Our newest Associated Researcher, Dr Michael Iyanaga, recently visited us for a packed week (4th-12th March). During his time with Modern Moves, Michael taught a seminar to the project’s MA module, ‘Decolonising Bodies: Drums, DJs and Dance Floors‘. His class, called ‘Inside the Roda: the shape of embodied history and resistance’, which drew on the circle formation of samba de roda and capoeira, captivated the students and team members alike. Michael, together with Ananya Kabir, Madison Moore, and Camilo Soler, also attended a seminar on anti colonialism and slavery at the Centre for History and Economics, Cambridge, where Ananya is Research Associate, shared his extensive knowledge of samba with the team, and accompanied Ananya to her weekly samba de gafieira class in London to help her with the work of dance analysis. He also drank a lot of tea, as befitted someone on his first visit to London.
This was the first time that Michael, a veteran of the trans-Pacific crossing, had found occasion to cross the Big Pond, and we are proud to have been the catalyst! We look forward to his next visit in May.
Our fifth Moving Group was dedicated to an exploration of tango music and dance, and it involved a double bill. First, we heard Dr Kendra Stepputat, ethnomusicologist from the University of the Performing Arts, Graz (Austria) speak on ‘Inter-relations in tango music and dance: exploring structural and social dimensions of a cosmopolitan genre’, and we then watched the film Tango Negro: African Roots of Tango by the Angolan filmmaker Dom Pedro. The two parts made for a rich learning experience in what they addressed separately as well as elements of shared interests.
Kendra’s talk focused on tango as a social dance practiced in Europe, Dom Pedro’s film focused on tango as a music embedded in the politics and history of Argentina; yet in the talk we heard music and in the film we saw dancers. Secondly, Kendra’s talk focused on the dance as a cosmopolitan practice and did not touch on issues of race and gender identity; Dom Pedro’s film was by definition deeply involved in the (evaporated) blackness of tango as manifested in musical history; yet (for a Modern Moves audience at least) race was present in the talk by its very absence, while the film’s interest in the long relationship between Buenos Aires and Europe (especially Paris) that shaped tango showed it as a cosmopolitan dance from its very beginnings.
These intersections meant that we had some fascinating, if unintended overlaps. Kendra’s talk showed an image of the earliest Tango ‘leaflet’, El Enterriano (1898), and in the film, we actually heard it played. The person playing that music in the film was Juan Carlos Caceres, whose research on the African roots of tango formed an important focus for Dom Pedro (and who is the film’s musical director); in the talk, Kendra cited his group, the Gotan Trio, as the kind of tango music that is not popular at all among Europe’s social dancers. This divergence made me think more deeply about the ‘complex inter-relations between tango music and dance’. What does it mean that what one aficionado of tango wishes to restore to the tango, is absent from its reception by another group of aficionados? Are they really talking about the same genre?
Kendra’s definition of ‘cosmopolitan’, which is a central characteristic of the group she is studying, involved the levels of university education and disposable income possessed by her typical European tango dancer. This was a dancer seemingly unperturbed by race issues, yet the paucity (or absence) of non-white people dancing tango in the European circles she investigates- in cities like Berlin where salsa and now kizomba draws a totally racially mixed demographic- is itself a commentary on ‘critical whiteness’. This white, white-collar cosmopolitanism appeared to those present in the audience as a puzzling elitism of tango’s appeal, and we kept returning to it in our questions to Kendra. An answer was provided by the film’s expose of the whitening of tango as central to its history. Yet the Afro-descendant lovers of tango we saw in the film said the same thing that Kendra found as essential to cosmopolitanism: ‘it is not about where you are born but where you want to live.’
Kendra began by telling us that although Argentina and Uruguay shared the early history of tango, Argentina has been better at claiming it is its national patrimony. This partitioning of shared cultural resources by modern nation-states was familiar to me from my work on the consequences of the Partition of India. But Tango Negro revealed visually the racialised dimension of this Argentinian appropriation of a shared tango: the Uruguayans on screen bore more phenotypical traces of African descent; the few Afro-Argentinians we saw and heard frankly attested to their ‘invisibilisation’ within their nation and their participation in their own ‘whitening’. The cosmopolitanism of tango that started from its acclaimed Parisian reception in the 19th century – a topic that both Kendra and Tango Negro showcased— thus seems to have involved an embourgeoisement of tango that was also its de-Africanisation.
Thanks to this evening, I understood a bit more about an aspect of tango that always intrigued me—the missing drums. From my Modern Moves research I have come to understand that a) drums often go ‘underground’; b) percussion can re-emerge on all manner of instruments, found objects and simply the body; c) the percussion that plays hide-and-seek in this way is that which involves African-heritage rhythm patterns marked by polyrhythm and what is, often controversially, called ‘syncopation’. These lost-and-found percussive dimensions make rhythm part of resistance on and after the Plantation. According to Kendra, the tango dancer must always walk on the 1 and the 3 of tango’s 4/4 measure and ignore syncopations heard in the music; In Tango Negro Juan Carlos Caceres restores tango’s lost Africanity through the use of complex drum-based percussion. The silenced polyrhythms of tango that haunt its cosmopolitanism thus ask the question, ‘at what cost’?
Kendra’s presentation of the cosmopolitan dancer who smoothens out percussive complexity and Dom Pedro’s re-introduction of the same together present tango as the quintessential Black Atlantic genre, a dance of migrants from different continents to the New World. In the film, the group Tocomochos declare that ‘the drums are the beating of our heart, it allows us to talk in a non existent language—we have to take the tango back’. Reminding us that ‘the only thing we were able to maintain was our drumming’, they assert that the drums transmit knowledge down the generations; drumming is resistance through survival. Acknowledging the black roots of tango means to reintroduce the drums and their associated sacredness into the tango. ‘There has always been an element of neglecting our identity’, they declare. ‘We need to know ourselves better. If we work on reconstructing the drum, we can understand many things.’
Who is the ‘we’? Shaped as much by dispossessed Italian immigrants (as Kendra reminded us) as the African slaves and their descendants that were the focus of Tango Negro, the film and the talk together made me think of Michael Rothberg’s concept of ‘multidirectional memory’ as a more productive response to shared traumas than the competition of sorrow and damage brought to a community through diaspora and dispossession. Shared too is the nostalgia that permeates tango and its appreciation. The film broaches the taboo subject of a ‘whitewashed history of Argentina through tango. A museum curator interviewed by Dom Pedro says, ‘the entire history of Argentina is a lie’. His camera captures a white couple dancing. In their faces contorted with some deep emotion, in the advance and retreat of their feet, I found that history made a truth. Dance becomes the trace of memory.
These two sides of the coin brought forth in painful clarity the traumas of tango. Bringing back to the audible surface tango’s rhythmic ancestors reminds us of the parallels between tango and other Afro-heritage music-dance complexes such as salsa, kizomba and samba. Tango’s status as a privileged social couple dance in Europe shows all the hallmarks of transnational commodification that Modern Moves research has observed in other Afro-heritage couple dances—most evidently, the formation of a ‘scene’ through festivalisation and gatekeeping, the elevation of DJs, and the evolution of new tango music styles. As with all these dance genres, though, the necessity of improvisation combats commodification by keeping the dance protean and unpredictable; while the couple dance format, which makes the constant negotiation between partners as an accompaniment to improvisation– impels two people in partner hold to listen to and learn from each other in concert with the music.
This listening, learning, and leaning in are also a pact of dancers with its submerged Africanity—especially where that Africanity crossed paths with global capitalism’s machines in the brave new world of America’s cities. ‘The steps of tango open up vistas’, remarks Robert Farris Thompson is his tour de force, Tango, The Art History of Love; ‘Tango is simultaneously a ritual and a spectacle of traumatic encounters, and of course it takes two—two parties to generate otherness, two places to generate otherness, two people to dance’—these are the words of Marta Savigliano in her equally stunning book, Tango and the Political Economy of Passion. These two works together explain this complex inner history of tango and are essential reading for the curious. They provide the script of lost loves and histories silhouetted against the urban triumph of Buenos Aires—as we see in the video of the month featuring the great tango dancers Juan Carlos Copes and Maria Nieves.
For further listening and learning, here is a playlist curated by friend of Modern Moves, the DJ John Armstrong!
TANGO LISTENING.
CLASSIC
CARLOS GARDEL
OSVALDO PUGLIESE
JUAN D’ARIENZO
ANIBAL TROILO
FRANCISCO CANARO
PEDRO LAURENZ
ALFREDO GOBBI
HORACIO SALGAN
CARLOS DI SARLI (his records are particular favourites with tango dance teachers for some reason)
ADA FALCON (esp the Lp Tango Ladies Harlequin label)
TANGO ARGENTINA (show soundtrack, very obvious choice but surprisingly good nevertheless)
HUGO DIAZ (who wrote the soundtrack for the movie The Tango Lesson- highly recommended film)
SANDRA LUNA (fantastic, intense classical tango sung by Sandra, who is still in her 20s I believe. Definitely NOT ‘easy listening’ tango!)
LITO VITALE
CARLOS FRANZETTI
NUEVO
ASTOR PIAZZOLLA (in first, second and third place! Everything he did was extraordinary, but if you want real fireworks listen to the 1986 LP Tango Zero Hora (easily available on Youtube/Amazon etc)
GOTAN PROJECT (A French DJ started this band in the late 90s- the first of the electro-tango acts)
BAJOFONDO TANGO CLUB (great band- saw them in Miami playing one of the most exciting latin dance shows I’ve ever seen)
NARCOTANGO
OTROS AIRES
GUSTAVO SANTAOLALLA(soundtracks for Brokeback Mountain, the Motorcycle Diaries, Pan’s Labyrinth, Camino, Ronroco etc as well as Playstation and many TV commercials! The founder of Bajofondo (above), he’s not really a tanguero ‘proper’, but is probably the most important living personality/musician in placing Tango and Argentine music in the international limelight)
TANGO NEGRO
Only very recently becoming a recognised genre, around the work of pianist JUAN CARLOS CACERES:
TANGO NEGRO TRIO,and all of Caceres’ solo albums, especially the extraordinary funky MURGA ARGENTINA, one of the very few recent renditions of Buenos Aires’ African-based Murga music
NON-ARGENTINE MUSOS, TANGO INFLUENCE
DIEGO EL CIGALA-CIGALA Y TANGO (Fine Flamenko sings tango)
DIEGO EL CIGALA -ROMANCE DE LA LUNA TUCUMANA(ditto)
ARTURO SANDOVAL-TANGO COMO YO TE SIENTO (Cuban jazz trumpet giant’s take on El Sonido Porteno)
RUBEN BLADES-TANGOS (Politically inspired salsa superstar does a great job with his favourite tangos)
When I was in graduate school I spent nearly all of my free time in New York City. If I wasn’t in coursework then I was in the train to the city or I was coming back from the city, usually because I’d been pumping through nightclubs in the East Village. There was always a last train from New Haven, around midnight, and a first train back, usually around 5am. It didn’t go unnoticed among my cohort, who regularly asked me, with an erudite yet judgemental tone, how I was able to find the time to do all my seminar work and go to New York City so much. The implication, of course, was that I wasn’t working hard enough, that I didn’t take graduate school or academia seriously because I always found my way to the party.
At the time, I didn’t realize that nightlife and club culture would eventually become my research project or that the narrative of pleasure versus the perceived torment of real intellectual labor would power the conversation about night worlds. So I got the idea to propose a special junior seminar for undergraduates about nightlife culture in New York City. The course was a hit. My students loved it, they loved the guest speakers I brought to campus, and they loved the field trips we took as part of the course.
Things got a bit more complicated, though, when the gossip tabloids got a whiff of the seminar, splashing it across headlines around the internet, including the Daily Mail, dragging my name as well as the University’s into the mud. I even got emails from prominent alumni who shamed me for teaching such nonsense and for me bringing the University’s name into the mud myself. And that’s when I realised that I was onto something with nightlife. There are a number of ways to study history, culture, social change, race, gender and sexuality, and the nightclub is one place to do it.
In certain academic circles, the pursuit of nightlife is seen as being all fun and no research, like I imagine some of the people I knew in grad school felt about what I was doing. The work is doubly unserious and unrigorous if it does not come from an identifiable archive or library holding. You’re not supposed to be having so much fun. This sentiment is less so in places like performance studies, American Studies and queer of color studies, where researchers of nightlife are actually on the rise. But as with any scholarship about the margins, which flips a canon on its head, the hardest task is proving you’re right and proving you’re right. I agree with Jack Halberstam’s notion of “low” theory, which he sees as an undoing of the traditional canon or archive, a privileging of “low” culture over high culture.
Fear and condemnation of nightlife is real and stretches from the church to city hall, and from your parents to the media. More than that, it’s a fear that reaches across time and space. In the early 20th century, for instance, a young New York girl called Eugenia Kelly was arrested after a weekend getaway upstate because her mother thought she partied too hard. Can you imagine? Mrs. Kelly actually wanted to have her daughter institutionalised because she partied a bit too much.
The reality is that morality and government actors have long pressured against urban nightlife and club culture. In Sydney, Australia, as one clear example, the current right wing government has installed a range of “lockout laws” to combat what it sees as nightlife fueled violence in its central business district. The lockout laws are simple: in the central business district, where a majority of the clubs are, no one can enter a venue after 1:30 am and alcohol is not served past 3am, though you can stay on until 5am.
The laws are killing the local night time economy and led to a massive Keep Sydney Open march and demonstration that I attended on February 21. At the rally, local venue owners, musicians and party people spoke openly against the puritanical anti-club laws and about the value of the club scene. The Government sees clubs as hotbeds of drugs, sex and violence, but for the folks gathered there that day, nightlife was about creative expression and creative community.
To punch up the link between pleasure and morals, many attendees at the rally dressed like Puritans.
Pleasure reminds us of our humanity. It’s proof that not only are we in a body but that we are also a body, with feelings, drives and desires that fall outside of what’s prescribed to us. It’s also a reminder that we are not machines. Marxist critics Adorno and Horkheimer believed that the only reason culture has entertainment is to distract us from the fact that we have to go to work again in a few more hours. It’s a pessimistic viewpoint, but I actually think they’re right. That’s why part of the magic and pleasure of nightlife is how it goes against the capitalist impulse to work and be productive.
What is the value of nightlife? What promises does Saturday night make? On Saturday, February 20th, Modern Moves postdoctoral researcher Madison Moore debuts a new performance lecture titled ‘How to Go Clubbing‘ which draws on theories of queer time and space to think through the magic and mythology of Saturday night. How does nightlife shape queer livelihood? Can clubbing use time to challenge capitalist notions of work and productivity? Is nightlife be creative? ‘How to Go Clubbing’ was commissioned by Performance Space, a leading interdisciplinary art center based in Sydney, Australia, with a commitment to experimental art practice. From February 20 to 21 Madison will be one of eight artists featured in Day for Night, a 24-hour extravaganza of art, performance, movement and lectures all focused on interrogating the queerness of nightlife. View the full schedule here!
There’s a razor thin line between cultural appropriation and racist caricature. But where, exactly, is that line? Is it when a blonde haired, blue-eyed model is cast in a fashion editorial as an “African Queen” in a well known magazine, her skin darkened to boot? Why not just hire a black model? Or is it when an Ivy League university sends out an email to students on Halloween reminding them to be mindful of putting on other people’s cultures as a costume, only for a visible member of the Yale community to pop back and tell students that they can wear whatever they want, never mind a suffocating culture of political correctness?
Beyoncé was recently featured in Coldplay’s single “Hymn for the Weekend,” a bouncy, colorful number. Nearly all of the press leading up to the release of the single had to do with the sheer fact that Beyoncé was in it. And, as Bey herself s(l)ays in her masterpiece “Formation,” “I might get your song played on the radio station” and, indeed, one wonders whether her appearance on “Hymn for the Weekend” has anything to do with its airplay. The irony, though, is that she isn’t even in the video. Her face is there but not her body. She only appears as mediated through screens — our smartphone and laptop screens and in the television screens of fans who watch her on tv sets around Mumbai. Beyoncé’s presence in the video is about her own iconicity.
But she came under fire in the media for her Bollywood styling. This is fascinating because Beyoncé is an artist who is black, Creole, but who can some how pass through racial categories. She can be “ratchet” black, she can be “white,” she can be “latina,” as evidenced by her Spanish-language record Irreemplazable. And now, with “Hymn for the Weekend,” Beyoncé can South Asian, too.
What does it mean for a single artist to be able to play with race the way Beyoncé does, to pass not necessarily for the sake of passing but to actually be able to tap into different financial markets, to see ethnic groups as a market?
I’m not one to believe that culture can’t proliferate, that culture doesn’t spread, move — that is, that culture isn’t already a type of virus, to use Barbra Browning’s words. It might be useful to remember Paul Gilroy’s theory of blackness and of black performance culture in general as a deeply profane practice. Blackness has long been sold back to black and white audiences, as much to legitimize and naturalise racial difference as to profit on black performance innovations at their expense. Black performance culture has long been appropriated for commercial gain, and perhaps its most distinctive quality is in how widely it is spread or, as Gilroy put it, ‘promiscuity is the key principle of its continuance.’
The issue is not that we are inspired by another culture, or that we are interested in its creative innovations. The problem is when these innovations are stolen, without credit, largely for commercial gain. More to the point, the people who initially came up with these creative innovations in the first place are often left behind.
If you follow fashion you may have noticed the latest hair trend taking heads by storm: the man braid. On the one hand this is a trend about metrosexual men taking care of their appearance, but on a much deeper level this is a story about white cultural appropriation. Black men and women have long been braiding their hair, working dreadlocks, braided extensions, twists, and hair beads. Patrice Rushen comes to mind, for instance. But when white men or women wear their hair braided, drawing inspiration from black cultures, the difference is that they may not be stopped by the police in the same way. No one at the workplace will tell them that their hair is unprofessional. They will not be denied a job because of their ethnic hairstyle. No one will think they are “too black.”
That’s why the problem with cultural appropriation has to do with how it is activated. There’s a difference between casting a white model only to paint her black and then call her an “African Queen” in a photo shoot and white guys suddenly discovering the beauty of wearing their hair braided. One approach purposefully overlooks ethnic people entirely while the other seriously believes it has stumbled onto something completely new and divorces it from its origin. This is cultural gentrification.
After the stupendous success of our Moving Conversation on Brazil, the Modern Moves research team is delighted to announce our fifth MOVING GROUP on Friday the 19th of February, on the theme of TANGO: BLACK ATLANTIC AND BEYOND.
We will screen the acclaimed film ‘Tango Negro: African Roots of Tango’ by the Angolan filmmaker Dom Pedro, and follow this with a guest lecture on tango music, dance, and cosmopolitanism by Dr Kendra Stepputat from the University of Music and Performing Arts Graz.
Please see the flyer below for all details.
This is a closed event with limited spaces, so those who wish to attend either or both parts should email Dr Elina Djebbari at elina.djebbari@kcl.ac.uk.
Modern Moves organised a stupendous MOVING CONVERSATION on the 8th of February. Our guests were Brazilian Slammer, hip hop artist, and all round Black Atlantic performance diva ROBERTA ESTRELA D’ALVA, in conversation with our charming, knowledgeable colleague from the Brazil Institute at King’s College London, the man whose conversation is laced with samba and bossa nova songs, DR VINICIUS MARIANO DE CARVALHO. For this Brazilian themed event there were also Caipirinha and doces and salgados from the KCL catering team, and DJ John Armstrong to make sure there is a fantastic playlist of Brazilian music in the house! Moreover, Master sambista from Rio de Janeira, Jimmy de Oliveira, creator of the samba styles ‘samba funkeado’ and ‘samba fragmentado’ graced the occasion with a special set of performances for us!
Please find the full report below!
Moving Conversation #5 – 18th February 2016:
by Ananya Kabir
‘Hiphop saves lives’—Roberta Estrela D’Alva
‘If we talk about the potential for change, we are talking about the favela as the most creative place in Brazil today’—Vinicius Mariano de Carvalho
These two comments, by our guests at this, the fifth in our Moving Conversation series, sum up the trajectory of this fascinating and energetic encounter between them. Roberta of Sao Paulo, whose multi-dimensional career encompasses slam poetry, theatre, performance, singing, academic writing, all folded into the composite character of the ‘Actor-MC’ (which she both embodies and theorises), was in conversation with the equally multi-dimensional Vinicius of King’s Brazil Institute, an academic who sings, conducts, and writes with equal ease. These Brazilians meeting in London were able to spark off in the Anatomy Museum that ‘flash of spirit’ (in the words of Robert Farris Thompson) that animates the dance floor and that, in our vision, animates our Moving Conversations.
Fittingly, they started the conversation not with speech but with song—and that too, a song about the god of metalwork and iron, Ogum (Ogun), the Brazilian form assumed by the Yoruba deity Ogun within the Afro-Brazilian religion Candomblè. This improvised call and response between the two conversationalists, riffing on each others’ names within their rendering of a traditional ponto do candomblè, set the tone for the rest of the evening.
The conversation moved seamlessly from discussions of oral performative traditions within Brazilian culture and their intersections with a global, modern form such as hiphop, to Roberta’s artistic and intellectual influences (which includes the semiotician Paul Zumthor), to the ability of Black social dance to ‘save lives’ by transforming violence into the creative impulse, be it in the streets of the Bronx or the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, and, most importantly, to the inseparable nature of the sacred and the profane as manifested in all versions of the Black social dance.
While Roberta returned repeatedly to examples from the history of hiphop to illustrate these points, Vinicius took those examples back to the case of Brazil. Deeper Black Atlantic kinaesthetic connections could emerge thereby which, of course, is the overall intention of Modern Moves to press out and theorize from. Thus showing clips from the film A Batalha do Passinho, which focuses on the Brazilian dance style ‘funk carioca’, revealed the social and kinetic similarities between it and hiphop. In both forms, similar body movements and footwork translated the intricacy of energy flows into kinetic virtuosity. The transformative force of hiphop as well as Brazilian dance forms, and their formation through trauma and slavery as the foundational violence of the Americas, emerged clearly through the discussion. It was confirmed in the discussion of the pedagogic potential of these dances that continued with questions from the audience.
Jimmy de Oliveira and Ulle Adamson perform samba de gafieiradoces, salgados, and caipirinhas from KCL cateringJohn Armstrong at the decksThe Modern Moves team with our speakers and performersVinicius Mariano de Carvalhoand Roberta Estrela D’Alva
The most famous song about Brazil, ‘Aquarela do Brazil’, celebrates Brazil for being, tautologically, ‘Brazilian’- ‘Brasil Brasileiro‘– and it’s more than just clever (or stupid) play with words. Brazil is essentially and deeply, Brazilian, more than any other country or culture I’ve known is ‘itself’ (and I’ve been fortunate to know a few). It is happily and confidently autonomous. Its expressive cultures seem to fragment and multiply to suit new needs without worrying about dilutions of essence, without provocations of submitting to external influence.
Jimmy de Oliveira and the fresco in his dance studio depicting samba de gafieira culture of Rio’s Lapa district
Brazil’s leading cultural myth is ‘anthropophagy’ or cannibalism, and, indeed, Brazil cannibalises external cultures, swallows them up to suit its needs, and uses them to generate newer variations of cultural forms established as ‘Brazilian’. In the field of social dance, this makes Brazilians versatile dancers and Brazilian dance floors open to all kinds of dance and music forms. But it also means a bewildering variety and sub-forms within Brazilian social dances. This adaptability combined with inwardness is what makes Brazilian dances, just like Brazil itself, Brazilian.
The entrance to the Academia de Danca Jimmy de Oliveira, Rio, which proclaims the versatility of Brazilian dance schools and their clientele
‘Aquarela do Brasil’ celebrates Brazil as land of the samba and the pandeiro but as anyone with a faint knowledge of Brazil knows, there is no one samba. In the words of Jimmy de Oliveira, founder of Rio de Janeiro’s Academia de Dança Jimmy de Oliveira, ‘many sambas, but one single passion’. At the Academia’s Oficina do Samba that I attended last week (14th-17th of January) in Rio, this reality was manifested in the timetable for the weekend’s classes, which alternated between samba tradicional, samba funkeado, samba fragmentado, and some offerings of samba rock and samba no pe thrown in.
Schedule of Workshops at the Oficina do Samba
Samba no pe, or the samba that is danced solo rather than in couple hold, is only one kind of samba, though the love that Brazilians feel for it was evident in the massive ovation that the class of samba no pe received from the workshop participants. This is the samba that is showcased in the Rio Carnival, and fittingly our teachers Ale Vilar and Kaila Mara were members of the historical samba school Mangueira. While teaching they insisted that samba is ‘alegria’ (happiness) and ‘sorriso’ (smile), so that smiling and a radiation of good energy was part of the learning process as much as the actual steps of the dance.
While samba no pe developed in the Carnival schools of samba, in the dance halls (gafieiras) of central Rio also developed samba de gafieira, or samba as a couple dance. Today we can still visit some establishments that were founded at the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries, such as the Centro Cultural Estudantina Musical, Rio Scenarium and the Clube dos Democratos. Here excellent live bands play and you can either join the locals singing along while doing what I call the ‘samba shuffle’—a basic movement of the feet to samba time—or show off the samba de gafieira skills that you’ve honed in a dance class at Rio, London, Buenos Aires, or indeed, the Oficina do Samba.
Centro Cultural Estudantina Musical, Rio de Janeiro
But samba de gafieira is only the beginning of the story. I had already encountered the curious hybrid Brazilians call ‘samba rock’ at the Exalta Afro festival that I had attended in Sao Paulo some years ago. It seemed to me then that samba rock was a dance style devised by hipster Brazilians in the 1960s to enable them to continue dancing in partner hold to rock music from the Anglophone world- music with a strong downbeat and pretty much zero interest from the perspective of rhythmic syncopation and layering. Despite the blandness of the rhythms of rock compared to the sounds of bossa nova and samba people wanted to dance to it because it was cool music; and they continue to do so.
The same impulse—to adapt samba as a couple dance to new music, rather than abandon couple dance completely—has led to samba funkeado or ‘funky samba’. Its creator, Jimmy de Oliveira, said to me that it arose from his hero-worshipping of Michael Jackson, and his desire to create samba styles that could respond to ‘funky’ and ‘groovy’ music. Samba funkeado allows the dancer to syncopate and exaggerate the codified steps of samba de gafieira. As the samba de gafieira rhythms are already syncopated to begin with, this exercise in re-syncopation breaks through normalisation of the rhythm by creating new, surprising, and playful ways of keeping the relationship between dance, music, and dancer fresh.
It is also a way to keep the conversation going between Brazil and the USA as two major inheritors of the Black Atlantic. Thus samba funkeado responded initially to North American music seen as ‘funky’, rather than the Carioca funk and other forms of Brazilian funky music. If we accept these principles as intrinsic to the way Brazilians feel about samba, then ‘samba fragmentado’, the latest form of samba de gafieira that Jimmy has created, is a logical development. Here, samba steps are deconstructed into successive poses that are held for a micro-second—or longer—depending on the call of syncopation. The appropriate music is hiphop or R n’ B, or Brazilian music created in that mould.
When asked about the difference between samba funkeado and samba fragmentado, Jimmy and his team responded not in words but by demonstrating to me the different feel of each style. But as an Australian participant in the Oficina helpfully articulated to me, samba funkeado is ‘photo-finish’; samba fragmentado is ‘time lapse’. In both cases there is a playing with and stretching out of and collapsing of time. We as dancers experiment with and experience time and counting in a multiplicity of possibilities, exploding the unevenness of syncopation when it has become absorbed into the framework of the dancer’s expectations.
Yet while all this teaching of funkeado and fragmentado is going on, there is also due respect being paid to ‘samba tradicional’ (traditional samba)- which is what samba de gafieira is called now to distinguish it from the newer styles. This re-labelling is as necessary as is the retention of the style for dance pedagogy: the newer styles do not abandon the 56 steps of the samba de gafieira repertoire (would be interesting research to unearth when and how this codification took place) but play with them and develop them to suit different musical demands and moods. I asked Jimmy de Oliviera whether the funkeado and fragmentado styles represent an evolution of the dance style in response to new and non-Brazilian music, and he enthusiastically agreed: ‘Isso!’
Lifestyle products by Jimmy de Oliveira paying homage to the traditional steps of Samba de gafieira- Facao, escovinha, piao, romario, elastico, puladinha. Photo by Flavia Amaral
This acceptance of ‘evolution’ in dance is in sharp contrast to the debates around kizomba’s evolution into urban and so-called traditional styles, and indeed the stiff resistance by many to the label of ‘traditional’ for kizomba styles that had developed initially in Angola. It seems to me that the difference lies in a sense of collective security that surrounds a dance that is accepted universally as national heritage and indeed whose strong status within the nation is matched by weak transnational presence—unlike kizomba, which has transnationalised spectacularly over the past decade and whose newer styles are being developed amongst Afro-diasporic communities in different European locations, most strikingly, France.
Practitioner of the Haitian dance style kompa Cliford Jasmin has pointed out that a strong dance identity for a genre is not necessarily matched by a strong music identity for the same genre. While this realisation can help us understand some of the debates around kizomba, I feel that what has let samba fragment and multiply without any depletion in the symbolic charge of samba is the co-existence of a strong music and dance identity for it, as well as the Brazilian tendency to cultural cannibalism and autonomy which has kept samba happily and comfortably Brazilian. This additional dimension would explain the differences between the global fates of samba de gafieira and another Afro-diasporic genre which exhibits an equally strong dance and music identity— salsa.
Lapa, Rio, the home of samba de gafieira, glorying in itself through tromp l’oeil murals
In the end, all Afro-diasporic social dance is about evolution, resistance, adaptation, subterfuge, and swag. These were the conditions under which samba de gafiera was forged out of the maxixe, the earliest urban Brazilian couple dance, which itself emerged from the dialogue between African dances of the Plantation such as jongo and lundu, that freed slaves from Bahia brought south to Rio, and European couple dances such as the waltz, the polka, and the mazurka. The maxixe, Jimmy de Oliveira explained to me, was a dance of humour, caricature, and exaggeration, and indeed, while dancing it with him, I was strongly reminded of images and old footage of the Cakewalk, that dance of the North American plantation, which mocked the masters through exaggerated homage to their elegant couple dances and balls.
The couple dance, formed in equal parts through resistance, mimicry, sly civility, and play, a dance of desire between the forbidden and the seized, the master and the slave, is, in my opinion, a foundational scenario of the Americas. It is a mythical moment of the birth of a culture through the process of creolisation. Its survival and adaptation in Brazil through the continuing evolution of samba de gafieira is one of the ways in which we can understand both how Brazil can both be intensely Brazilian and intensely part of the wider world of the Black Atlantic African diasporas. Watch here a video we took of a moving choreographic sequence by two dancers in Brazil which enacts the meta-narrative of movement from the African dances brought to the New World by slaves to couple dances such as samba de gafieira.
Tshirt from Jimmy de Oliveira declaring- many sambas,, one unique passion. photo by Flavia Amaral
With thanks to: Minkyoung Kim, my Research Assistant in Brazil and dancer extraordinaire; Jimmy de Oliveira and his entire dance team; Flavia Amiral; Anderson Mendes de Rocha, my first teacher of Samba de gafieira; Arthur and Aiste, my gafieira teachers in London, and a special ‘obrigada’ to Arthur for introducing me to Jimmy in Rio de Janeiro.
All photos are by Ananya Kabir; except where otherwise acknowledged!
Lambada, the so-called ‘forbidden dance’ from northeastern Brazil that swept through the world in 1989 through the music of Kaoma, has been one of the foundation stones of Modern Moves.
Since then, lambada has evolved into a number of dance styles that go under the umbrella term of ‘Brazilian zouk’. Through the usual network of dance studios, festivals and congresses, and dance socials, Brazilian zouk forms have become fully transnationalised. Genealogical tree of lambada– courtesy Luis Floriao.
Last summer, the dance drama Brazouka paid homage to lambada as the starting point of Brazilian zouk through the story of Braz dos Santos, one of the original dancers of the Kaoma videos. The Brazouka team carried further their engagement with lambada by organizing, together with Braz and his brother Didi dos Santos, the Brazouka Beach Festival in Porto Seguro from the 1st to the 9th of January.
What’s at stake in recreating the moment of origin through a social dance festival? Why go back to a small Brazilian town when a dance style was supposedly born, when its subsequent forms have become so international? What is being memorialised, and why? What are the scales of encounter between regional, national, and transnational? How is cosmopolitanism danced and how is the region remembered (or forgotten)? These are the reasons (and more) for our interest in this Festival.
Modern Moves sent our Associated Researcher MK Kim, a Brazilian zouk enthusiast, to attend the festival in Porto Seguro. Here’s an account of her first impressions:
On a mission to learn where Brazilian zouk comes from, my first stop is Porto Seguro, where lambada was the most popular dance in the 1980s before it had become a “forbidden dance”, banned because people thought it was too sensual.
Arriving at Porto Seguro in the morning of 2nd January, I was so eager to see with my own eyes the birthplace of lambada. I stopped at a local store for water and went straight to the beach. The ocean sounded, smelled, and looked surreal. This is the place where lambada arrived and which gave life to it.
While walking on the beach, I remembered that Holly, one of the Brazouka Beach festival’s organizing team, had said that the venue was located right by the beach. I asked few locals at the beach if they knew where the festival was. Nobody knew about the festival, but when I said lambada, they shouted “oh, lambada!” and pointed northwards.
I finally found the festival venue “Boca da Barra”, which used once upon a time to be a simple bar where people would drink and dance.
Nowadays, it’s a typical Brazilian venue: a semi-outdoor building bathed by a light sea breeze, where there is only ceiling but no wall, two wooden dance floors, a coconut water vendor, bar, food vendor, little alley to the beach and resting area. Mother nature, history and festival organizers seemed to have set up everything perfectly for us dancers.
The workshops were at the same dance floor as the parties and shows in the evening. They are mainly Lambazouk, and some ladies styling, men’s styling, samba funkeado, and kizomba. People take a break by going into water to cool off. If you don’t have a partner, you could do Capoeira with the ocean.
People usually say that Lambada/lambazouk is all about having fun. As soon as I walked into the venue, I was asked for a dance even before changing my shoes and constantly asked to dance the whole night. While sweating my life out from dancing outdoors with no cooling system in 30 degrees Celsius, I smelled and felt the ocean breeze, perhaps the same one that dancers felt in those clips from 1989, right here.
The parties are full of “energy boa” (good energy). Indeed, lambada is all about having fun. A woman dancing with two guys, a guy dancing with two women, “Oh, hey let’s dance!” “Oh, you told my woman? Who cares, I am going to do a little free styling till you are done, or I may steal yours.”
The performances that the Brazouka team has organized are breathtaking. The Brazouka Beach festival team have thought through the evolution that lambada underwent after the Porto Seguro era; they have awarded ‘Lifetime achievement awards’ to the dancers Jaime Aroxa and Adilio Porto who played a huge part in developing Brazilian zouk in Rio de Janeiro after the Porto Seguro phase.
From the venue to the town: vendors and shops open along the beach every day. They sell souvenirs, sweets, beachwear and fresh coconut water. It’s a reminder of the history and what they represent and perceive the region as. People walking around, the way they remember and associate with the place, the street becomes a living museum.
Of course, the music vendors caught my eyes. They sell so many different types of music. The seller said the most popular are Bahia music albums – with no specific genre, but a mixture of all the music from Bahia, followed by Zouk and Lambada.
Every Sunday in Porto Seguro, people gather at the plaza in the city center for music and dance. There were lots of open restaurants at the plaza where people were enjoying a cooled down evening after the heat of the day. A stage with a DJ and band was set up in the plaza, in front of a tiled dance floor built into its middle. How fantastic!
When I arrived, a Forro band was playing and a few people were already dancing. Somebody told me with body language that Zouk will start at 10 pm. Around 10 pm, a Zouk DJ in his “Zouk music” hat from the Youtube music channel based in Brasilia arrived and dancers started to increase.
In the plaza right near the beach, with the smell of ocean mixed with fried fish, grilled meat, and beer, everybody was dancing. Dancers mostly gathered near the stage and they all seemed to know each other. I was also surprised at the range of the DJ’s music, from traditional Lambada, Zouk, and to updated Zouk remixes.
I don’t speak Portuguese and I am not used to Lambazouk, but that was not a problem. Everybody embraced everybody. A guy was dancing with a little girl, mom was dancing with her baby son holding him in her arms, and an older couple and young couple were dancing as well. Everybody was indeed just so happy to dance. It was like a celebration of the end of the week. Low key, with friends and family, yet filled with happiness and sharing the joy of life.
During our subsequent days in Porto Seguro—we learnt many things that corrected and complicated these initial impressions. Was it 40 years ago that lambada was ‘born’ (as announcements during the festival’s opening claimed) or 30 years ago (as the festival tshirts proclaimed)? The venue was named ‘Boca da barra’ but the original Boca da Barra was now a gas station and young employees there remembered only the new venue when they heard the name. Didi dos Santos, the brother who stayed behind (Braz lives in London now) revealed to us that the sources of inspiration for the turns and dips he introduced into lambada were the films ‘salsa’ and ‘dirty dancing’, while the basis of its footwork lay in the Brazilian dances forro, baiao, even maxixe…
So is lambada a Caribbean dance or a Brazilian dance? Both possibilities were articulated by Didi at different times during our conversation. ‘A Caribbean dance with a ‘sotaque brasileiro’ (Brazilian accent) is what I hazarded as a compromise. To my delight, Didi enthusiastically agreed.
All photos by MK Kim unless otherwise indicated.
Italicised text by Ananya Kabir; the rest by MK Kim
We thank Holly Middleton, Luis Floriao, Didi Dos Santos, and each other.
Friday 4th May 2018 Anatomy Lecture Theatre (day) and Great Hall (evening) King’s College London, Strand Campus, WC2R 2LS Five years of Modern Moves draw to a close. Celebrate with…
Our fifth Moving Group was dedicated to an exploration of tango music and dance, and it involved a double bill. First, we heard Dr Kendra Stepputat, ethnomusicologist from the University…
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