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

From an academic colleague’s reaction to a roda de capoeira in New Orleans, there came one of the main seeds of inspiration for this highly recommendable gathering of 13 essays, including the captivating and elucidating introduction penned by both editors of the volume. All verse on performances originating in or inspired by Brazil. At the 2008 meetings of the Brazilian Studies Association, one scholar dedicated to the study of Brazil claimed that the capoeira being performed in a Tulane University foyer had “something uncanny about it” and “made no sense outside Brazil” (15). We readers may infer that the spark caused by that colleague’s personal discomfort in light of an alleged disconnect among the performers, the audience, and the setting is one of the multiple questions propelling and orienting the selected essays. Whether or not the topic of each of the essays falls perfectly into either of the book’s indexed topics listed in the cataloging data (Brazilian arts, Brazilian ethnic identity, Brazilian civilization), all chapters offer their own fascinating insights with transdisciplinary academic rigor.

The contributors include senior authors, such as Bryan McCann and Lídia Santos, and younger critics, such as Cristina F. Rosa and Benjamin Legg. Cinema, dance, literature, music, painting, performance, photography, sculpture, and theater are discussed in connection with class consciousness, curatorial practices, ethnicity, gender issues, folklore, protest art, and the zeitgeist of several eras, but mostly from 1950 to the present day. Performing Brazil, explain the editors, “creates an analytical geo-performative space that links Brazil to the [African] diaspora and back, along with a mixture of urban and rural tropes, and that understands performance as a staged activity in the broadest sense of the term” (6).

Following the book’s introductory essay, Bishop-Sanchez presents in “On the (Im)Possibility of Performing Brazil” an intricate panorama of the challenges one faces while investigating performative acts and subjects, in general, and those associated with brasilidade, or Brazilianness, in particular. She argues, firstly, that “performing Brazilianness is a concept that is ever evolving, nationally and internationally, in relation to live events that mold the projection of Brazil to its different audiences, both at home and abroad” (20). She then adds that performance “is a means to explore, develop, and challenge conceptions of national character and the embodiment of nationness” (20). Bishop-Sanchez’s essay is laudably eye-opening in the sense that it juxtaposes groundbreaking theories on the ways by which we analyze (and thus “preserve”) live, under-documented, or thoroughly undocumented art, an effort considered by some, such as Peggy Phelan, as “indomitable” (21). Despite the ontological difficulties and academics’ widespread refusal to write about performance, Bishop-Sanchez offers an operational definition, according to which performance “is a visual medium couched in a specific time and space that facilitates discussion and constitutes a basis upon which to draw” (21). Since performance projects a message that can be construed or sensed by the spectator, actor, or performer, she adds, “it functions as a site for interpretation and meaning” (21).

Further theoretical advances in the volume come from other scholars, such as Fernando de Sousa Rocha. He stretches the notion of cultural cannibalism to its 21^st-century reincarnation through socioeconomic symbolism in films like Cláudio de Assis’ Mango Yellow. A discussion of Belo Horizonte-based modern dance group Corpo, in turn, serves as a platform for the re-reading of body language, especially the ginga, as an element that not only translates a visual composition of Brazilianness but also enhances our understanding of the coexisting forces in transculturation, especially those detected through the interconnections between processes of identification and corporeality.

Another distinguished contribution in Performing Brazil to the young field of performance studies comes from the closing text written by Maria José Somerlate Barbosa. She examines the links between elements of theatricality, such as stage devices and dramatic language, and various attributes...