective sensibilities of that social group. These data have enabled a closer look at what would have been the feelings and sensibilities produced or provoked during such shows.
This work falls within the set of studies that, according to Oliveira , recognizing the limits of the stories of general character, tries to understand the materiality of life, the answers that people give to different situations experienced in spite of any rationality. To do so, we were inspired by the definition of sensibility coined by Sandra Pesavento In order to understand the education of sensibilities at a particular historic moment, it was necessary to understand in which sensibilities the producers of the shows and the public were immersed, distinguishing the hegemonic sensibilities from the collective and the individual ones.
We define the individual sensitivities as those imaginary operations of sense and representation of the world, originating from the unique experiences of the subjects; we define the collective sensitivities as imaginary operations of sense and representation of the world related to common experiences lived by distinct social groups; and, we define the hegemonic sensibilities as imaginary operations of sense and representation of the world that dominant groups aim to impose on other social subjects.
