The curious case of maxixe dancing: From colonial dissent to modern fitness

ABSTRACT

The primary goal of this study is to shed new light on the meteoric rise (and fall) of maxixe dancing, from Rio de Janeiro’s practices and performances in the late 1800s to its international explosion in Parisian venues in the 1910s, and subsequent codification in USA dance manuals published in 1914. Building on my previous scholarship, I examine how different kinds of bodies have articulated maxixe at four distinct scenarios, paying close attention to the positionality of female partners and their interactions. Using the scholarship of Savigliano, Velloso, Kraut, Goldman, Lowe, Foster, Santos and Mignolo, I address (a) how this partner dance functioned at the bodily level (how it was executed or described), (b) the (socio-political) roles it assumes and (c) the effects it produces (from discourses to affects).

KEYWORDS:

• Maxixe
• Brazilian tango
• Afro-Brazilian aesthetics
• coloniality
• exotic dances
• physical culture

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Dr. Cristina Fernandes Rosa is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Roehampton’s Department of Dance. She has previously taught at University of California Riverside, Tufts University, Reed College, Florida State University, Tallahasse, CalArts and, from 2012 to 2013, she was a research fellow at Freie Universität’s International Research Center “Interweaving Performance Cultures” (Germany). Rosa has been published in peer-reviewed journals, such as TDR, and edited books, such as Performing Brazil (2014) and Moving (Across) Borders (2017). In her book Brazilian Bodies and Their Choreographies of Identification: Swing Nation (Palgrave McMillan, 2015), Rosa examines how movement qualities cultivated across the black Atlantic contributed to the construction of Brazil as an imagined community. Rosa earned her PhD from UCLA.

ORCID

Cristina Fernandes Rosa http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2413-691X

Notes

1 Bailey, Whirl of Life.

2 Lambada is a partner dance from the North of Brazil that mixes Native Brazilian, Afro-Brazilian, and French Caribbean rhythms and dancing styles. It first emerged in the 1980s, gained international visibility with the group Gypsy Kings, and faded away a few decades later.

3 Rosa, Brazilian Bodies, 82.

4 I deploy Diana Taylor’s notion of scenario, which she defines as “culturally specific imaginaries – sets of possibilities, ways of conceiving conflict, crisis, or resolution – activated with more or less theatricality” (2003, 24). Scenarios are, she adds, “meaning-making paradigms that structure social environments, behaviours, and potential outcomes” (26). Thus, they offer a better way to critically engage with complex contexts such as colonial encounters. “Simultaneously set up and action, scenarios frame and activate social dramas” (28). Firstly, scenarios demand, and draw attention to, embodiment. Whilst both scenarios and narratives insert bodies into frames, she argues, as a frame the scenario takes into consideration both verbal and non-verbal ways of meaning-making. In doing so, it shifts the focus of attention from scrips to actions/behaviours and interactions. Secondly, she proposes, as a system of interactions between different kinds of (available) bodies and (expected) roles, that all scenarios are localized, or rather linked to a particular space and its specific practices. Therefore, their understanding is always already socio-politically and economically contextualized. At the same time, scenarios remain “flexible and open to change” (29), thus allowing “degrees of critical detachment and cultural agency” (29) of all social actors. Thirdly, similar to Bourdieu’s notion of “habitus”, the scenario functions as a cultural frame that allows for “durable, transposable dispositions” (31), but whose outcome may be flexible and reversible. Fourth, the transmission of scenarios combines elements drawn from both archives and repertoires. Fifth, they can be read or be understood in more than one way, thus forcing agents and spectators alike to acknowledge their positionality. Finally, scenarios collapse past and present “through reactivation rather than duplication” (32).

5 Goldman, I Want to be, 6.

6 Lowe, The Intimacies, 18–21.

7 Foster, Valuing Dance, 24.

8 Desmond, “Embodying Difference.”

9 Santos, “Beyond Abyssal,” 45.

10 In the article “Worlding Dance and Dancing out there in the World” (2009), Savigliano poses some pertinent questions regarding the geopolitics of dancing knowledges, whereby only certain dances are considered worthy to be archived and, subsequently, analyzed, historicized, and/or theorized, while others are unaccounted for or otherwise made invisible in archives. “Only some dances taking place out there in the world attain the status of World Dance. They are ‘other’ dances that have the capacity to be assimilated to the Dance field: Exotic, and yet disciplined enough to be incorporated through translation into what counts as Dance.” (167).

11 Savigliano, Tango, 185.

12 Ibid., 13.

13 Foster, Valuing Dance, 85.

14 Efegê, Maxixe, 26 (all quotes in Portuguese are translated by the author).

15 Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?”; Hall, Representation; and Lopes, “Um forrobodó da raça e da cultura.”

16 Velloso, A dança, 176. Tango is spelled with a capital “T” to indicate this is a commodified version of the form, which has been codified and attributed to a particular authorship, in this case Lino and Duke.

17 Delgado and Muñoz, Everynight Life, See 10.

18 Wisnik, Maxixe Machado, 34.

19 See Efegê, Maxixe; Tinhorão, História social da música popular brasileira; and Chasteen “The Prehistory of Samba.”

20 As Dias, Quem tem medo da capoeira; Monteiro, Quem tem medo da capoeira?; and Reis, Rebelião escrava no Brasil attest, since colonial times in Brazil the distinction between “honest” and “dishonest” activities were often evoked, but the exact position where one should draw the line dividing these two collections has been subject to interpretation. For a wider discussion of “honest” and “dishonest” black entertainment, see Rosa, Brazilian Bodies, 50–53.

21 See Efegê, Maxixe and Tinhorão O samba agora vai and História social da música popular brasileira.

22 Thompson, An Aesthetic, 88.

23 Gottschild, Digging, 8.

24 Rosa, Brazilian Bodies, 24–26. In this case, “metre” or “metrics” (métrica, in Portuguese) refer to the regularly reoccurring patterns and accents such as bars and beats. It becomes significant when discussing co-metric and counter-metric patterns, the latter illustrative of Afro-Brazilian tonal syncopation. For music and literature scholar José Miguel Wisnik [original in English], “[t]he European polka, which is the prototype of all popular, urban dance music, becomes ragtime in the United States, habanera in the Caribbean, and maxixe in Brazil. The rhythmics [rítmica] of these three genres from North, Central, and South America are equally contrametric [contramétrica]: that is, they base themselves on accentuations that fall outside of the tonic points [pontos tônicos] of the binary measure; they thereby create a texture of internal pulses, tending towards polyrhythm, which call for a swaying dance [dança gingada] full of swing. These rhythmics are different from the ones that predominate in Western Europe, which musicology identifies as cometric [cométrica]: that is, where the figures and rhythmic divisions double the tonic points of the measure.” Wisnik and Kramer, Ambivalence, Paradox, 3; italics and brackets in original.

25 This syncopated way of moving is pervasive to several Afro-Brazilian forms, including samba, jongo, umbigada, frevo, capoeira, coco, to name a few. See Rosa, Brazilian Bodies, 38.

26 Rosa, Brazilian Bodies, 23–43.

27 Sodré, Samba,12.

28 Ibid., 13.

29 In O espetáculo das raças, Schwarcz explores a wide range of discourses at the turn of the twentieth century in Brazil, which adopted scientific racism and social Darwinism in order to resolve the “racial question” in the country. As Schwarcz notes, for instance, criminal doctors and hygienists often factored race hierarchy and miscegenation in their diagnosis and posology of physical, mental, and moral diseases. In “Novas raças, novas doenças” Varella points out, furthermore, that historians such as Robert Southey (1774–1843) had long deployed the metaphorical use of medical terms connected to diseases, such as “infected”, “contagious”, and “pestilential” in their writings (3). She further notes that in Southey’s History of Brazil (1862), “Southey held that in the New World there were two different phenomena at play when it came to diseases … The second had to do with racial mixing, in that the ‘mixture and intermixture of three different races, the European, American, and African, has produced new diseases, or at least new constitutions, by which old diseases were so modified, that the skilfullest physicians were puzzled by new symptoms’ (Southey, 1862a, quoted in Varella, 464–465). Thus, colonization and the intermixture of different races resulted in both a change in existing diseases and the development of new ones” See Varella, “Novas raças, novas doenças,” 5.

30 Ibid., 21.

31 See Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, and Savigliano, Tango.

32 Savigliano notes that female tango dancers are, in fact, “docile bodies in rebellion”. See Savigliano, Tango, 209.

33 Mignolo, “Coloniality.”

34 Desmond, “Embodying Difference,” 38.

35 Ibid.

36 Rosa, Brazilian Bodies, 139–140.

37 Lopes, “Um forrobodó,” 78.

38 Rosa, Brazilian Bodies, 140–143.

39 Ibid., 81.

40 Anderson, Imagined Community.

41 Savigliano, Tango, 75.

42 Sachs, World History, 444.

43 Ibid., 445 (my emphasis).

44 Savigliano, Tango, 169.

45 Duke’s biography and artistic life has been extensively documented over the years. See Efegê, A danca excomungada; Tinhorão, História social da música popular brasileira; Witkowski, “De la matchitche a la lambada”; Velloso, “A dança como alma da brasilidade”; Lopes, “Um forrobodó da raça e da cultura” and Shaw, Brazilian Popular Performance.

46 Foster, Valuing Dance, 24.

47 Bauman, Pilgrim to Tourist, 29. He further notes that, “in the tourist world, the strange is tamed, domesticated, and no longer frightens; shock comes in a package deal of safety […] but also a do-it-yourself world, pleasiling pliable, kneeled by the tourist’s desires, made and remade with one purpose in mind: to excite, please and amuse” (29–30).

48 Sandroni’s use of the terms “cometricity” and “contrametricity” draws on the scholarship of the ethnomusicologist and composer Mieczyslaw Kollnski. For him, the syncope present in Brazilian music is nothing more than the way in which this frictional interplay between cometricity and contrametricity, characteristic of African music, is represented in Western musical notation (Kollnski, A Cross Cultural Approach, 26). For a wider discussion on “pulse” in Afro-Brazilian music, see Wisnik, Sem Receita: Ensaios e Canções.

49 Translated by the author. Original in Portuguese: “Ao reforçar a ordem corpórea e a expansão da gestualidade, o maxixe introduzia um processo de mudanças que punha em questão os referenciais dominantes do universo sensorial. Daí a polêmica social que desencadeia. Aparecem, ou, ao menos, se fortalecem, outras formas de pensar e viver a cultura. O tato, o olfato e a escuta ganham expressão.” Velloso, “A dança,” 178.

50 Savigliano, Tango, 169.

51 Savigliano, “Worlding Dance,” 168.

52 Shaw, Brazilian Popular, 73.

53 Ibid.

54 Ibid.

55 Lopes, “Um forrobodó,” 74.

56 Ibid., 71.

57 Efegê, Maxixe, 63.

58 Castle and Castle, Modern Dancing, 135.

59 Erenberg, “Everybody's Doin' It,” 155.

60 Ibid., 177.

61 Ibid.

62 Maxixe was included in four dancing manuals published in 1914: Castle and Castle, Modern Dancing; Newman, Dances of To-day; Hopkins, The Tango and Other Up-to-Date Dances; Anderson, Social Dancing of To-day and Mouvet, The Tango and the New Dances for Ballroom and Home.

63 Foster, Valuing Dance, 85.

64 Castle and Castle, Modern Dancing, 22.

65 Ibid., 136.

66 Ibid.

67 Ibid., 142.

68 Ibid., 17.

69 Ibid., 173.

70 Desmond, “Embodying Difference,” 40.

71 Castle and Castle, Modern Dancing, 155.

72 Ibid., 131.

73 Erenberg, “Everybody’s Doin’ It,” 164.

74 Seigel, “Disappearing Dance,” 94.

75 Ibid., 98.

76 Reggae de dois is an Afro-Brazilian partner dance from the North of Brazil, danced to both Jamaican and Brazilian reggae music.

77 Samba de gafieira is an Afro-Brazilian partner dance from Rio de Janeiro. This style differs from what the World Dance Sport Federation (WSDF) and the International Syllabus of Traditional Dance (ISTD) defines as Samba in their respective, Latin and Latin American Ballroom Dance syllabi.

78 Forró is an umbrella term given to an Afro-Brazilian partner dance from the Northeast of Brazil, connected to various musical rhythms such as forró pé-de-serra, arrasta pé, baião, xote, xaxado. It gained national popularity in the 1950s and, in the last decades, attained international visibility, especially in Europe.

79 For a detail discussion of these aesthetic principles within Afro-Brazilian dance forms, see Rosa, Brazilian Bodies, 24–43.

80 Murphy, The People Have Never Stopped Dancing.