»Brincadeira* is serious business: carnival in dystopian times«

Carnival in Brazil is the result of the social, cultural, spiritual, political, and economic processes of the diaspora of enslaved people from Africa to Brazil. It is much more than a party; it is a collective ritual, subversive of normative logic, which exposes contradictions, tensions, and social wounds. It is the very drive of joy promoting collective health to imagine life and create resistance. This performative vital force is noticeable in the musical manifestations of the party. They are maxixes, sambas, maracatus, afoxés, frevos, etc., which compose a source of rhythms marked by the African presence in Brazil. Although carnival has multiple meanings, variations, appropriations, and strategic uses, we are interested in the historical and political perspective that understands music, dance, brincadeira, and the partying body as expressions of the anti-racist and counter-colonial struggle. In the Brazilian academic sphere, carnival is a complex field of study that has spanned for some decades several areas of knowledge: sociology, history, economics, politics, arts, among others. Due to the extent and complexity of these issues, this lecture will address them through a case study: the Cordão do Boitatá street carnival parade. Created in 1997 in the city of Rio de Janeiro, it has been an Intangible Heritage of the State of Rio de Janeiro since 2022. The strength of its “brincadeira" lies in collective participation, political involvement in the city, and the expression of music. For 29 years, Cordão do Boitatá has held an acoustic parade with around 300 musicians through the streets of the city and, for 19 years, it has presented the Multicultural Ball of Praça XV for thousands of people. Everything is a dispute in a city like Rio de Janeiro, and carnival functions as a kind of synthesis of social contradictions: wonder and struggle for survival, ecstasy and social inequality, celebration and corruption, enchantment and necropolitics. Due to its intensive mobilization force, what can carnival do, in this dystopian situation of a world in environmental collapse, brutal social inequalities, political extremism, militarization, and humanitarian crisis?

*Brincadeira is a Brazilian term that can encompass several meanings like playing, joking, teasing, games, among others. There is no direct translation in English, and to avoid limiting its meaning, we maintain its use in Portuguese.

Biography

Adriana Schneider Alcure - theater director, actress, performer and playwright as well, having been responsible for several stage productions. She is a professor in the Theatre Direction Undergraduate Program and the Performing Arts Graduate Program at the School of Communications of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ). Since 2017, along with Professor Eleonora Fabião, she has coordinated UFRJ's NEP - Núcleo Experimental de Performance [Experimental Performance Nucleus] and, since 2020, she has been a member of the Akademie der Künste der Welt (Academy of the Arts of the World) in Cologne, Germany. She conducted postdoctoral research at Universität Bonn (Capes/Humboldt Foundation Grant, 2018-2019). She has a PhD in Human Sciences (Cultural Anthropology) from UFRJ (2007), with a doctoral internship at FU-Berlin (DAAD/CNPq grant), and a Master's degree in Theater (Performing Arts) from UNIRIO (2001). She is a member of Coletivo Bonobando, Cordão do Boitatá, Grupo Pedras de Teatro, and Muda Outras Economias.