The focus of performance in Videobrasil
by Lucio Agra
about Focus 4 of 18th Contemporary Art Festival Sesc_Videobrasil's Public Programs
Although not talked about much, one of the neglected roots of performance in Brazil lies precisely in the discovery of a new musical universe. In the early 60s, a time when the happening developed in Europe and the United States, the Music Course at the University of Brasília was inaugurated, and the group that went by the name of Música Nova (New Music) gathered around the maestro Claudio Santoro (in 1963). They carried out experiments that would be seen as “performative” today: tearing up newspapers, hurling coins into a potty, emulating prepared pianos, shaving in public or even firing a shot into the sky were some of the actions involved in the compositions by Rogério Duprat, Régis Duprat, Gilberto Mendes, Damiano Cozzela and others. After the dictatorial military government ordered that the experiments be ended, some of the group’s members returned to São Paulo and became involved in Tropicalia productions.
In this I see one of the possible Brazilian variants of what is globally known as “sonic performance,” a subtype of performance art in which musicians and non-musicians – the latter, more often than not – get together to produce sound art. Here, musical aspects are apprehended via paths opposite to the melodic-harmonic tradition, founded upon the descriptivism that enjoyed vast success during the 19th century. The 20th century was a fertile period for the articulation of music and other languages: the noise-generating devices created by Luigi Russolo, the futuristic painter-turned-musician, and the music scores by the Russian painters Mikhail Matiushin and Vassíli Kandinski comprised the first stage in a process that split off into two currents. On the one hand, serialism, through Anton Webern’s “timbre melody” (klangfarbenmelodie), whereby emphasis shifted from instrument to instrument, and on the other hand, live music, regarded as a propositional action in space-time. John Cage’s so-called “randomism” at once championed the happening and a new type of musical (de) composition whose landmark is “The untitled event” (1952). The best-known historiography of performance (Jorge Glusberg, RoseLee Goldberg) makes mention of these international sources. In Brazil, however, even the chronology of performance prepared for the 15th Videobrasil, in 2005, and enclosed in the number 1 edition of Cadernos, failed to make mention of this Brazilian starting point.
The 80s saw one of the spikes of interest in performance in Brazil, proof of which were several instances of the articulation between performance and music: José Roberto Aguilar’s Banda Performática; events at SESC Pompéia programmed by the likes of Renato Cohen, the author of Performance como Linguagem (1989) and featuring actions like the punk festival “O Começo do Fim do Mundo” (The Beginning of the End of the World); and numerous performances held at the nightclub Madame Satã, where virtually every 80s band played; not to mention the performative overtones in the demeanor of musicians of the time.
I believe a good part of what would be called “artist bands” today, including the two representatives featured in this retrospective edition of Videobrasil – Cão and Chelpa Ferro – could claim noble origins in the adventures of Mutantes, Gang 90 and artists like the Rio-based The Zés Manés. For its part, Chelpa Ferro has made its work into a program that develops gradually over the years.
In 1998, the group did not perform the same intervention, since it had embarked on a different quest. The installation Moby Dick – a huge drum kit evoking the famous solo by Led Zeppelin’s John Bonham – gained eloquence in the ultra-heavy silence it caused upon being seen, and the incense drum sticks that gave it an air of suspension that seemed to refuse noise. In the performance shown in that year, the humongous drum kit stayed in the forefront without ever being played.
Chelpa Ferro’s experiments oscillated between noise and silence, or between the extremes of constructive investigation of timbres and the anarchy of the happening – the same extremes that provide orientation to Brazilian art in general, as well as to Brazilian performance.
The presence of two young representatives of today’s sonic performance – Pontogor and Abel Duarte –, both of whom have participated in festivals of performance, noise music, free improvisation and other ramifications and subgenres of this anti-music universe, endows Chelpa’s actions with a supplementary sense, a decisive affirmation that the source that emerged in the 60s has not ceased to bear fruit.
The other tradition, which emerged in the 80s, gave rise to Cão, featuring the constant presence of Dora Longo Bahia on the bass. Maurício Ianês brings into the experiment the research on voice that marks many of his works, and the paint on his body. Bruno Palazzo, in turn, develops his activity concurrently in the visual arts and music fields, and Ricardo Carioba’s performances always revolve around sound. On the group’s website ( http://cargocollective.com/cao/info ) Carioba is described as a sound artist – one of the new denominations that arose with the hybrids produced by the friction between languages that have been a striking feature of Contemporary Art since the 70s, alongside the emergence and consolidation of Performance itself, in what Dick Higgins called “intermedia poetics” in 1966.
In opposition to these two watershed events, the other performances in this commemorative cycle allude to two other possibilities: performing arts and fine arts.
It seemed clearer in the debate that followed Alexandre da Cunha’s performance, on November 23, that there was a profusion of meanings in recovering a piece of work created in the past by a performer who had veered off into sculpture, leaving live art-making aside. As is sometimes the case with artists of this “visual” brand, da Cunha called upon other bodies to carry out his action, voluntarily distancing himself from it.
This would be unimaginable in the case of Luiz de Abreu and his O samba do crioulo doido, internationally acclaimed and winner of the latest Videobrasil Festival. It is impossible to disconnect the actor from the dancer who engages in a different strain of performance that is widespread in Brazil and stirs much controversy: we could call it a “stage” performance, for lack of a better term.
Here, once again, we must revisit Renato Cohen, a pioneer in discussing this subject in Brazil, and a champion of the notion of “contemporary scene.” This idea is, in broad terms, the definitive incorporation of the destabilization wrought by performance in Theater from the 70s onward. The artistic attitude that birthed this new language was a “theft” of a few constitutive features from traditional theater and dance, reworked and combined with information from pop art, conceptualism and, once again, theater, in the genres that relinquish traditional forms of staging (the stage, the theatrical building).
Just like Joseph Beuys decides to produce a piece of work that is a song by a rock and roll band (Sonne Statt Reagan, 1982), performance artists like Laurie Anderson and theatrical artists like Robert Wilson revisit the old box of illusions to produce hybrids that are halfway between music, the cabaret scene, the live picture and other hybrid forms. The video for Laurie Anderson’s O Superman, a huge hit on MTV (at a time when it did not exist in Brazil) was over eight minutes long, completely experimental, and served as a prelude to recordings of Anderson’s theater performances that would result in a film in 1986. During the 00s, performance artists as diverse as Marina Abramovic or Jonathan Meese would be invited for seasons at Bob Wilson’s Watermill.
These exchanges have increased as of late. In Brazil, theater artists are often interested in performance. Groups invite performers to collaborate and even if the opposite situation does not happen very frequently, the classical unfriendly attitude from the Body Art period does not seem to make much sense anymore.
To me, it seems that what drives Luiz de Abreu to dub his work as performance is partly this desire to articulate with said language, though not always as clear-cut and anchored on its constructive principles.
A lot has changed since 2005. Artists from theater and dance have reaffirmed their proximity with performance like Ivaldo Bertazzo or Denise Stocklos had done before, in the early 80s, in this same, then-recently inaugurated SESC Pompéia. They were featured in 14 performance nights organized by Renato Cohen, who had just arrived from a trip to look for the hippie heritage abroad, from whence he brought back the strong – and performative – impact of bands like DEVO or the Talking Heads (the latter, after all, were an art band formed by New Yorkers such as Laurie Anderson).
There is, therefore, another lineage, deriving from dancing, that could also serve an effort in tracing the genealogy of Brazilian performance, and which leads directly to the experiment by Luís de Abreu. Featuring some of the traditional characteristics of the “spectacle” (rehearsal, season, repetition on the one hand; frontality, virtuosity, dramatic effect on the other), Abreu’s performance also abandons this tradition purposely to create a sequence with no diegesis, a juxtaposed succession of “frames” or “scenes” where a body dances out all of the stereotypes that stick to its skin, while undressing itself of these very images, as the omnipresent Brazilian flag gets mixed up, mocked, toyed with, serving at times as shelter and at others as erotic or ironic pretext. This form of performance – a form that produces what I have once called the “theater of dismantling,” an undoing of the traditional scene –, concatenates the data whereby today, in theater and dancing, one can get a glimpse of one’s own boundaries in the face of what these languages configure as performance.
That which performance has taken from theater, from dancing, from poetry, from music and the visual arts returns to these latter art forms, causing all of them to aspire to the place of freedom performance has inaugurated. Further, it allows us to think no longer of a logic based on ontology, on what constitutes each language, but of what causes each language to “cease to be.”
Watching a performance week such as this – so infrequent even in 2005 and so normal today, preceded and succeeded by a series of events (festivals, meetings) about performance as a theme and as a practice – helps us grasp the desire of painters, sculptors, musicians, dancers who avidly seek this un-territory.
The conjunctions of video/visual arts/poetry/music/theater/dance and performance are key for us to understand this trajectory in Brazil. Whereas in the countries that surround it, in the rest of Hispanic America, there is a persistent – and, to a point, linear – permanence and development of performance art, in Brazil, it is liked and disliked in similar proportions, and enjoys bewildering peaks of interest and decline. Would this have to do with our tendency to undo the limits of all forms and produce virtual articulations that are likewise produced in Mexico (take the fascination that wrestling exerts on Mexican performances) or in Argentina, Chile, Colombia or Venezuela?