FREE WORDS: Cultural politics in Brazil: from academic dance to the periphery of the stage

Podcast / 14 min / e-Scena

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03/10
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Polish subtitles

 

FREE WORDS is a series of essays in a ready-to-listen form. The authors read them in their mother tongues.

Prof. Maria Claudia Alves Guimarães, UNICAMP University, São Paulo, Brazil, is a specialist in the history and theory of contemporary (mainly Brazilian) dance.

In her essay Guimarães briefly outlines the history of dance in Brazil and its political context. Below –  excerpts from the essay. The whole essay in the form of a podcast read by the author in the original language (Portuguese), with Polish subtitles will be published on our e-Scene (i.e. on our FB fanpage and YT channel). In Polish it will be also published in the festival magazine, which will be available in October at festival venues during the events. The whole text in English will be available here on our website after its premiere on the e-Scene.

Excerpt from the essay:

When someone talks about Brazil, the image of the country is generally associated with carnival, samba dancing, bossa nova, dance, football, joy, as well as with a country that does not protect its Amazon rainforest, does not protect its indigenous people culture, and has an extreme social inequality. 

However, whatever one’s point of view, the truth is that we know very little about the territories that we are not familiar with, that have peripheral histories, and that remain in our imagination, as distant exotic places, far from our reality. Therefore, we will try to expose herein historically important moments of cultural policies that were implemented in the country, and that influenced the development of dance as well.

[the entire text in EN to come right here, after the premiere of the podcast on the e-Scene ]

THE ENTIRE TEXT:

Cultural policies in Brazil: from the scholar to the periphery in the scene

When someone talks about Brazil, the image of the country is generally associated with carnival, samba dancing, bossa nova, dance, football, joy, as well as with a country that does not protect its Amazon rainforest, does not protect its indigenous people culture, and has an extreme social inequality. 

However, whatever one’s point of view, the truth is that we know very little about the territories that we are not familiar with, that have peripheral histories, and that remain in our imagination, as distant exotic places, far from our reality. Therefore, we will try to expose herein historically important moments of cultural policies that were implemented in the country, and that influenced the development of dance as well.

Colonized by the Portuguese, Brazil has been known by many as a country rich in cultural traditions, where indigenous tribes lived in. Slave traders brought Negroes from Africa for more than three hundred years, especially from its West Coast. Although the colonization took place in a very exploratory way in the first 300 years, with little investment in the area of culture and the Arts.

The Indigenous Brazilian population and the Africans danced not to entertain, but as a form of resilience, to keep their beliefs and traditions, despite all the restrictions placed by the colonizers. It was only after 1808, with the arrival of the Portuguese royal Court to Brazil (which left Portugal due to the Napoleonic invasion), that various cultural sectors received the first investments. Thus, at the beginning of the XIXth century, the first cultural institutions were created in the country, such as the National Library, the National Museum of Fine Arts and the National Historical Museum. 

It was also then that the teaching of the Arts began to be disseminated. As an example we have the French Mission brought to teach painting; the widespread  private teaching of music with emphasis on the inclusion of foreign teachers; and the introduction of music in the training of teachers.

Brought from overseas, several dance teachers came initially to teach ballroom dancing to the court, or later to teach the daughters of farmers. These teachers would end up also acting as dancers in operas and operettas. They fought hard then in a country that considered dance a minor art form. However, all of these actions were directed to the affluent society, which disregarded the culture of the native-born and enslaved peoples, devaluing them and setting them apart.

According to Botelho (2016), it was in the republican period, when the country was celebrating 100 years of independence, when it sought to reflect its identity that it began to draw up a cultural policy focused on the Brazilian culture. Thus, in the 1930s, during the government of Getúlio Vargas, a cultural policy was implemented for the first time in the country, aiming at preserving, documenting, disseminating and producing a cultural heritage, under a nationalist point of view. It began also to approach Brazil ethnographically, as a nation with roots in and miscegenated by indigenous people, Africans and Europeans (Portuguese). It was during this period that a thought was raised that the municipal, state and federal governments should finance the Brazilian culture.

Then, shortly before Vargas took office, the first official dance school was founded at the Teatro Municipal do Rio de Janeiro (in 1927), where professional dancers would train to dance in opera and ballet concerts. The first dance company, the Corpo de Baile do Teatro Municipal do Rio de Janeiro was established in 1936, what provided a precedence for the establishment of other schools and companies all over the country in the following decades. 

Capoeira prohibition was lifted in 1930. However, after almost 50 years of the abolition of slavery, the Negro culture movement was still taking its first steps in Brazil. The lack of access to culture and education was still an obstacle to the poorest social strata. Thus, although foreign choreographers working in Brazilian dance companies tried to include Brazilian themes in their ballet concerts, just as modern dancers began to settle in the country and seek the confluence between modern language and the Brazilian culture there was a huge gap between both popular and erudite cultures. The access to artistic training and enjoyment by the least well off, the Negroes and browns to both popular and erudite cultures was also very difficult.

People began to think about a policy called Democratização Cultural (Cultural Democratization) in the 1960s and 1970s, in which both the political left and the right proclaimed the need for the dissemination of the erudite culture to the less well-off social classes. Although this was a period greatly impacted by the military dictatorship in Brazil, when censorship prevailed, according Botelho (2016), “the military government, in order to improve its image, began to establish in 1975 a policy to protect the heritage and cultural production, in order to protect, support and recover the Brazilian cultural heritage, as well as to stimulate creative flows”. Having this in mind, it adopted a policy that led it to pay more attention to the potential, values and characteristics of each region in Brazil, as well as on the context in which they found themselves, recognizing their respectability as knowledge.

The 1970s was the period in which several stable dance companies began to emerge across the country, since we already had several generations of trained Brazilian dance professionals. It was then as well that, plenty of suggestions were made for joining the popular and the erudite began to be heard, such as the proposition of an armorial art by Ariano Suassuna. However, despite the emergence of actions such as the Barca da Cultura, which aimed at providing access to the arts in the most diverse regions of the country, the Amazon region included, the prevailing mentality was that the erudite culture should prevail and be made accessible through social projects. It was under this point of view that the Ballet Stagium Company danced in the Xingu region for the indigenous people, exposing the importance of observing and learning from these peoples.

On the other hand, the first cultural projects related to art education were established during this period in large urban centers. The goal of these projects, also known as sociocultural projects, was to use culture as an educational tool for social transformation. One of the first projects inaugurated was Olodum, in the State of Bahia, in 1979, which soon gave precedence to similar initiatives across the country.

In the following decades, with the political openness, the country adopted a neoliberal policy with Culture Incentive Laws, which transferred much of its responsibility to the private initiative by reducing taxes. It was during this period that Non-Governmental Organizations began to grow taking upon themselves the responsibility of promoting actions related to social movements.

In the city of Rio de Janeiro, Sovik (2014) points out that these projects began to emerge with force in the 1990s, when, with the democratization process already in place, police violence against the poor came into the agenda. As a result, the massacres of both the Candelária and Vigário Geral, which took place in 1993, led to the foundation of projects such as the Casa da Paz, Viva Rio and AfroReggae porjects, and of many others in the following years, providing spaces for the young people on the periphery to express themselves.

However, in the early 2000s, during the government of President Lula, investments by the State were re-established, and a cultural policy was implemented with the purpose of providing greater participation of the civil society in relation to the goals and actions to be prioritized, and adopted. Said policy provided the different social strata, different ethnic groups, social differences and so on, the means for them to hear and voice their point of view. It was at that moment, according to Botelho (2016) that people began “to think about consolidating culture as the basis for the expression of the individual itself, as a tool for the construction and the exercise of citizenship”.

This helped even more the further development of a cultural policy, whose principle is to serve the population, aiming at listening to its needs, its motivations, assuming not only to provide access to erudite art. It did as well as start to consider the popular arts of each group, of each layer of society as legitimate, thinking no longer on the Democratization of Culture, but on a Cultural Democracy.

The result is dance academies are no longer the only gateway to start dance training, making it possible for the poorest population to access training in the most varied types of dance. It happens in some public schools, in technical schools (ETECs), in public dance teaching institutions, in NGOs, etc., within a range of choices that include capoeira, the various Brazilian dances, ballet, contemporary dance, jazz, urban dances, Afro dance, ballroom dancing, among many other modalities, and even providing access to study in public dance courses.

Based on the teachings of the well-known educator Paulo Freire (1987, 2016 ), that “education is a form of intervention in the world”. That education has a “fundamental role in the process of overcoming poverty and neglect, to be carried out by the society itself”, we see that through dancing the individual is often able to appropriate the place where his best expression lives. As a result, he begins to see the world feeling himself a part of it, as well as he believes he can be the protagonist of his own story.

It is for these reasons that we increasingly see a greater number of projects and, consequently, of professional groups and collectives that emerge because of this work to rescue citizenship. It mixes formations such as ballet and contemporary dance with hip hop, funk , passinho, capoeira and other dances that are very present and very much appreciated by young people in the periphery, among which stand out the works such as those of Lia Rodrigues Cia de Dança, Cia Fusion de Danças Urbanas, Grupo Treme-Terra, Grupo ZumbBoys, and many others.

It was within this context that Alice Ripoll’s established the Cia Rec, which will be featured in the program of this festival, and which began giving contemporary dance classes to young people, who danced hip hop at an NGO in Chácara do Céu, a favela in Rio de Janeiro. Although shortly after the NGO ended the partnership, the group continued workuing without any support, rehearsing in an old church at the favela where they lived, until they performed at the Panorama Festival with much success as well as managed to maintain themselves through their own work, on Brazilians stages and abroad.

However, although examples like this are becoming better known, the existing sociocultural projects are still insufficient to include the vulnerable population while much more chances exist for those who belong to the middle and upper classes. In addition, in these pandemic and post-pandemic times, many setbacks have also been established in relation to cultural policies, since investments by the government have been greatly reduced, making it difficult for companies, groups, collectives and many dance professionals to survive.    

 

References:

BOTELHO, Isaura. Dimensões da cultura: políticas culturais e seus desafios. São Paulo: SESC, 2016. 

CARVALHO, Lívia Marques. O ensino de artes em ONGs: tecendo a reconstrução social. São Paulo: ECA/USP, 2008.

FREIRE, Paulo. Pedagogia da Autonomia: saberes necessários à prática educativa. São Paulo: Paz e Terra, 2016.

_______. Pedagogia da indignação: cartas pedagógicas e outros escritos. 

São Paulo: UNESP, 2000.

_______. Pedagogia do oprimido. São Paulo: Paz e Terra, 1987.

SOVIK, L. Os projetos culturais e seu significado social. Galaxia (São Paulo, Online), n. 27, p. 172-182, jun. 2014. http://dx.doi.org/10.1590/1982-25542014110411.

 

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