A Dance of Resistance from Recife, Brazil: Carnivalesque Improvisation in Frevo

Frevo is an energetic music and dance that symbolizes Brazil's state of Pernambuco: loud brass instruments provide the fast-paced melodies, and dancers in bright costumes hold small colorful umbrellas called sombrinhas as they perform acrobatic feats, dropping to their knees before springing up into high airborne splits. The word frevo is a colloquial variation of the Portuguese verb ferver (to boil) that alludes to its frenetic, aggressive nature and the hot, sweaty carnival during which it is danced. Frevo comes from Recife, the capital of the northeastern¹ state of Pernambuco, and its neighboring colonial town, Olinda. Recife is the sixth largest metropolitan area in Brazil (the city's population is 1.5 million and the metropolitan area contains close to 4 million) and it is known for its rowdy street carnival. Although frevo is not widely known around the world, Brazilians recognize it as part of Pernambuco's regional carnival tradition, distinct from the more internationally famous samba carnival of Rio de Janeiro in Brazil's southeast. Frevo is an emblem that represents a regional variation on Brazilian national identity, and it is said to originate from one of Brazil's more famous national traditions, the martial art of capoeira.

This article presents ethnographic research based on six months of fieldwork in Recife and Olinda to examine how frevo is a dance of resistance and implements strategies of cultural resistance that relate to its origins in capoeira. In considering how frevo's playful and carnivalesque nature combines with its improvisational techniques, I propose the term "carnivalesque improvisation" to describe how frevo enables dancers and foliões (street revelers) to work through and around the unpredictability and violence of carnival and society at large. The practice of "carnivalesque improvisation" resists the racism and classism that is associated with pejorative connotations of the word improviso in the frevo dance community, countering the idea that it is done without preparation or technique. I explore how the methodologies of dancers Otávio Bastos and Valéria Vicente and two groups, Guerreiros do Passo and Brincantes das Ladeiras, encourage dancers to practice improvisational techniques to develop self-expression as a strategy of resistance against elitist and exclusionary trends in mainstream frevo.

Frevo is a dance of resistance because it narrates, through both sound and movement, complex notions of identity that contribute to socioeconomic empowerment and the valuation of popular culture (vis-à-vis erudite or commercial culture). I use the term "dances of resistance" to refer to dances around the world that are involved in strategic processes of liberation, activism, and/or marginalized racial, social, or ethnic identity formation for a specific group of people.² Frevo is said to arise from and belong to o povo, or "the people," of Recife and Olinda—it is an enactment of carnivalesque hierarchical inversions of power (Da Matta 1984) for social interactions that relate to Pernambucan discourse about the state's mestiçagem, or "mixed" African, European, and indigenous identity ("Frevo Patrimônio Cultural Imaterial do Brasil" 2006). After Brazil's abolition of slavery in 1888, Recife was in a state of racial, political, and economic upheaval, and carnival brought these social tensions into focus. Throughout the twentieth century, these dynamics have played a role in the politicized vacillation between embranquecimento (whitening) and "Africanization" trends in frevo's legitimization process. Juliana Azoubel argues that, while frevo masquerades as a dance of celebration, it is actually an enactment of the struggle of racially and economically marginalized peoples to gain social space and achieve cultural integration (2007, 56–66). O povo can refer to many different groups of people and is ambiguously defined by those groups, but I use the term to refer to poor, black, undereducated, or otherwise marginalized peoples.

This examination is framed around dance scholar Danielle Goldman's (2010) explanation for how dance improvisation walks the line between devaluing so-called "popular" or "folk" culture and serving as an emancipatory strategy of resistance that requires a kinesthetic engagement with the world. That is, the improviser requires intellectual and artistic preparation as well as social or cultural...