Black Performance || Mixing and Playing: Performing Blackness in Brazil

Mixing and Playing: Performing Blackness in BrazilAuthor(s): Judith WilliamsSource: Theatre Journal, Vol. 57, No. 4, Black Performance (Dec., 2005), pp. 600-603Published by: The Johns Hopkins University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25069726 .

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600 / Forum on Black Theatre

black" may also be in the vernacular movements, the competing time signatures of the

music, or the references in the overlapping stories.

There is a fluidity of time and space in a jazz aesthetic. Time is both coterminous and

coeval. Now and then and will be coexist. There and here and never was is. Ancestors

and deities and nature and humans float, sing, spin, and make worlds together, aware

or unaware of each other's presence. Such work challenges audiences to attend more

closely than they would with more conventional work. Writer Sharon Bridgforth believes that this close attention transforms the audience into "active witnesses" who

work with the performers to make the work live. The jazz aesthetic encourages audiences to bring the kind of presentness and honesty to their experience as the

performers, director and writer bring to theirs.

If the work of theatrical jazz aesthetic artists such as veteran Laurie Carlos,

apprentices Daniel Alexander Jones, Sharon Bridgforth, Grisha Coleman, Erik Ehn, and the next generation of Walter Kitundu, Zeil Miller III, and Florinda Bryant are not

examined for their contributions to our understanding of "black plays," then we will

collapse the possibilities of black performance into the most public and most commer

cial work thereby narrowing the possibilities for blackness itself. Instead, our under

standing of "playing black" should include the work of avant-garde artists who

remind us that black encompasses multiple realities.

JONI L. JONES/IYA OMI OSUN OLOMO

University of Texas, Austin

^?^^

Mixing and playing: performing blackness in Brazil

While others in this forum have discussed the idea of a black play in the United

States, I am addressing the issue from a Brazilian perspective. I propose that rather

than ask, why is there an essay addressing the issue of what is a black play? or, what

is playing black from a Brazilian perspective? We might ask, why is there only one

essay that looks at definitions of blackness from a non-US perspective? The very

question of what is a black play in Brazil seems to imply certain assumptions about the

differences between race and nation in the US and Brazil. In Brazil where notions of

miscegenation have historically circulated more freely, alternate paradigms of race and

performance emerge; however, they destroy the possibility that the seemingly pro

gressive narrative of hybridity could be a solution for the dialectical stratification of

race in the US. Though blackness in Brazil is recognizable through self-classification, identification of a black play remains bound up in the definition of mulatto and

national identity: black artists must assert an artistic vision that distinguishes black

ness from miscegenated national narratives of assimilation within a context that

simultaneously ignores and reinforces a racialized power structure.

Theatre has been one arena in Brazil where contentions of a racially mixed culture

break down and the myths of Brazilian society are revealed. Still, champions of the

Brazilian "racial democracy" thesis have highlighted the African influences on

Brazilian culture, the absence of legal barriers between the races, the lack of violence

against blacks, and the large number of racially mixed individuals as evidence that



FORUM ON BLACK THEATRE / 601

Brazil is a country without discrimination.29 However, in explaining just who the

"oppressed" were in the theatre of the oppressed, Augusto Boal pointed out that in

Brazil the primary oppressed group is the blacks. Black Brazilians have had a limited

presence on the Brazilian stage. Unlike in the United States where legal barriers to

black achievement forced blacks to create all-black institutions, in Brazil, the mixed race ideal that allows all Brazilians to claim their heritage to each of three races?

African, Indian, and European (and thus blackness)?impedes race-based collective

action. In such circumstances, attempts of blacks to gain space on the stage and in

Brazilian society become more difficult. Blackness and "mulattoness" in Brazil are in

endless conversation; the performance of one informs the other. Rather than always think about race in terms of black and white as we do in the States, Brazilian culture

requires that we think about how this third category complicates blackness?not

necessarily reducing racism or opening up opportunities for those in one class at the

expense of those in another, but creating another vision that has its own limitations.

Unlike the tragic mulatta in the United States, whose occupation of the space between the races always leads to unfulfilled love and eventually death, the mulata in

Brazil is an essential figure of the national imagination and was a key character of the

comic revue theatre. For the most part, white actresses played these roles; however, in

its golden age exceptional Afro-Brazilian women shone on the stage. Audiences and

critics lauded women known to be of mixed race?like Aracy Cortes (1904-1982) and

Zaira Cavalcanti (1913-1981)?for their "authentic" Brazilianess, and praised both for

their talents and their feminine appeal in the mulata roles. Black women, however, did

not have access to these roles. For example, in the 1926 play Ai Zizinha, Ascendina

Santos, a black woman who could not be read into the frame of mulatta attraction,

portrayed the comic foil for the lead, who was a white woman playing a mulata. At the same time that the texts of these plays ridicule darker-skinned black women, they

emphasize the joyful attraction of the Portuguese to the mulata, and reproduce discourses that exaggerate the sexuality of mixed-race women.

In response to their limited access to the theatre, Afro-Brazilians have historically formed their own groups and used the stage as a locus for the reformation of Brazilian

identity that included a black presence. In August of 1926, the Black Revue Company produced the show Tudo Preto, or All Black, and confounded traditional representations of blackness in Brazil. The all-black group displayed the ambivalence of its identity politics with the use of two terms for black?the more militant "Negro" in the name of the group, and the less confrontational "preto" in the title of the play. At the same time that the text of the play, Tudo Preto, and the musical numbers place the performers

within transnational narratives of blackness, the play also stakes a claim for blackness within the vision of the mulatto nation. Despite the exceptional nature of an all-black

company or the potential confrontation in its name, the text of Tudo Preto skirts

political issues and embraces many of the black stereotypes and comic conventions of

the revue theatre, including the prevalence of the mulata. At the same time that the

performers were playing black, they were playing mulatto.

29 Donald Pierson, Negroes in Brazil: A Study of Race Contact in Bahia (Chicago: University of Chicago

Press, 1942) and Gilberto Freyre, New World in the Tropics: The Culture of Modern Brazil (New York:

Knopf, 1959) provide examples of these ideas.



602 / Forum on Black Theatre

Later examples of Afro-Brazilians in the revue theatre?like the Brazilian Mulatto

Company of 1930 and the Mulatto Company of Musical Spectacles of 1940 and 1941?

emphasized mulatto, rather than black identity, moving from performing blackness to

performing "mulattoness." None of the three groups was able to move beyond a two

show lifespan. The same claims of mestisage that the nation has prided itself on and

that these companies embraced, encoded the reason for their failure. If the claims of a

mulatto Brazil and the opportunity implied by the racial democracy thesis were a

matter of fact, then the appeal of these companies could really only exist in their

novelty. Further, the more talented of the performers could attain individual success

without the need of such specific racialized separations, and "mulattoness" was just as

easily performed by the more successful and experienced white artists.

In contrast to the performance of blackness and nation invoked by the revue theatre, the carnival parades, or the blackface clowns present in the "serious" theatre, the Black

Experimental Theatre (TEN) showcased the black man as tragic hero with its debut

production on 8 May 1945. For TEN, the circumstances that create this hero arise from

the ideology of racial democracy, whose rhetoric emphasizes the possibility of

individual success but whose realities impede the attainment of the black protagonist at every turn. Abdias do Nascimento, the key founder of the group, articulated his

vision of black theatre in the 1968 volume, Dramas para negro, prologo para brancos. Like

the authors of Tudo Preto, Nascimento provides a transnational perspective for black

theatre; however, he uses N?gritude to create a boundary-crossing genealogy for Afro

Brazilian dramaturgy that subverts the national narrative of a "mulatto nation." He

denies the appeal of whitening and asserts the uniqueness of the black experience in

Brazil. In this model, N?gritude provides a politics and aesthetics of difference in which

an Afro-Brazilian identity accretes layers that connect it both to race and diaspora. Rather than look to the earlier attempts by black Brazilians in vernacular entertain

ment, TEN created a performance of blackness that escapes from the tragic state of

mulatto exceptionalism. And yet, that the authors of TEN's plays were both white and

black complicates the group's rhetorical interventions. Even as TEN's specific notion

of blackness demarcates its militancy, its practice replicates the national ethos of

shared heritage.

On the Brazilian stage today, Afro-Brazilians continue to be exceptions; black

playwrights are equally as rare; and the mulata still serves as the national ideal. The

conditions of exclusion faced by the vaudeville performers and TEN persist and

mirror the problems of US blacks in the theatre. Despite the rhetorical acceptance of a

mixed-race identity in Brazil, performers of African descent face the realities of racism.

Leda Martins argues that in Brazil "the terms preto, pardo, moreno, mulato, crioulo are

articulated in a m?tonymie net of exclusion that restores and delimits the possible

positions for the Negroid element in the Brazilian social structure."30 These terms,

rather than denote a gradation of opportunity based on color, obfuscate the reality of

black exclusion present in Brazilian society and on the stage. The attempts of Brazil's

blacks to define themselves on the stage provide a perspective that is increasingly instructive to the United States as the temper of race relations in the United States

evolves into a situation more like Brazil's in which there are no laws that prejudice blacks, interracial marriage increases, and mixed-race individuals are able to assert

30 Leda Mar?a Martins, A scena em sombras (S?o Paulo: Editora Perspectiva, 1995), 36.



FORUM ON BLACK THEATRE / 603

their identities as mixed-race people on the census even as race-based inequities

continue. Afro-Brazilians have attempted to express a black voice on the stage in an

environment where their cultural forms, assimilated and deracinated, have emerged as stand-ins for national culture, and allow all Brazilians to, in essence, play black

without recognizing the uniqueness of the black experience. In few instances, how

ever, does the cross-racial impersonation move in the opposite direction; the rhetoric

of racial opportunity belies a reality of racial exclusion.

JUDITH WILLIAMS

University of Kansas

^^^^

What is a black play? Tales from my theoretical corner

There is no such thing as THE Black Experience.

?Suzan-Lori Parks, "An Equation for Black People Onstage," 1995

I believe that race matters?that is the largest, most identifiable and most important part of

our personality.

?August Wilson, "The Ground On Which I Stand," 1996

Without fail, I begin each African American Drama class by tackling head-on the

slippery, paradoxical identity of what is often loosely referred to as a "black play." This

unavoidable preliminary exercise in defining terms and establishing parameters, I

have found, sets up a particularly appropriate segue into discussing the history of

African American performance?especially the circumstances that kept black per formers from the stage and from writing their own experiences. While leading this

exercise proves useful on several levels, I also, without fail, paint myself into a

theoretical corner. Inevitable questions such as, "Does the black playwright determine a black play?". "Does the focus upon black experience define a black play?" "Must a

black play feature a black cast?" and "Can a playwright of another race or culture

write a black play?" fuel complex philosophical debates that do more to raise

consciousness than to provide answers. Pursuing answers to these queries becomes an

exercise that allows students to flex their critical thinking muscles; however, the reality is that none of them can be answered definitively.

Clearly, the twenty-first century has brought with it a multiplicity of variables that must be considered when trying to come to grips with what exactly determines a black

play. From the color blind casting phenomenon to increasing cross cultural influences

and the blurring of racial boundaries, the phrase "black play" seems tenuous at best.

Also, now more so than ever, a surprising number of playwrights who happen to be

African Americans have taken to defamiliarizing, deconstructing, and even outright

rejecting traditional notions of blackness in their work. Critically acclaimed and

outspoken African American playwright Suzan-Lori Parks does not mince words

about the matter, arguing, "As there is no single 'Black Experience,' there is no one

way to write or think or feel or dream or interpret or be interpreted."31 In plays such as

31 Suzan-Lori Parks, "An Equation for Black People Onstage," in The America Play (New York:

Theatre Communications Group, 1995), 21.



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