Performing Brazil: Essays on Culture, Identity, and the Performing Arts ed. by Severino J. Albuquerque, Kathryn Bishop-Sanchez (review)

Performing Brazil is a set of English-language essays on the performance of brasilidade (Brazilianness) in and beyond Brazil. This collection offers insights into the ways performance constitutes a privileged site for expressing, embodying, creating, and contesting Brazilian identities in globalized contexts. While engaging a wide range of social practices and cultural forms identified as “Brazilian,” the focus is clearly on formal presentational modes of performance “excluding unrehearsed or unstaged performativity in daily life” (6). Individual chapters analyze specific forms of performance(s) and highlight intersections of performativity with such issues and concepts as race, gender, sexuality, hybridity, nationness, and immigration.

Following a short introduction by the editors, Bishop-Sanchez (chapter 1) provides an excellent opening essay charting the realm of performance studies and the inherently hybrid nature of performance itself as a springboard to “assessing the discursive boundaries of performing Brazil” (17). The key concept of brasilidade (Brazilianness) permeates the chapter and is explained as closely “linked to the cultural representation of the nation and any performative re-creation of the broadly construed idea of Brazil” (17). Here, notions of performing Brazil and performing brasilidade become synonymous and are directly linked to Benedict Anderson’s idea of “nationness” as involving emotionally charged cultural artifacts and representations of the nation.

The centrality of the body, embodiment, and complexities of racial identity in performing Brazilianness is highlighted in chapters focusing on dance, movement, and film. Rocha (chapter 2) traces contradictions in the foundational concept of antropofagia (cultural cannibalism) before illuminating its resurgence in recent Brazilian cinema, where metaphorical “chewing up” of the other suggests acts of consumption without digestion. Benjamin Legg (chapter 9) argues that Brazilian movie star Sônia Braga both embodied and contested variant Brazilian conceptions of female sexuality and beauty linked to racial identity as she simultaneously embodied North American expectations and fantasies of the Latina woman. Two of the most interesting essays (chapters 3 and 4) focus on staged dance performances of Brazilianness. Cristina Rosa shows how Grupo Corpo, one of Brazil’s premiere modern dance companies, captured national and international attention through its combinations of Euro-Brazilian ballet techniques with choreographic deconstructions of ginga, a sinuous and syncopated style of swaying the body historically related to Afro-Brazilian movement practices. Producing what Rosa calls “choreographies of identifications,” Grupo Corpo’s code switching between Eurocentric and non-Eurocentric embodied practices suggests a performative friction that Rosa reads as precisely Brazilian. A complementary chapter by Ana Paula Höfling argues that staging Afro-Bahian folk authenticity through racially marked dancing bodies—understood as bona fide culture bearers—legitimized the interplay of tradition with artistic innovation and modernity in Bahia’s Viva Bahia dance company. Alessandra Santos discusses Arnaldo Antune’s video art project Nome and suggests the intimate relation of this performance of Brazil as an embodiment of the quotidian urban realities of São Paulo, South America’s largest urban center.

Music and movement in cosmopolitan and immigrant contexts are the focus of chapters 5–7. Eric Galm’s chapter “Global Identities of Capoeira and the Berimbau: Keeping It Brazilian Overseas” highlights the trans-national nature of capoeira performance in North America by both Brazilian and non-Brazilian performers. Annie McNeill Gibson shows how Brazilian immigrants in post–Hurricane Katrina New Orleans create participatory sites of “fun” read as meaningful dialogues of shared Afro-Atlantic performative experiences. Bryan McCann’s chapter charts the historical importance of Brazilian harmonica player and composer Maurício Einhorn for the improvisational possibilities of bossa quente (hot bossa), a jazz samba style that emerged in tandem with bossa nova. The chapter eloquently illustrates the complexity and hybrid range of performing Brazilianness through an examination of the individual musical biography of this influential Brazilian musician. Chapters on performativity in Brazilian literature and the...