Brazilian Bodies and Their Choreographies of Identification

Swing Nation

Cristina F. Rosa

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137462275
• Topic: Mezzi di comunicazione e arti performative
• Subtopic: Arti performative

Brazilian Bodies, and their Choreographies of Identification retraces the presence of a particular way of swaying the body that, in Brazil, is commonly known as ginga. Cristina Rosa its presence across distinct and specific realms: samba-de-roda (samba-in-a-circle) dances, capoeira angola games, and the repertoire of Grupo Corpo.

Part I

Understanding Ginga

1

Decoding the Ginga Aesthetic

Ginga is a way of not taking life too seriously and facing your problems with a play of hips, feet, and heels. There have been 505 years that Brazilians have been swinging [gingando] through life – and they can recommend it to everyone.¹

Rui Castro, Ginga: The Soul of the Brazilian Football

In the months leading up to the 2006 World Cup in Germany, the Nike corporation sponsored a series of worldwide parties designed to launch its new campaign “Joga Bonito” (“Play Beautiful”). In a nutshell, its goal was to connect Nike’s name brand to the “Brazilian” style of playing football and its sponsored footballers (at the time, Ronaldo and Robinho). One of the key features of these marketing events was the exhibition of the documentary Ginga: The Soul of the Brazilian Football (2005), a partnership between Nike and the O2 Filmes production company.² This documentary, which chronicles the life of eight emerging and professional footballers from Brazil, asserts that ginga is an intrinsic part of Brazilian cultural identity. Juxtaposing scenes of Brazilians dancing samba, playing capoeira, and playing soccer, the irreverent documentary revisits Gilberto Freyre’s 1930s argument that the bodily swing – i.e. the ginga – present in Afro-Brazilian practices such as samba and capoeira have “contaminated” that European recreation in Brazil, transforming the Apollonian sport into a Dionysian dance or “foot-ball mulato” (see the Introduction).

On the back cover of the box set distributed during Nike’s campaign, more importantly, one reads that ginga is:

an almost indefinable, mystical quality of movement and attitude possessed only by Brazilians and evident in everything they do. The way they walk, talk, dance and approach everything in their lives.

Ginga is what gives Brazilian football players their fluidity and rhythm on the pitch and enables them to “Joga Bonito” (Play Beautiful). Contrary to this view of ginga as “an almost indefinable, mystical quality of movement and attitude possessed only by Brazilians,” in this chapter, I will argue that ginga is a bodily disposition or way of moving that, though connected to a particular culture, might be acquired, embodied, and reproduced by anybody, in spite of his or her ethnicity or place of birth. Subsequently, in this book I will offer an analytical discussion of the underlying principles informing the embodied concept of ginga as well as an introductory discussion of how this bodily mechanism works in practice. Ginga may be defined as a swaggering way of sliding or tilting (parts of) the body from one side to another when walking or, otherwise, acting in society. It functions, more importantly, as a central mechanism with which one may “juggle” weight across time and space, while maintaining a cool and supple sense of flow.

As stated in the Introduction, this “juggling mechanism” is the key element of a non-hegemonic system of bodily organization and knowledge production, which exercises a distinct way of perceiving and interacting with others. For practical reasons, hereafter I refer to this movement system as the ginga aesthetic. Based on the information discussed on this chapter, in this book I draw attention to how different segments of society in Brazil have cultivated steps, gestures, and intentions centered on the ginga aesthetic, selectively remembering and recombining them with other lexicons of movements available in, but not limited to, indigenous and foreign dance forms, martial arts, and team sports.

Preliminary considerations

For starters, it is important to recognize that there is no scientific evidence that Brazilians, or even Afro-Brazilians, inherit dispositions such as bodily syncopation genetically. In this regard, the music composer and literature professor José Miguel Wisnik states that:

In order to escape the risk of idealizing Brazil and Brazilians, we need, from the very start, to refrain from postulating cultural superiorities, or even from positing an idea of “national character.” Instead … it’s important to identify complex specificities. (Wisnik, 2011, p. 3)

For Wisnik, for instance, the complex interactions of African and European peoples and cultures in the New World, especially in major pro-slave port cities such as Rio de Janeiro and Salvador in Brazil, New Orleans in the US, and Havana in Cuba, have led to distinct, yet comparable, processes of “Africanizing transformation” and “hybridization” of cultural spheres. In relation to the “Africanization” of music in the New World, for instance, Wisnik further points out that:

The European polka, which is the prototype of all popular, urban dance music, becomes ragtime in the United States, habanera in the Caribbean, and maxixe in Brazil. The rhythmics [rítmica] of these three genres from North, Central, and South America are equally contrametric [contramétrica]: that is, they base themselves on accentuations that fall outside of the tonic points [pontos tônicos] of the binary measure; they thereby create a texture of internal pulses, tending towards polyrhythm, which call for a swaying dance [dança gingada] full of swing. These rhythmics are different from the ones that predominate in Western Europe, which musicology identifies as cometric [cométrica]: that is, where the figures and rhythmic divisions double the tonic points of the measure. (Wisnik, 2011, p. 3, italics and brackets in original)

Drawing on Sandroni (2001),³ Wisnik explains that this frictional interplay of rhythmic cometricity (same meter) and contrarmetricity (different meter or multi-meter) infuses the main rhythm with different kinds of polyrhythmic patterns or pulses, identified in Western music theory as syncope. This explains why samba, rumba, and jazz rhythms have “swing.” In a related article, Wisnik further explains that syncope may be understood as “a constant oscillation between an order and its accentual counter-order, sustained in a single movement” (2004, p. 46, author’s translation) or rather a stress in non-tonic points within the basic riff. Therefore, it presupposes pliable dislocations and discrepancies. Moreover, “this kind of rhythmic ambivalence, or structuring oscillation within the tonic points of reference, demand of the active listener a balancing sway, a characteristic and counter metric swing of the body” (2004, p. 48, author’s translation). The syncope installs, he adds, a dialectic between two simultaneous measures of accentuation, which the Brazilian Afro-European rhythm sustains to the limit: the binary beat that its counter-measure pulls, and the combined addition of odd and even musical cells that agglutinate and subdivide themselves, within the main riff. I will return to Wisnik’s understanding of syncope when discussing qualities of movement related to ginga.

Below I offer a brief overview of the Africanist aesthetic principles informing this way of moving. My theoretical conceptualization of ginga as the foundational element within a movement system that recuperates-cum-invents an Africanist way of thinking and acting, or embodied epistemology, draws on the groundbreaking work of the art historian Robert Farris Thompson on West African aesthetics and its presence in the diaspora. For Thompson (1966), the five characteristics shared by a wide range of dance forms in West Africa, and their respective music traditions, include apart playing and dancing; dominance of the percussive concept of performance; multiple meter; call-and-response; and songs and dance of derision. Together, they amount to what he identifies as the West African “aesthetic of the cool.” Over time, Thompson’s considerations on the aesthetics of West African dance and its cultivation on both sides of the Atlantic have triggered a radical change in the course of scholarly studies across the black Atlantic world. In particular, the findings of his multi-sited ethnographies have provided researchers and practitioners with concrete anchor points from which to identify, trace, and critically analyze how Africans and their descendants contributed to the reproduction of aesthetic knowledge in the Americas through movement.

Dance scholar Brenda Dixon Gottschild (1998), for instance, has followed in the footsteps of Thompson, discussing the premises of an Africanist aesthetic derived from West African principles and its identifiable presence in a variety of dance forms and regimens of training developed in North America. Moving one step further, Gottschild acknowledges the direct relationship between meaning and motion, inferring that dancing bodies articulate ideas and worldviews by deploying aesthetic principles through actions and attitudes. Her analysis addresses, for instance, the position and the articulations of the torso, the relationship between the torso and the limbs, and the resonance between rhythm and movement.⁴ Similarly, in his comparative ethnography, the sociologist Julio Tavares (1998) has traced a correspondence between the concept of coolness (related to jazz), as observed in Harlem, New York, and the concept of ginga (related to capoeira), as observed in Mangueira, Rio de Janeiro. Connecting embodied knowledges to processes of identification, Tavares concludes that in the diaspora, men and women’s signature ways of moving construct renewed self-representational images of elegance and beauty (coolness in the US and ginga in Brazil), whose performativity is further amplified by bodily modifications such as hairstyles, accents, clothing, and swagger.

The cross-examination of the available scholarship on African/Africanist aesthetics and its proliferation in the New World measured against my embodied knowledge of particular Afro-Brazilian movement practices grounded in the ginga aesthetic (e.g. samba, capoeira, frevo, and coco) has led me to outline a series of principles that are crucial to the understanding of the ginga aesthetic, and therefore the argument in this book. For the sake of clarification, I have grouped principles that are mentioned in this research project under eight subheadings, some of which overlap with one another and some of which are not fully developed. Yet, in this book, a clear understanding of the principles listed below becomes handy when retracing and qualifying the presence of this underlying system in a variety of socio-cultural activities, from dancing to thinking. The following lines function as a glossary for the text.

First and foremost, the concept of polycentrism/polyrhythm, as defined by Gottschild (1998), refers to movements generated from more than one body part and/or connected to multiple meters. By extension, the polycentric and polyrhythmic body alludes to the fragmentation of the body into multiple centers capable of articulating more than one rhythm simultaneously. With this infrastructure in place, dislocation in time and space may lead to two sets of variables, which I have grouped as: (a) call-and-response and apartness in movement; and (b) serpentine pathways and high-affect juxtapositions. When discussing practices such as samba and capoeira, call-and-response refers to dialogical conversations instantiated, back-and-forth, between body parts, between two or more dancers, between dancers and musicians, or between performers and the audience. By contrast, apartness in movement calls for the isolation of body parts in time and space. It also considers tangential rifts and flourishes that gain precedence over basic rhythmic patterns of movement or the search to find open spaces between the main riff with which to improvise. Therefore, it privileges an investment in (personalized) style over (standardized) form. Moving forward, Gottschild’s term high-affect juxtaposition evokes the ability to send the body into dynamically balanced movements of contrariety that evoke irony or paradox. Juxtaposition is also observed in movements that displace, defer, disorient, surprise, or shock. It also references the abrupt or dramatic overlaps and breaks between contrasting movements or postures and the juxtaposition of body parts, as in contrapposto. Conversely, the ginga aesthetic also emphasizes the corporeal ability to create smooth and flexible flow that sends the body in sinuous trajectories, that is, serpentine pathways. Generally speaking, this principle involves undulating sways, round twists, and circular turns, as well as movements and attitudes characterized by corporeal fluidity and pliability, and other rippling effects. To “move like a snake” through sinuous dislocations in space, tangential swings, or spiral shifts in different directions is not only desired but is also utilized, in some instances, to avoid direct contact or confrontation, or to simply seduce, or confuse rather than attack the other.

While the five principles outlined above shape the lexicon of movements and the trajectory pathways associated with the ginga aesthetic, the last three inform, more widely, the flow, syntax, and rhetoric associated with this movement system. Given their importance and level of complexity, below I will describe them in more detail. Departing from Thompson’s scholarship (1966, 1973, 1983), the concept of coolness in movement must be understood as a dynamic coordination of opposing forces. Neither too cold nor too hot, coolness is expressed through pliable and supple control, stability, composure, and equilibrium between style and character. Thompson (1983) affirms that coolness is a aesthetic manifested through idealized actions or, better, the dynamic articulation of the ideal noble character (iwa rere), a cold principle, in tandem with (or against) the force or energy that ignites the world (asé), a hot principle (Thompson, 1983).⁵ Beauty is achieved, he explains, by seeking a balance between these two complementary principles (Thompson, 1973). Coolness also seeks to balance out discrete elements, such as active bodies and serene expressions, with a detached yet ignited poise. It also evokes asymmetry, looseness, and indirectness.

Departing from the concept of polyrhythm, kinesthetic dissonance includes stepping in and out of sync or falling out of rhythm and coming back again; sideways displacement or asymmetrical shifts; participatory discrepancies; and swinging in and out of agreement with fixed cycles (riffs). It also means to move in different, odd rhythms. These rhythmic dissonances may provoke the sense of being both connected to and detached from the main spatio-temporal organization/whole, sending rippling effects and reverberations across that shared space. Kinesthetic dissonance is expressed through a variety of movements of bodily syncopation, such as samba’s frictional articulation between shuffling feet and wiggling hips or the pelvic grinding of funk carioca dancers. Moreover, in order to articulate syncopated utterances, these dancers must combine the intra-connected dialogue between decentralized and independently moving parts with their ability to reproduce multi-meter patterns, such as (tonal) syncope. Hence, a deeper look at this role of syncopation in Afro-Brazilian rhythms may help us to figure out how dancers embody the principle of kinesthetic dissonances to articulate bodily syncopation.

According to Wisnik (2004), in the particular case of samba and maxixe,⁶ the syncope represents a rhythmic stress in a dislocated point in time; outside the binary tonal beat (2/4). However, rather than being a “mistake,” tonal syncopation could be better understood as an interplay between interconnected measures, permeated by textural and asymmetrical dislocations. In this frictional dialogue between two (or more) rhythms, while some instruments may follow the same basic rhythm, others come in and out of sync by either lagging or speeding up one of the tonal intervals or changing its tonal accent. Together, they produce a constant oscillation between juxtaposed meters. Wisnik concludes that this oscillatory dissonance structures the musical score with visual and audible feints (negaceios), enriched with highlights and recesses (Wisnik, 2004, pp. 45–8).

Along these lines, Barbara Browning understands samba dancing as “a c...