Mixing and Playing: Performing Blackness in Brazil

While others in this forum have discussed the idea of a black play in the United States, I am addressing the issue from a Brazilian perspective. I propose that rather than ask, why is there an essay addressing the issue of what is a black play? or, what is playing black from a Brazilian perspective? We might ask, why is there only one essay that looks at definitions of blackness from a non-US perspective? The very question of what is a black play in Brazil seems to imply certain assumptions about the differences between race and nation in the US and Brazil. In Brazil where notions of miscegenation have historically circulated more freely, alternate paradigms of race and performance emerge; however, they destroy the possibility that the seemingly progressive narrative of hybridity could be a solution for the dialectical stratification of race in the US. Though blackness in Brazil is recognizable through self-classification, identification of a black play remains bound up in the definition of mulatto and national identity: black artists must assert an artistic vision that distinguishes blackness from miscegenated national narratives of assimilation within a context that simultaneously ignores and reinforces a racialized power structure.

Theatre has been one arena in Brazil where contentions of a racially mixed culture break down and the myths of Brazilian society are revealed. Still, champions of the Brazilian "racial democracy" thesis have highlighted the African influences on Brazilian culture, the absence of legal barriers between the races, the lack of violence against blacks, and the large number of racially mixed individuals as evidence that Brazil is a country without discrimination.²⁹ However, in explaining just who the "oppressed" were in the theatre of the oppressed, Augusto Boal pointed out that in Brazil the primary oppressed group is the blacks. Black Brazilians have had a limited presence on the Brazilian stage. Unlike in the United States where legal barriers to black achievement forced blacks to create all-black institutions, in Brazil, the mixed-race ideal that allows all Brazilians to claim their heritage to each of three races—African, Indian, and European (and thus blackness)—impedes race-based collective action. In such circumstances, attempts of blacks to gain space on the stage and in Brazilian society become more difficult. Blackness and "mulattoness" in Brazil are in endless conversation; the performance of one informs the other. Rather than always think about race in terms of black and white as we do in the States, Brazilian culture requires that we think about how this third category complicates blackness—not necessarily reducing racism or opening up opportunities for those in one class at the expense of those in another, but creating another vision that has its own limitations.

Unlike the tragic mulatta in the United States, whose occupation of the space between the races always leads to unfulfilled love and eventually death, the mulata in Brazil is an essential figure of the national imagination and was a key character of the comic revue theatre. For the most part, white actresses played these roles; however, in its golden age exceptional Afro-Brazilian women shone on the stage. Audiences and critics lauded women known to be of mixed race—like Aracy Cortes (1904–1982) and Zaíra Cavalcanti (1913–1981)—for their "authentic" Brazilianess, and praised both for their talents and their feminine appeal in the mulata roles. Black women, however, did not have access to these roles. For example, in the 1926 play Ai Zizinha, Ascendina Santos, a black woman who could not be read into the frame of mulatta attraction, portrayed the comic foil for the lead, who was a white woman playing a mulata. At the same time that the texts of these plays ridicule darker-skinned black women, they emphasize the joyful attraction of the Portuguese to the mulata, and reproduce discourses that exaggerate the sexuality of mixed-race women.

In response to their limited access to the theatre, Afro...