Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Performing Brazil: Essays on Culture, Identity, and the Performing Arts

2016; Duke University Press; Volume: 96; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00182168-3424240

1527-1900

Jack A. Draper,

Music History and Culture

The presentation of performance theory in Performing Brazil is innovative and interesting across multiple genres and national and international contexts. The analyses of the performance of the Brazilian diaspora in particular are important contributions to Brazilian cultural studies, allowing for a reconsideration of Oswald de Andrade's concept of antropofagia, or cultural cannibalism in a postmodern, transnational context. Brazilianness and hybridity of the foreign and native are explored in a national context more familiar to the discipline but also from the outside looking in, highlighting fascinating instances of what Benedict Anderson would call the “long-distance nationalism” (or lack thereof) of various US Brazilian communities.Following Kathryn Bishop-Sanchez's helpful theoretical introduction on performance, most of the remaining chapters can be divided into two groups, based on whether they frame Brazilian culture and the performance of Brazilianness in a more national or international context of production and circulation. Chapters 2, 3, 10, and 12 are framed more in a national context, but the first three of these are very much engaged with either Brazilian artists' incorporation of transnational cultural influences or the critical tradition and artistic trope of cannibalism, or both. Fernando de Sousa Rocha reveals a tendency in some Brazilian cinema at the twenty-first century's turn toward emphasizing the violence and destructiveness of the cannibalist trope in lieu of the cultural and stylistic synthesis behind Andrade's concept. In the following chapter, Cristina F. Rosa demonstrates the continued importance of the synthesis of foreign and native elements in Brazilian art with the example of the Belo Horizonte–based dance troupe Grupo Corpo, at the same time demonstrating that the Brazilian Modernist project of merging erudite and popular culture is alive and well in the group's blending of modern dance, ballet, and popular/folk dance and rhythms. Alessandra Santos's discussion of Arnaldo Antunes's art provides an important example of an artist who is fully engaged with international avant-garde video and performance art and who questions the very notion that as a Brazilian he must focus on performing Brazil.Chapters 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, and 11 all analyze Brazilian art, popular culture, and performance in an international context—either as exported and produced or curated abroad through tours, exhibitions, and film releases or as performed abroad through the oral, textual, audiovisual, and bodily discourses of Brazilian immigrants (particularly to the United States). Among other things, Ana Paula Höfling, Eric A. Galm, and Annie McNeill Gibson all make original contributions to scholarship on the performance and practice of capoeira outside Brazil. To note just one important example, Gibson explores the resonance of both capoeira and carnival culture in New Orleans, as introduced by Brazilian immigrants, with the African American dance and performance in the street celebrations there (both Mardi Gras–related and others). Lidia Santos's and Simone Osthoff's chapters demonstrate the wide range of concerns addressed in performances of Brazilian culture at international art exhibitions in Europe and the United States. Santos analyzes artists dealing with urban poverty in Brazil, who incorporate the voices and creativity of favela youth but go beyond the realism that has been the dominant form of representation of this subject for the past two decades. Osthoff discusses the art curator, a form of transcultural mediator not discussed by other authors in the collection but in some ways similar to the choreographers or art directors whom they analyze. Osthoff goes further to argue that the role of curator and critic is increasingly participatory and involves a changing notion of the archive—considered to be more a toolbox or database that the curator has recourse to in producing exhibits rather than the more traditional idea of a repository of preproduced, finished artworks. Benjamin Legg's analysis of Sônia Braga's television and film performances in the United States and Brazil reveals the intercultural dialogue on issues of sexuality, gender, and race that accompanied one of the (relatively few) Brazilian performers to achieve celebrity in international media.The two remaining authors stand out for differing reasons. Bryan McCann provides something of a bossa nova interlude in the middle of the book, departing from the style of an academic study and moving closer to popular music review. Beautifully written, his portrait of Maurício Einhorn examines another great (yet underappreciated) example of transcultural mediation, specifically Einhorn's musical dialogue with US and Brazilian artists in the context of the international jazz and bossa nova scene. Maria José Somerlate Barbosa uniquely emphasizes the performative aspect of Clarice Lispector's writings, considering performance through speech act theory and its emphasis on language's power to shape reality for the audience.Taken as a whole, this collection is perhaps most important as a contribution to transculturation theory, but unfortunately it is rarely and only briefly addressed as such by the book's authors. This includes a dialogue with antropofagia, which is carried out by one author in the specific cultural territory of Recife, Brazil, but is surprisingly lacking in many of the chapters that analyze international transculturation of Brazilian art forms or folklore (one notable exception being Osthoff's mention of artist/curator Giselle Beiguelman's concept of tecnofagia). Even more needed in Brazilian cultural studies than a theoretical engagement with the cannibalist trope in contemporary Brazil are theoretical revisions of transculturation theory and antropofagia with regard to Brazilian peoples and cultures as they emigrate. This collection provides some fascinating examples of new interactions and hybridizations of Brazilian art and popular culture in this international context but does not present a new theoretical schema (or update older theories of transculturation in Latin America) to understand these performances of Brazilianness outside Brazil. We must look to future scholarship to do so, which will be greatly aided by this collection's close analyses of contemporary Brazilian cultural productions and their interactions with other cultures both inside Brazil and transnationally. Overall, this anthology makes a powerful case that performance itself, rather than a mere representation of a given culture, has been an underappreciated component of the larger processes of exchange, hybridization, and heterogeneous resistance between different cultures (national and otherwise).