On Stage Alone: Soloists and the Modern Dance Canon

SIX: Modernity and Nationalism in Solo Dance in Brazil: The Bailado of Eros Volúsia and the Performance of Luiz de Abreu

141 six Modernity and Nationalism in Solo Dance in Brazil The Bailado of Eros Volúsia and the Performance of Luiz de Abreu Sandra Meyer The first four decades of the twentieth century witnessed countless transformations in dance in Europe and North America, which reverberated in Asia and South America. One of the most important phenomena of this new dance was found in the composition of the solo. Soloists ’ search for personal expression was distinguished by the specification of a national or sociocultural context allied to a view of a new dance based on the absorption of aesthetic models from other cultures, such as the Greek in Isadora Duncan, the oriental in Ruth St. Denis, and the African in Katherine Dunham. The stylization of dance in the early twentieth century based on African cultures, unlike the alterity constituted by means of a utopian, late Romantic look at Greek, Indian, or Egyptian culture, had latent sociopolitical implications because of the recent and combative formation of black identity in countries such as Brazil and the United States. In Brazil in the 1930s and 1940s, the solo dances of Eros Volúsia (Rio de Janeiro, 1914–2004) affirmed a combination of nationalism and modernism 142 imbued with reflections on her own Afro-Brazilian culture. In this period, Brazilian arts expressed issues relevant to national culture without losing sight of the desire to be modern. The modernist movement, triggered by the Semana de Arte Moderna de 1922 (Modern Art Week) organized in the city of São Paulo by a generation of intellectuals and artists who criticized the artistic and literary forms upheld by academic traditions, searched for a creative conscience concerned with portraying Brazilian culture, from its naturalqualitiestoitsgrowingurbanization,whilemaintainingaconnection with the movements of the European vanguardists. In this context in the 1930s and 1940s, the new dance presented by Volúsia turned to Afro-Brazilian matrices, distinguishing her from other figures of Brazilian dance at the time who followed the ballet tradition. In the same period ,AmericananthropologistanddancerKatherineDunham(1909–2006) was building a unique vision of Afro-American dance in the syncretic, although segregated, American culture. These choreographers brought to the modern dance scene in their countriesrepresentation of Afro-American and Afro-Brazilian culture. Volúsia’s proposal to create a national body was appropriated by the political ideology of the Brazilian government at the time of the Estado Novo (1937–45), one of the most authoritarian periods of the country’s history.1 The regime worked on two essential fronts, culture and education, seeking to “establish the bases of nationality, construct the nation, forge Brazilianness .”2 Mestizo culture became the official representation of nation, and the Brazilian dances of Volúsia revealed the nationalist and modern project idealized by the Estado Novo government. Eros Volúsia was the inventor of a national bailado, which realized an “anthropophagic” relation to foreign and domestic cultural references. The Portuguese term bailado, translated from the French ballet, was used at the time to refer to both modern dancesand ballet. It established itself at a time when ballet was institutionalizedinthecountrywiththecreationofthe first official schools and companies by the theaters in large Brazilian cities. My analysis of the beginnings of the modern dance solo in Brazil relies on a study of Brazilian dance of the 1930s and 1940s by Roberto Pereira (1966– 2009), one of the most important dance history researchers in Brazil.3 I refer as well to the concept of miscegenation that arose from the philosophical Sandra Meyer 143 and ethical anthropophagic proposals of Oswald de Andrade (1890–1954). Oneofthemainproponentsforculturalchangeduringthefirstfourdecades of the twentieth century, de Andrade defined his Brazilian cultural activism as anthropophagic, creating an analogy with the tradition of anthropophagic Indians. Published in the magazine Antropofagia in 1928, the “Manifesto Antropofágico” proposed feeding off everything that foreigners brought to Brazil, “to suck all the ideas from them and join them to Brazilian ones, thus realizing a rich, creative, unique and proprietary artistic and cultural production.”4 The name of the manifesto was intended to revive metaphorically a belief of some anthropophagic indigenous peoples who devoured their enemies, supposing that they would thus assimilate the enemies’ qualities .5 Written by Oswald de Andrade, with the help of Mário de Andrade and Raul Bopp, the manifesto is the most radical of the entire first phase of the Modernist Movement, because it defends resistance to incorporations made without a proper critical spirit. The proposal was to...