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Some questions, when avoided, seem to reappear each time with more urgency, as if insisting to produce, if not answers, at least new questions.

The issue of the use of the popular dances or social dances in the scene of contemporary dance is one of those matters that follow me. Perhaps because, in Recife, where I grew-up, a big range of those dances alternates themselves during the year in the routine of the public events; perhaps because I came to notice that information from those dances compose my physicality in such a way that ignoring does not take them off the scene; perhaps because the sense of ritualistic, collective practice, signal of cultural questions, stroke me and moved me as artist-citizen-person… The fact is that, be as theoretical inquiry, or dealing with vestiges of movements and intentions in my artistic practice, the elements of those dances stop me and require attention.

I say that to mark that this article does not come from an artist that, after seeing the dances of popular tradition and being seduced by them decides to bring them to stage, but from someone that through diverse forms had contact with those dances during her formation and, having chose the art of dance as profession, sees herself obliged to reflect about that presence. My intention is to point the journey that allows the vision I propose and the place from where I speak.

Another prominent question is that this writing emerges from a practical research study about Frevo, in a movement research and artistic creation environment with a group of actors and dancers from Recife. Therefore, it is first in the dance that those formulations find the trigger to be structured as discussion.

Our artistic research began in November 2005, from the following question: Could Frevo be used as a body language capable to provoke dynamic and specific senses and thus serve the construction of contemporary dance performances?

It is common sense between researchers and dancers that Frevo has wide repertoire of movements, intentions and dynamics and that it is a dance extremely open to the dancer’s creativity. However, the traditional use of Frevo in Recife seems to have as a characteristic the stage transposition of the movements in synchronized form among the dancers, using mainly a frontal relation with audience and rarely proposing new uses. Such tendency became a school in Recife, through the Popular Ballet of the Recife (whose researches and scenic structures was made in 70′s and 80′s) and whose more recognized and contaminator artistic result relates to a pedagogical and para-folklorical form to present the local cultural expressions.

Our idea is to approach that social-cultural phenomenon Frevo, touching it through several axes – dynamics, sensations, historical elements, logic of weight use and articulations, using the elements that will interest a discussion conducted by the process itself. By doing that, we have an encounter with information, reflections, and sensations that, in the present state, I share partially with the reader in this article.

The way we are approaching Frevo understands it as being a dance constituted of an accumulation of body knowledge about equilibrium, impulse, agility, explosion and dislocations. Our research, still in course, showed that is possible to perceive Frevo as a body language that specialized itself through accumulation of techniques and approaches, generating a big and representative social-cultural legacy and diverse singular artistic qualities. The hint of the dancer Jaflis Nascimento, “Frevo is the plastics of Pernambuco”, looks more and more pertinent. We understand that Frevo needs to be investigated not with the folk look, that justifies its existence by the need to rescue or reconstruct a nation’s identity, but better recognizing its singular characteristics as an artistic legacy, a technique that developed in a spectacular form different relations with the space, time, gravity and that allows the expansion of the body’s possibilities.

Diving in corporal stimuli generated by the music of Frevo – for it is a dance which invention of movements has always been connected to the relation body-music – we could notice recurring points of muscular acceleration and sensations of agitation and euphoria that suggested movements of inflection of the knees, movements of the external bone and impulses of explosion. That made us, while working, replace the worry about existing steps and their forms, by a quest for dynamics, musicality, pleasure, displacement and suspension.

The discussion this path creates took us to the name of that dance: the specialists refer to the dance that uses Frevo music as step. By that, the dancer of frevo is identified as ‘passista’ (something like a steper, N.T.). As “step” in dance is synonym of systematized movement, that denomination, at the same time that confuses, reduces the dance comprehension. What we found still stranger in that detachment was to discover that, in records from the beginning of the century, the name “Frevo” was much more connected to corporal phenomena than to the music. In the newspapers of the beginning of the century, the word ‘Frevo’ was synonym for animation of the crowds, chaos, suggestion of something belligerent, or in Valdemar de Oliveira’s words “a kick in the middle of the street”. The reason it was necessary to separate in two names the song and the dance and what the name “step” made to this dance is a question to be dealt with.

The pedagogical organization of the education of Frevo was also structured through the cataloguing of steps, named and defined in their form. Like this, we learn Frevo through its basic steps: ponta-de-pé-calcanhar, tesoura, saci pererê, trocadilho…

Thinking that the form of transmission indicates perceptions about dance and forms of scenic approaches, maybe it is interesting to notice that the division of Frevo in steps was an option and, despite being anchored in several aspects, facts and situations of the sprouting and development of Frevo, that option is not unique or the one that better defined what it was.

The division of Frevo in steps is just one of the forms to understand it; and we cannot avoid noticing that the form to approach the movement is connected to leading thoughts. Perhaps an answer to a Cartesian world vision, in which each element can be divided in parts and treated separately, theoretically, without losing its comprehension as a whole. It does not hurt to remember also that to Descartes the best metaphor for the body is the machine, and that in his hierarchically way of arranging the kinds of knowledge relegates the dance to a lower role in the scope of the arts and the arts in a lower role among the levels of knowledge.

It is valid to note that some of those reflections found support in conversations and meetings with the Guerreiros do Passo (Step Warriors), a group of dancers that is dedicated, in an unpaid initiative, to transmit Nascimento do Passo’s approach of the frevo in schools and squares of the Metropolitan Region of Recife (Nascimento do Passo is a Frevo historian. N.T). In our new phase of research, we will have dancers from diverse “trends”; work partners as Otávio Passos, Gil Torres, Paulo Melo, Luciano Fagundes.

It made me especially happy to notice that many of the questions that are initiated here only became possible through the artistic experience and the contribution from each one of those interpreters-researchers – Jaflis Nascimento, Leda Santos, Calixto Neto, Marcelo Sena, Iane Costa e me. We could all divide our history and the constant questioning of the movement in our careers.

A second element that was present in our discussions was the relation between Frevo and violence. The question was how to deal with its belligerent origin and its elements of fight, knowing and feeling how much it became a symbol of joy, blast of enjoyment, a dance of contagion and exhibitionism, compressed in the virtuosity of the ‘passista’. We could establish that its development and specialization as artistic language during the century prioritized those aspects and we decide to throw ourselves in the game of doing the contrary road; to find a ‘passista physicality’ as a person available to enter a fight at any moment; and also in the attempt of identifying moments and situations in carnival where Frevo embodies itself, like that kick to which Valdemar de Oliveira refers himself.

Was interesting to find in that “belligerent” Frevo a black body with a much sharper image, in a easy transit not only between Frevo and Capoeira, what always stood out on available texts (Oliveira, Dantas, Araújo) but also and surprisingly magical, hip moving body, suggesting movements of macumba and samba. It is surprising not fornot being easily perceived that the possibilities of movement of the African descendant have constituted and were transmitted through their religious dances, but because this inheritance never stood out like characteristic of the ‘passista’ in Frevo.

Our reflection, from the relation established in the body, is that, despite of non existent relation between Frevo and religiosity – as in a big extent of the popular dances in Brazil -, one of the pillars that allow the constitution of the dance of Frevo is the ginga that constituted the black body and that is strongly connected to the African Brazilian religious practices.

Despite of apparently looking redundant, the question that standing out is: why do we remember so little of the black content in that dance? Perhaps because its structure is not compressed in ginga, in the “malemolência” and slowness that we use to identify with the black inheritance of Brazil. Maybe by a need of acceptance by local society – Frevo (music and dance) then became a symbol of local art. Or even because that inheritance points out a side of Frevo that interest us less to remember: the marginal condition in which ex-slaves were thrown at urban centers. After all the ‘capoerista’ we speak about was not an artist, but a risky delinquent. Forgetfulness or deletions that become indicators of cultural logics, ideologies, taste.

Our “discovery”, or better said, what the corporal research pointed out, was to realize that one of the possibilities to find Frevo was to unbleach it (in the sense of understanding and temporarily undoing the resulting transformations of the stylization of Frevo in its adaptation for stage or to answer what was understood as beautiful). By doing that, was much easier to dance it. And, looking us dancing, we could see that was the white-Iberian look, and a classical perception of beauty, that made Frevo more erect, with closed legs, with less hips and malice, standardized and, in its stage form, synchronized.

To think about those processes, to invest in each one of those elements, separate or articulately, allowed us thrilling discussions. My intention by bringing those discussions to this text in the present phase of the research was to divide those relations we are being able to establish between dance, culture and society with people interested in the argument of dance as knowledge area.

Bibliography references:

ARAÚJO. Rita de Cássia. Festas: máscaras do tempo: entrudo, mascaradas e frevono carnaval do Recife. Recife, :1992.

ARRAIS, Raimundo. Recife, culturas e confrontos: as camadas urbanas na campanha salvacionista de 1911. Natal, EDUFRN:1998.

OLIVEIRA, Valdemar. Frevo, capoeira e passo. Recife: CEPE, 1971.

ROCHA DE OLIVEIRA, Goretti. Danças populares como espetáculo público o recife, de 1970 a 1988. Recife: FUNDARPE/Companhia editora de Pernambuco

SILVA, Leonardo Dantas. O frevo Pernambucano. Cultura Brasília jul/dez 1978.

VICENTE, Valéria, MARQUES, Roberta e COSTA, Liana. Acervo Recordança. Parte da história da dança em Pernambuco entre 1970 e 2000. Recife: Recordança, 2004.