The year 2022 marks the celebration of 70 years of life and five decades of career of Pernambuco multi-artist Antonio Nóbrega. He arrives at Unicamp in March for a six-month program in the “Hilda Hilst” Resident Artist Program, under the coordination of the Institute for Advanced Studies (IdEA). A master of dance, music, theater and poetry, Nóbrega returns to the University – where he worked as a professor at the Institute of Arts – with the mission of broadening the spotlight on contemporary Brazilian popular culture.
Brazilbrasil is the title of the book he is writing, the result of decades of research, and where he questions the supposed cultural diversity that holds the country together in its heterogeneity. “We let ourselves be carried away by a kind of conceptual unconsciousness in relation to Brazilian culture. We are often happy to say that Brazil is a country with cultural diversity. There is diversity, but, at the same time, we have a popular cultural unity. Carimbó, drum de creola, batuque paulista and coco de roda are as diverse as they are homogeneous. We need to understand why this is so. That’s what I intend to show in these meetings.”
The artistic residency will consist of a series of 12 in-person, fortnightly meetings, entitled Brasisbrasil – cycle of meetings with Antonio Nóbrega, to begin on March 15, in the auditorium of the Faculty of Medical Sciences (FCM). There will be a practical part, with eight dance, poetry, music and theater workshops at IdEA headquarters, and also virtual meetings. Two of them will be made directly from Portugal, where he will be in May for research on Portuguese popular culture and its relationship with Brazil.
Nóbrega said he was excited about the residency and spoke to the Unicamp Portal about how she awakened the desire to share the results of her research. “I am very altruistic, as well as excited, for this event”, explained Nóbrega. “This altruism comes from my 70 years and 50 years of career, but it also comes from a coincidence, which is writing a book. It’s a long essay about the popular cultural world, specifically about scenic manifestations, which I intend to launch this year.” The experience at Unicamp will be, for him, the ideal moment to present the most important topics in the book.
Between 1985 and 1991, Nóbrega was a professor of Brazilian regional dances at the Department of Body Arts at the Institute of Arts (IA) at Unicamp. Teaching work took up precious time for the development of his artistic career, which is why he abandoned academic activity. During this period he found himself motivated to “grammaticalize”, as he defines it, the universe of Brazilian dances, but he felt that this would require intense research work in the streets, terreiros and dance circles. Resuming this project in the year he turns 70 and returns to Unicamp is, in his words, a “very happy” undertaking. “I left the University with a task, with a search, and today I arrive with the answer.”
Contributions from the academy
One of the ways to overcome the limitations imposed by mass culture for the dissemination of popular culture, according to Nóbrega, would be through encouraging the codification of its symbolic, playful and sensorial universe. For him, Brazilian universities could place themselves at the forefront of this role, incorporating, for example, popular poetics and cordel literature into their curricula. “An institution committed to culture, not just Brazil, but Brazilian culture, and I make a distinction between the two, should dedicate greater space to the apprehension, study, research and investigation of the popular cultural world.”
For Nóbrega, there is no popular culture in Brazil that is not Afro-Brazilian, but the slave culture, which for centuries was hegemonic, added to the amplification of mass culture, undermines the understanding of the wealth that Africans brought to the country.
“Much of the Brazilian disorder comes from slavery, the way we formed this country, the abject way in which the enslaved were treated and, worse, when there was abolition, how they were left, discarded, on the Brazilian streets”, he stated. “Black and mixed-race people have a very rich cultural history that we need to understand. I think that mass, globalized culture creates a fog in the sense of getting in the way. Excessive proximity to American culture sometimes brings this blurring.” In the essay he is preparing, Nóbrega will highlight the catalytic element represented by the African presence in Brazil, and especially the Bantu culture, coming with enslaved people from the regions of Congo and Angola.
The arrival of the artist from Pernambuco comes after a year of suspended activities of the Resident Artist Program “Hilda Hilst”, due to the worsening of the Covid-19 pandemic. IdEA coordinator, Christiano Lyra, highlighted the importance of having a great figure in the Brazilian arts, with multiple talents, for the return of face-to-face activities at the University. “We have a lot of expectations with Nóbrega’s participation, it is a motivation for this rebirth, and it has everything to be a very rich interaction.”
The events are free and open to the Unicamp community, and also to external audiences interested in Brazilian art and popular culture. The program includes interaction with professors and researchers in theoretical discussions in a remote model. Registrations for Brasisbrasil – cycle of meetings with Antonio Nóbrega are already open, and candidates interested in participating in the selection process for the workshops may also register on the IDEA website.
“There are a series of very happy circumstances this year, 200 years of Independence, 100 years of Modern Art Week. Nóbrega, as an interpreter of such a vast field of Brazilian popular manifestations, brings the reference that we are one people, we have a lot in common”, summarized the IdEA coordinator.
Lyra, who is a professor at the Faculty of Electrical and Computer Engineering (FEEC), praised the role played by Antonio Nóbrega in the Armorial Movement, led by writer and playwright Ariano Suassuna (1927-2014) in the early 1970s, and his trajectory in last 50 years, with award-winning shows and presentations in Brazil and abroad.
Immersion in popular demonstrations
Born in Recife in 1952, Nóbrega began to get involved with the arts by learning the violin, which took him to the Paraíba Chamber Orchestra and the Recife Symphony Orchestra in the late 1960s. In 1971, Suassuna invited him to join the Quinteto Armorial, pioneer in the creation of Brazilian chamber music with popular roots. The group, which released four albums between 1974 and 1980, debuted on stage in 1972, marking the beginning of Nóbrega's career. Before becoming an armorial with fiddle in hand, curiously, Nóbrega was unaware of the exuberance of the popular culture that surrounded him in Pernambuco, dedicating himself to classical training.
“Ariano thought that there was a movement that was already very distorting Brazilian culture. He defended a way of presenting Brazilian culture through the assimilation of what I call the popular cultural world or popular culture. In the case of music, it would be dedicating ourselves to listening to fife bands, viola playing, popular songs, seahorse singers, rezadeiras, etc. He wondered how we could recreate this, expand it, create more meanings”, recalled Nóbrega.
In the letter of recommendation he wrote for hiring Nóbrega at Unicamp, in 1985, Ariano Suassuna listed his qualities and suggested that the University would have a lot to gain from the presence of the young professor on its faculty. “As an actor-dancer, musician and mime, I don't know anyone in Brazil more complete than Antonio Carlos Nóbrega de Almeida. There may be those who are just as much: more, no.”
Suassuna and his contributions to Brazilian culture in the Armorial Movement, Brazilian popular musical imagery, the syncopated dance step, poetry in popular scenic manifestations, Mário de Andrade and the Week of 1922, new Brazilian cultural epistemologies, dialogues and disagreements between two cultural currents that frequent Brazil are some of the themes that will be present in this semester of Antonio Nóbrega's activities at Unicamp.
Resident Artist’s “Hilda Hilst” Program with Antonio Nóbrega
Brasisbrasil – cycle of meetings with Antonio Nóbrega
Dates: 15/03, 29/03, 12/04, 26/04, 31/05, 14/06, 28/06, 12/07, 26/07, 09/08, 23/08 and 06/09.
Time: 10h to 12h
Location: Auditorium of the Faculty of Medical Sciences (FCM) at Unicamp
Address: Rua Albert Sabin, s/nº, Cidade Universitária “Zeferino Vaz”, Campinas
Carried out: Institute of Advanced Studies (IdEA) at Unicamp
Workshops with Antonio Nóbrega
Dates: 12/04 and 26/04 (Poetry); 31/05 and 14/06 (Dance); 28/06 and 12/07 (Theater); and 26/07 and 09/08 (Music)
Hours: 14h30 to 16h30
Location: Institute of Advanced Studies (IdEA)
Address: Avenida Oswaldo Cruz, 301, Cidade Universitária “Zeferino Vaz”, Campinas
Carried out: Institute of Advanced Studies (IdEA) at Unicamp
Access the workshop registration forms:
Brazilian popular rhymed poetry
Popular matrices for a Brazilian theater
Brazilian popular musical imagination
