dança de rua / Foto divulgação

Dancing greeting, dear friends.

As few may know, I am a researcher of popular culture and its transformations in urban environments, focusing on dance. However I always had reservations about publicizing my research in virtual spaces, because it is a format in which the discussions seem hurried and often not so useful in terms of deepening debates about complex themes that are thrown into the virtual world and treated in a superficial and simplistic manner. Given this panorama, idança is currently the most flexible portal, coherent with our artist’s endeavors. That said, it makes sense and I think it is beneficial for such space to publicize our reflections, events and news about dance.

I firmly believe that many choose to format and synthesize their research so that they become viable in a digital format as a way to spread their own work. On the other hand, we usually deal with individuals that do little or no research, but unload their crooked and not-so-well-grounded “theories” in our already troubled and tense dance field.
Thus, I have always adopted in my short career in dance a political stance of not inserting my reflections acquired through research in web pages, given that they are issues that cannot be condensed in three or four pages. In other words, this text is more a preoccupation, a diagnosis and a political statement about street dance and not a reflection based on theoretical-methodological study.

This text is about the existence of a University Extension Course about “Urban Dance” that took place at Campinas State University (UNICAMP) in the second semester of 2009 and was conducted by Cia. Eclipse, represented by Professor Ana Cristina Ribeiro Silva along with Professor Holly Elizabeth Cavrell (USA). The occurrence of this course left me ambiguously surprised when I realized its program proposed “a theoretical and practical approach in which we will study and research different urban dance styles”.

On one hand it is interesting to realize there is a wide practice of urban dances in all of its ramifications in all of Brazil, which legitimizes the fact that its dancers are teaching academics linked to higher education institutions – even if they don´t take into account their use, which can range from the mere reproduction through future classes in which these people will use this material for scenic interventions in which codes taken from street dance are imploded or manipulated in other languages, which we historically agree to group under the same slippery nomenclature – sometimes too specific, sometimes to broad – called contemporary dance. Both are viable and feasible in different levels.

On the other hand, once we look closely to the course about street dance, we can see the great embarrassment and lack of knowledge about the historical process that forged street dances throughout the last two decades and a half in Brazil. How so? In the middle of the 1980’s Brazilian society started to experience a particular and local phenomenon that later became known as street dance. Since the first appearances, such dancing cultural manifestation worked as a dialogue dynamic with multiple body references like: Funk, Soul, Jazz Dance and Break (there are some that prefer to speak of contamination). It is worth stressing that such medium have African origins, but was modified in the territory currently known as the United States of America.

However, access to those references comes in a fragmented and non-structured way though mass media outlets and gesture exchanges through observations in parties in the outskirts of Brazilian cities. The problem is: in the national landscape there were people who started this practice in an appropriate way, creating a peculiar aesthetics, in which different references of movement, thought, experiences, gestures and social recognition through dance were mixed. This new form of dance became known because of the competitive festivals circuit already in the end of the 1980’s. This space crucially interfered in the formatting and legitimization of what would be street dance in Brazil. By the way, the street dance nomenclature wasn´t established by the dancers, but by “specialists”: curators, jurors and all the people who were always actively present in those festivals.

During the 1990’s a group from the city of Santos emerged and provided a formula to what would become “the” street dance. Again, those who engender and consolidate this model are not those who practice it, but the “specialists”, who gradually provide through awards, propositions and invitations the foundations for an “acceptable” street dance, one closer to the most traditional Eastern dance patterns.

After this moment, a group of people coming from street dance emerged and started to occupy the places where aesthetic legitimation is provided for street dance, carrying out courses, lectures, workshops, performance and mainly being judges in competitive festivals. Reinforcing even more the “mainstream” street dance.

This process created a double discontent: both “specialists” and street dancers turned against this closed format of what street dance in Brazil should be. There was a mutual need, a search to make possible the renovation of this form of dance in our national territory. However, the lack of studies, research, understanding of the cultural appropriation process, mediation, re-signification, incorporation by both parts, prevented the perception of the process that had been taking place since the beginning of the 1980’s, making the use of North American “new models” comfortable, lazy and viable. Virtual “Korans” of urban dances, where nomenclatures, tutorials, formatted, closed and liable to be reproduced. We invite its “messias”, we praise their “saints”, we open space for its Brazilian “apostles” to preach the holy word of hip hop. How beautiful it is to see Freestyle, New School, Krump, B.boying, Locking, Popping, everything well organized and well finished. Now we are theoretically and bodily grounded to offer a university extension course.

I believe this new formatting of street dance in Brazil is highly valid. What troubles me is that we paradoxically alienate from the process the people who actually managed to produce a hybrid from these external references, who far from reproducing a model, created other forms of expression dealing with these codes. Individuals who effected very rich appropriations in their bodies in which instead of being a juxtaposition of recognizable names and movements from specific dances, produces multiple bodies, with thousands of possibilities.

For those who complained about the “mainstream” of the 1990’s, it´s about time to review their concepts about urban dances, because they are not in foreign unanimities. At a certain point in our path we “gave up” something we built to adopt, assimilate and glorify North American urban dance standard as “authentic”. We must stop watching the performances of the groups that are currently around in the Brazilian scene. What we have are models that must be followed closely. Otherwise, the artist is bound to fail within the street dance logic operating nowadays.

We must pay a little more attention to the form and its production, circulation, broadcast processes, but above all, the appropriation process. How people use this information coming from outside the national territory, before even trying to frame them into strictly formal demands. The same way we deal with micro forms of disciplining there is another micro practice carried out in the social environment, in which the common men use this information, creating thousands of ways to make.