Brazilian Bodies and Their Choreographies of Identification: Swing Nation

Brazilian Bodies and Their Choreographies of Identification

New World Choreographies

Series Editors: Rachel Fensham and Peter M. Boenisch

Editorial Assistant: Alexandra Heller-Nicholas

Editorial Advisory Board: Ric Allsop, Falmouth University, UK; Susan Leigh Foster, UCLA, USA; Lena Hammergren, University of Stockholm, Sweden; Gabriele Klein, University of Hamburg, Germany; Andre Lepecki, NYU, USA; Avanthi Meduri, Roehampton University, UK

New World Choreographies presents advanced yet accessible studies of a rich field of new choreographic work which is embedded in the global, transnational and intermedial context. It introduces artists, companies and scholars who contribute to the conceptual and technological rethinking of what constitutes movement, blurring old boundaries between dance, theatre and performance.

The series considers new aesthetics and new contexts of production and presentation, and discusses the multi-sensory, collaborative and transformative potential of these new world choreographies.

Gretchen Schiller & Sarah Rubidge (editors)

CHOREOGRAPHIC DWELLINGS

Prarthana Purkayastha

INDIAN MODERN DANCE, FEMINISM AND TRANSNATIONALISM

Royona Mitra

AKRAM KHAM

Forthcoming titles include:

Pil Hansen & Darcey Callison (editors)

DANCE DRAMATURGY

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Brazilian Bodies and Their Choreographies of Identification

Swing Nation

Cristina F. Rosa

© Cristina F. Rosa 2015

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Rosa, Cristina F.

Brazilian bodies and their choreographies of identification : swing nation / Cristina F. Rosa.

pages cm

ISBN 978–1–137–46226–8 (hardback)

1.   Capoeira (Dance)   2.   Capoeira (Dance)—Social aspects—Brazil.    3.   Dance—Social aspects—Brazil.   4.   Choreography.   I.   Title.

GV1796.C145R67 2015

793.3'1981—dc23                                           2015005432

Typeset by MPS Limited, Chennai, India.

Contents

List of Figures

Series Editors’ Preface

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Choreographing Ideas

Part I   Understanding Ginga

1Decoding the Ginga Aesthetic

2Historicizing Ginga

Part II   Analyzing Ginga

3Understanding the Presence of Ginga in Samba Circles

4Investigating the Articulation of Ginga in Capoeira Angola

5What is it about the Baiana?

Part III   Staging Ginga

6Brazilian Bodies and Nationalism in Dance

7What is it about Grupo Corpo?

Conclusion: The Pride and Shame of Being a Swing Nation

Notes

Bibliography

Index

List of Figures

1.1 Diagram of a polycentric and polyrhythmic moving body

2.1 Jean Baptiste Debret’s Convoi funèbre d’un fils de roi nègre , 1839

2.2 Jean Baptiste Debret’s Quête pour l’entretien de l’eglise du Rosario , 1839

2.3 Candomblé orixá Iansã

3.1 Samba dancing at a terreiro de Candomblé

4.1 Johann Moritz Rugendas’ Jogar Capoera ou Dance de la Guerre , 1835

4.2 Mestre Cobra Mansa playing capoeira in Chicago

4.3 Contramestre Fubuia (Itaparica, Brazil) and Professor Chiclete (Lille, France) playing capoeira in Paris

4.4 Maintaining an alert relaxation. Contramestre Célio and Adriana Pimentinha playing capoeira in Salvador

4.5 Serpentine pathways. Professor Xixarro playing capoeira in Paris

4.6 Wheeling the vertical axis. Mestre Poloca and Márcio playing capoeira in Salvador

5.1 The Lady in the Tutti Frutti Hat. Screenshot of Carmen Miranda in Busby Berkeley’s musical The Gang’s All Here (1943)

5.2 Colonial market woman ( quitandeira )

5.3 Jean Baptiste Debret’s Negresses Libres, Vivant de leur Travail , 1839

5.4 Jean Baptiste Debret’s Scène de Carnaval , 1839

6.1 Jean Baptiste Debret’s Boutique de la Rue du Val-Longo , 1839

7.1 Rehearsal of Grupo Corpo’s Breu

Series Editors’ Preface

Choreography in the global context of the twenty-first century involves performance practices that are often fluid, mediated, interdisciplinary, collaborative, and interactive. Choreographic projects and choreographic thinking circulate rapidly within the transnational flows of contemporary performance, prompting new aesthetics and stretching the disciplinary boundaries of established dance studies. Crossing the borders of arts disciplines, histories, and cultures, these new world choreographies utilize dance techniques and methods to new critical ends in the body’s interaction with the senses, the adoption of technology, and the response to history, as well as present-day conditions of political and social transformation, or in its constitution of spectator communities.

As a result, well-rehearsed approaches to understanding choreography through dance lineages, canonical structures, or as the product of individual artists give way to new modes of production and representation and an ever-extending notion of what constitutes dance in performance. Choreographic practice as well as research on choreography draws on new methods of improvisation, (auto-)biography, collective creation, and immersion in ways which challenge established (Western) notions of subjectivity, of the artist as creator, or which unsettle the objective distance between the critic and the work. The post-national, inter-medial and interdisciplinary contexts of digital and social media, festival circuits, rapidly changing political economies, and global politics call for further critical attention.

With an openness to these new worlds in which dance so adeptly maneuvers, this book series aims to provide critical and historicised perspectives on the artists, concepts, and cultures shaping this creative field of new world choreographies. The series will provide a platform for fresh ways to understand and reflect upon what choreography means to its various audiences, and to the wider field of international dance and performance studies. In addition, it will also provide a forum for new scholars to expand upon their ideas and to map out new knowledge paradigms that introduce this diverse and exciting field of choreographic practice to dance, theatre, and performance studies.

Rachel Fensham, University of Melbourne

Peter M. Boenisch, University of Kent

Alexandra Heller-Nicholas, Series Administration

We gratefully acknowledge the support of this publication by the faculty of Arts at the University of Melbourne.

www.newworldchoreographies.com

Acknowledgments

I would like to acknowledge the University of California, Los Angeles for providing support during my doctoral research, which culminated in this monograph. In particular, I would like to thank the Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance, the Latin American Institute, the Center for the Study of Women, and the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at UCLA for financially sponsoring this project through a number of grants and fellowships.

For their generosity and attention during my multiple research trips to Brazil, I would like to thank Candida Braz, the archivist at Grupo Corpo, and Rodrigo Pederneiras, its resident choreographer; Mestre Valmir Damasceno, founder of the Fundação Internacional de Capoeira Angola-Bahia (FICA-BA); Helena Katz, the Director of Centro de Estudos em Dança at PUC-SP; Mestre Cobra Mansa, founder of the Kilombo Tenondé Center for Capoeira Angola and Permaculture in Bonfim, Bahia; Soraia da Silva, the Director of Centro de Pesquisa em Dança (CDPDan) at the Universidade de Brasília (UnB), and (the late) Fred Abreu, founder and former Director of the Instituto Jair Moura de Capoeira in Salvador, BA. In addition, I extend my gratitude to the Centro de Estudos Afro-Asiáticos (CEAO) at the Universidade Federal da Bahia (UFBA) for their contributions to this project during my research time in Salvador, Bahia.

For their critical feedback as I tried to get a handle on the archival and ethnographic data collected during the early stages of this project, I would like to extend special thanks to Professors Andrew Apter, Rosângela Araújo, Paula Barreto, Sue-Ellen Case, Donald Cosentino, David Gere, Randal Johnson, Allen Roberts, Livio Sansone, Carlos Eugenio L. Soares, Janet O’Shea, and José Miguel Wisnik. Above all, I would like to thank Susan Leigh Foster, my mentor and PhD advisor. Her impeccable ethics, unwavering commitment, and thoughtfulness have inspired me and kept me on track all along. Many thanks also to my colleagues at UCLA, with a special obrigado to Lorena Alvorado, Feriyal Aslam, Rosemary Candelario, Wes Days, Arianne Hoffman, CedarBough T. Saeji, D. Sabela Grimes, Carla Melo, Jose Reynoso, Michael Sakamoto, Carolina San Juan, Angeline Shaka, Raphael Xavier, Giavanni Washington, and Sara Wolf. I am certain that without their serious input and playful camaraderie, I could not gone this far.

For their continuous support as I transformed this research project into a book manuscript, I would like to acknowledge the incredible librarians and staff who assisted me in the following institutions: Florida State University, Tallahassee; the International Research Center Interweaving Performance Cultures at FU, Berlin; the International Foundation of Capoeira Angola in Washington DC; the University of California, Riverside; and Reed College. I am especially grateful for the kindness of these individuals and organizations, granting me access to their special collections and offering me personal assistance when needed. I am also thankful to Rachel Fensham and Peter M Boenisch, the editors of this book series, for offering their expertise and generous support. Likewise, I am especially obligated to Lauren Davidson, Jose Reynoso, Davi F. Rosa, Ana Paula F. Rosa, and Jonathan Wolf for their editorial assistance in different chapters, as well as Jon Lloyd, for painstakingly copy-editing the entire manuscript.

This project has benefited from a wide variety of audio-visual material, some of which are reproduced here. In this regard, I would like to acknowledge: the Biblioteca Brasiliana Guita e José Mindlin, USP and Acervo da Fundação Biblioteca Nacional, Brazil for kindly providing digital reproductions of public domain images housed at their archives; the dance company Grupo Corpo for cordially allowing me to attend its open rehearsals and photograph its activities all the samba and capoeira master teachers who have welcomed me in their homes and have cordially permitted me to document their classes and public events. I would especially like to thank treinel Adijair Dija Damasceno (FICA-BA), who is featured on the cover of this book, and Ugo Edu, who took the photograph.

Finally, I would like to thank my parents, Maria Célia and Darlan, for their unconditional love and trust.

Portions of this book were previously published in the following essays and I thank the presses for permission to reproduce them here:

•Performing Brazil: The Case of Grupo Corpo, in Performing Brazil: Essays on Culture, Identity, and the Performing Arts. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2015, pp. 67–97.

•Playing, Fighting, and Dancing: Unpacking the Significance of Ginga within the Practice of Capoeira Angola, The Drama Review , 56(3) (2012): 141–66.

Introduction: Choreographing Ideas

As it so happened, one day in the morning, as I was strolling through the grounds of my suburban home, an idea took hold in the trapeze I carry about in my brain. Once hanging there, it began to wave its arms and legs and execute the most daring antics of a tightrope walker that anyone could possibly imagine. I just stood there and watched it. Suddenly, it made a great leap, extended its arms and legs, until it formed an X, and said, decipher me or I devour thee.

…

My idea, after so many feats, became a fixed idea. God save you, my reader, from a fixed idea. Better a speck, a mote in the eye.

J.M. Machado de Assis,

Memórias Póstumas de Brás Cubas, 1881

Point of origin

What comes into your mind whenever you hear the expression Brazilian people or simply Brazilians? Outside Brazil, the answer often boils down to people dancing samba and playing football or capoeira. Or carnival: sexy women wearing G-string bikinis and feathered headdresses. Depending on how old you are, the footballers Neymar Jr., Ronaldo, or Pelé, or the actress Carmen Miranda might come to mind as well. Not by coincidence, all these figures and scenarios involve a specialized dynamic of movement or effort: hip swing. Now, why is it that a nation with over 200 million people came to be defined by the way it moves, instead of the way it looks (ethnicity) or the way it talks (language)? How did this happen? How did this unique bodily swing pervasive to physical activities like samba, capoeira, carnival, and the Brazilian way of playing football come to signify Brazilianness? Is it really possible to articulate identity through motion? What are the benefits of using movement as an identity? These are some of the pressing questions that this book seeks to elucidate. But before we get wrapped up in all this, let’s go back to the lady in the tutti-frutti hat for a moment.

From all the images listed above, Carmen Miranda (1909–55) is perhaps one of the most powerful, yet controversial, symbols ever produced about Brazil. Beyond her charismatic voice and extravagant costumes, the auspiciousness with which Miranda moved to the black rhythm of samba has given international visibility to a soft and soothing way of swaying the hips. In Brazil, this swayed motion is commonly known as ginga. And what exactly is ginga? Ginga involves the articulation of sinuous and offbeat – or syncopated –– dialogues between bodily parts, especially the hips and feet. To give the reader a glimpse of the complexity of this term, suffice it to note that people in Brazil have used many different words to describe this way of moving or the images it evokes in one’s mind: gingado (swayed-walk),¹ suingue (bodily swing), molejo (spring, pliability, swagger), corpo de mola (spring-like body), jeito or jeitinho (way, manner, habit),² jogo de cintura (hip-play),³ and gambiarra (precarious make-shift or make do),⁴ to name just a few.

Here is a more interesting question: what do you, my English-speaking reader, already know about ginga? From where I stand, deeply immersed in this subject from head to toe, I no longer know what to assume. So I do what most people do these days –– I Google it, as if I were looking up my own name on the Internet. The third result leads me to Wikipedia in English (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ginga). There I find a disambiguation page listing ten entries for the word ginga. I quickly review them by elimination.⁵ I am left with item 1, where Wikipedia informs me that ginga is a fundamental movement of capoeira, and item 6, where ginga is described as a Japanese-Brazilian digital TV middleware. I will come back to item 6 later on, but this book is mainly concerned with the first definition. I consider the presence of ginga in this Afro-Brazilian martial art form, along with its significance in other distinct choreographies, dance forms, and practices of everyday life.

Articulating ideas

This book derives from my doctoral research, which I developed under the mentorship of dance scholar Susan L. Foster. At first, her argument that bodies are capable of articulating ideas as a bodily writing (Foster, 1995, p. 15) took me off-guard. After a while, though, it took hold of the trapeze I carry about in my brain (Machado de Assis, 1881, epigraph). Like the character in Machado de Assis’ novel, I just stood there and watched it. Suddenly, it made a great leap… To cut a long story short, her idea moved me to design a comparative study to measure and qualify how ginga works, what it means, and how it interacts with other systems of representation. Part 1 of this book is entirely designed to fully explore this. For now, here is what you need to know. First, ginga means the movement you see when a man sways his hips or a woman shuffles her feet. Secondly, this particular way of swaying and shuffling is a key element within a movement system anchored in Africanist aesthetic principles. Polycentrism and polyrhythm are two of them. The ginga aesthetic is, by distinction, the expression I use to talk about this movement system. It is the underlying map or structuring logic that guides or enables bodies to move in such a fashion.

One of the strengths of this project is a set of analytical tools (i.e. lenses, approaches, and apparatuses) that I have compiled and tailored from various disciplines. I use some of them to analyze how this movement system works and how it is used in distinct realms. In this book I pay close attention to the presence of ginga across three specific and distinct realms: samba, capoeira, and concert dance. In the last case, I analyze the incorporation of the ginga aesthetic in set choreographies by Grupo Corpo, a contemporary dance company based in Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais. In the end, rather than providing a comprehensive examination of these realms in Brazil, in each case my movement analysis focuses primarily on three aspects: (1) how ginga functions at the bodily level; (2) the multiple roles it assumes in each of these realms; and (3) the effects that it mobilizes through choreographed and/or improvised movements, trajectories, or knowhow.

Across the chapters, my genealogy of ginga observes how a bodily mechanism connected to Afro-Brazilian heritage articulates blackness and how it interacts with other categories of identification (e.g. gender, sexuality). Some of the tools below have helped me examine, in particular, how a slippery signifier is first read as a symptom of primitivism and/or immorality, but eventually becomes a floating signifier for that which is local/national. Departing from Spinoza’s inquiries regarding human affect (affectus in Latin), I examine how the deployment of this movement system has engendered various actions and passions (e.g. desire, pride, shame, and melancholia) at the bodily level. Like Spinoza, I am particularly concerned with the means through which these affects increase or diminish one’s power of acting and/or thinking (Spinoza, 1993 [1677], pp. 68–112).

Where I am coming from and where we are going

In a nutshell, this comparative study analyzes the contributions of Africans and their descendants across multiple and distinct spheres of Brazilian culture. It dialogues, first and foremost, with the domain of critical dance studies, which advocates for a contextualized specificity of its analytical tools. It also expands its field of vision beyond Europe, US, and other geopolitical locations where English acts as a lingua franca (i.e. the former British and US empires; see O’Shea, 2010). When I began my research in 2005, for instance, critical dance studies research and projects were being funded and tested out largely within North American and European institutions. Often, these investigations privileged proscenium stage productions over vernacular and/or non-Western movement forms. These other practices and forms were still being examined, with few exceptions, within the fields of cultural studies, anthropology, sociology, and folklore (Savigliano, 2011).

This had also been the case in Brazil. Movement practices associated with Afro-Brazilian heritage had been recorded and analyzed in Brazil for more than a century.⁶ When compared to the scientific racism of the nineteenth century, pioneering works such as Cecília Meireles’ Batuque, Samba e Macumba (1933, an ethnographic exhibition of drawings and watercolors later published in 1983) and Mário de Andrade’s ethnographic catalogue of Brazilian folk dances and pageants (Danças Dramaticas do Brasil, originally published in 1934) represent a remarkable turning point in terms of expanding the meaning of culture to include folk and popular manifestations. In the end, though, these earlier authors had little experience of dancing or writing about dance. They had no way of giving the reader a clear sense of how, for instance, the female dancers of the batuque, samba, and macumba moved their hips underneath their skirts. At best, these publications describe the footsteps that these dancing bodies left behind. The reader was often left to believe that the dancers did it naturally.

The recent scholarship on Afro-Brazilian social dances such as samba (and its relation to carnival) has injected the field of dance studies with a number of fertile seeds.⁷ In the last decade, publications such as the National Institute of Historic and Artistic Heritage’s dossiers on intangible heritages have also expanded and systematized the scholarship on these subjects.⁸ However, when I began my research, little work had been done to address how ginga informs or relates to samba dancing. Similarly, in the 1990s, there was a revitalization of the field of dance studies in Brazilian universities and its scholarship is progressively solidifying both its theoretical and practical elements. In particular, these institutions have sought to diversify the sources and outputs of their productions. But this has been a gradual process.

In the case of capoeira, there has been a substantial proliferation of ethnographic and historical research projects about this martial art in the last 20 years. Most of these works seek to address several, if not all, of capoeira’s structural and performing aspects.⁹ Generally speaking, scholars have cross-referenced a wide range of archives against their observations of particular performances (repertoire) and/or their fieldwork (ethnographic material). Yet, like those writing about samba and carnival, most lack the training and the necessary tools to analyze capoeira’s non-verbal discourses. Instead, these scholars tend to focus largely on knowledges transmitted through oral history, artifacts, musical rhythms, and lyrics of songs.

In order to overcome these multiple gaps and shortcomings, I reached out to distinct strands across the field of critical dance studies. I selected and mixed theoretical tools pertaining to dance ethnography, historiography, and close analysis of set dances and movement practices.¹⁰ I bent them and re-shaped them, when necessary, to make them work in my project. I also pulled additional tools from other disciplines, such as art history, performance studies, critical studies of race and gender, phenomenology, semiotics, and recent developments in post-colonial studies in Latin America. All along, I have made a conscious effort to slide back and forth across these various fields, at times overlaying multiple concepts at once, and at other times executing all kinds of acrobatic maneuvers. Below, I briefly acknowledge some of the most significant elements in my tool box and their deployment and relevance.

The expression choreographies of identification is an amalgam that intersects a number of propositions. For starters, it follows the understanding of bodies as both the producers and the medium of their own productions. For dance scholars Helena Katz (2003, 2005, 2006) and Christine Greiner (2005, 2010),¹¹ bodies and environments are constantly exchanging data, or shaping and being shaped by one another, through continuous processes of mutual contamination. Here, it should be noted that the term contamination acts as a provocation against discourses and practices that either defend an imagined state of ethno-cultural purity or prescribe racial hygiene.¹² Named corpomedia, their theoretical lens provides a collection of anchor points from which to discuss the epistemology of the body and cognitive processes in dance. With this tool at hand, I consider the ways in which the ginga aesthetic informs how people organize their bodies to articulate ideas in scenarios such as concert dance, social dance, and martial arts. It also allows me to consider the space people construct as they move around and how the environments where they step into also shape these moving bodies (see Part I).

This amalgam also dialogues with the phenomenologist and media theory scholar Vilém Flusser (1998, 2014). In the 1970s, Flusser began to write a manuscript for what he called a General Theory of Gestures (see Flusser, 2014).¹³ His writings on gesture turned my attention towards the role of physicality in discussions of knowledge production and ways of knowing. His philosophical discussion on bodily cognition made me consider the relevance of one’s relationship to one’s body as well as the underlying logic through which one thinks and acts within these movement practices.

The black Atlantic world (Gilroy, 1993) to which we are about to sail is a place filled with a transnational, multi-lingual, and multi-religious flux of people and ideas from different ports. This amalgam therefore departs from the understanding of categories of social identity such as black as intersectional and pliable processes situated in a particular geopolitical context or dimension. As the critical race theory scholar Mara Viveros Vigoya clarifies in her essay Dionysian Blacks: Sexuality, Body, and Racial Order in Colombia:

Here black is understood not as an essentialized identity but as a personal, social, cultural, political, and economic process in a particular temporal and spatial context with local, regional, national, and trans-national dimensions. (Viveros, 2002, p. 75)

When I examine performances centered on ginga, I assume that they have been shaped by heterogeneous set of ideas under which African peoples and their descendants have (re)structured their communities, their systems of beliefs, and their systems of knowledge production in Brazil. With this understanding at hand, I problematize a number of essential assumptions, such as: (a) the belief that blacks are inherently inclined (i.e. feel an impulse) to seek sexual pleasure; (b) the limiting equation of racial miscegenation to processes of whitening; and (c) the belief that the essentialization of one’s identity is the only way to valorize alterity (e.g. black pride).

Following this strand of thought, I pulled the expression processes of identification from the writings of Jesus Martín-Barbero (1987, 2003). I use it here to differentiate essentialized identities (i.e. fixed ideas, images, and discourses whose variables are imagined static and constant) from flexible and complex processes articulated across a range of intersecting categories (gender, race/ethnicity, sexuality, class, nationality, etc.) situated in a particular time and space. I also dialogue with Amalio Pinheiro’s understanding of individuals as movable territories (2008). Like Katz and Greiner, Pinheiro defends the idea that people are constantly interacting with strands of information coming from different places.

Most prominently, I have adopted Susan L. Foster’s definition of choreography as an overarching score or a framework of decisions that implements a set of representational strategies, which evidences a theory of embodiment (1998, pp. 16–17).¹⁴ Employing choreography as a theoretical lens, my comparative study investigates the ways in which the ginga aesthetic interacts with choreographies of gender, ethnicity, sexuality, and, later on, nationality. Foster’s deployment of choreography has also enabled me to examine how bodies (are expected to) look like, move, behave, and interact with one another and, thus, how choreography relates to other systems of representations (Foster, 1998). In her recent scholarship, Foster points to the existence of corporeal epistemes that participate in the production of knowledge and the structuring of power (2010, p. 13). Applied to my comparative study, this framework allows me to see more clearly how the cultural interactions in a country like Brazil happen at the bodily level. Departing from this premise, I consider how the colonial encounter in Brazil generates not only the (forced) interaction, or at least coexistence, of diverse peoples, languages, and cultural goods, but also the transculturation (Ortiz, 1995) – or rather the recuperation-cum-invention¹⁵ – of a range of ideas informed by heterogeneous notions of corporeality, connected to various corporeal epistemes.

In the end, the amalgam choreographies of identification intends to contribute to the theorization of identity formation as a pliable, decentralized, and multilayered process. In order to do this, I combine (a) Foster’s understanding of choreography, corporeality, and corporeal episteme as elements implicated in the production of aesthetic knowledges and discourses of identities (i.e. gender) with (b) Katz and Greiner’s view of bodies as both agents and media of themselves, (c) Flusser’s recognition of the phenomenological relationship between moving and thinking and its relevance to human cognition, (d) Martín-Barbero’s definition of processes of identification, and (e) Pinheiro’s understanding of individuals as movable territories.

This book offers a comparative analysis of diverse practices whose assimilation of the ginga aesthetic has yielded different results. When examining how bodies and environments exchange information in movement practices, my comparative study benefits from Diana Taylor’s (2003) framing of performance as an interpretative lens with which to examine the colonial encounter in Latin America as well as her use of the concepts such as scenario, acts of transfer, linguistic tropes, systems of equivalences, and double codedness. Taylor’s scholarship pays close attention to how traumatic memory percolates through Latin American productions. By contrast, I second Margaret Drewal’s (1992) and Rita Amaral’s (2002) understanding that, across the African diaspora, playfulness is a rhetorical strategy that is pervasive to various events and celebrations. It thus informs the way in which these communities transmit knowledge and make sense of the world. As will be addressed in Chapter 1, along with coolness and dissonance, derision and serious play function as generative forces in the emergence of transatlantic cultures and identities in Brazil. In the context of religious rituals of Candomblé, Amaral (2002) points out that the labor-intensive and body-centered celebrations encourage the serious dissipation of physical energy in dancing, singing, and playing music, and the replenishing the body with votive food, beverages, and prayers. At these religious parties, the lavish consumption and expenditure of resources enable priests and devotees to maintain their epistemology alive.

In order to measure and qualify the elements associated with the ginga aesthetic, in my research I pulled ideas from scholars addressing African/Africanist aesthetic knowledges in movement, especially Thompson (1966, 1973, 1983), Tavares (1984), M. Drewal (1992), Gottschild (1998), and H. Drewal (1999), fully discussed in Chapter 1. My methodology also takes into consideration how blackness is articulated in both the religious and vernacular spheres.¹⁶ I embrace, for instance, Tricia Rose’s assertion that the innovative aesthetic of urban practices in black America (i.e. hip hop) has the potential to incite social dislocation and rupture (1996, p. 196). In my comparative study, I look for instances where people have questioned hegemonic modes of identification, producing movement styles no one can deal with (Rose, 1996). In order to investigate the ways in which ginga choreographs blackness in post-colonial Brazil, I also dialogue with Thomas DeFrantz’s notion of corporeal orature (2004). In addition, Yvonne Daniel’s (2005) work on the African diaspora, especially her corporeal cartography and her understanding of bodies as active repositories, has inspired me to imagine the ginga aesthetic as a mapping system –– an underlying set of cultural codes in which bodies articulate images and metaphors. Throughout this book, I deploy this mapping (see Figure 1.1 in Chapter 1) to decipher the embodied principles it departs from and the ideas it (re)produces through set and improvised choreographies. I watch for patterns when comparing what happens in each distinct realm.

This book defends the socio-political significance of movement as a non-verbal way of knowing and articulating ideas corporeally. It further looks at how the migration of embodied ideas to different scenarios, and their incorporation by different kinds of bodies, transforms perceptions of culture, identification, representation, and self-representation. Following Marta Savigliano’s (1995) steps, I have borrowed the tools of the colonizer (i.e. feminist, post-colonial, and post-structuralist discursive frameworks) to scrutinize the formation of transatlantic choreographies of identification in Brazil. Savigliano’s detailed unpacking of a process of auto-exoticization in a global capitalist economy enabled me to comprehend the underpinnings of Latin American hybrid dances and the kinds of power relations they negotiate on the dance floor. In doing so, this book opens up new paths to dialogue with the field of Latin American studies,