Between Nostalgia and Apocalypse. Daniel B. Sharp
the stage. In the beginning, we didn’t even have a PA system, just one microphone with a small amplifier. After this, we played on a small stage during São João. We played there, and everyone said ‘man, this is great!’ and put us on the larger stages.”
One of the most striking shifts in the group’s performance on stage was the decision to drastically reduce the number of dancers, from around twenty-five to two or three at a time. Fagner, the best young male dancer from the Gomes family, and Daiane, the best young female dancer from the Calixto family, ended up specializing in that role. From that point forward the group’s performances were no longer a direct transfer of practices developed in informal, participative contexts. Instead, the circle of dancers broke apart and the musicians faced the audience. Fagner and Daiane served as the group’s representatives. They would demonstrate the steps on stage, then jump down into the crowd to coax audience members to dance: “Fagner and Daiane [were the ones who] began this business of getting down from the stage to dance with everyone, snaking through the crowd and getting the circle dance started. It was they who did this.” Each larger stage where they performed gave them motivation to rehearse their vocal harmonies and tighten the layers of percussion: “After playing on the largest stages during São João in Arcoverde, they called us to play in Recife, so we went there. We had to realize that we weren’t that little group that plays in someone’s house anymore. We had to clean up the small mistakes and concentrate harder on really playing well for the stage.”
Government cultural preservation efforts and commerce have worked hand in hand in the story of samba de coco in Arcoverde. By 2004 recordings of the music of Coco Raízes would serve as the soundtrack to the chamber of commerce convention and a fashion show in the publicly funded colonial district of downtown Recife. Government festivals provided the band with a career ladder to climb as it honed its craft, from local Arcoverde festival stages to Recife’s Carnaval.
SAMBA DE COCO PERFORMED AT HOME
One of the earliest videotapes from Ciço Gomes’s collection contained footage of his daughter’s birthday party in 1996, providing an example of an informal performance of samba de coco for family and friends, before the group began performing on stage. On the tape the white noise of the shakers, the metallic clang of the triangle, and the staccato booms of the surdo drum enveloped the dancers as they moved in a circle around a small living room cleared of furniture. The percussionists lined the wall behind the circle, and everyone sang the refrains in response to whoever was singing lead at the time. Everyone present was dressed in everyday attire: T-shirts, shorts, trousers, dresses. The mood in the room was of orderly, family-friendly, alcohol-free celebration. The lead singer was alternately Lula Calixto, who was singing in a pinched tone, straining to project over the percussion and the din of voices at the party as he danced in the circle, or Ciço, who stood either in the middle of the circle or outside it. Ciço was constantly making eye contact, singing lines directly to partygoers, lifting people’s spirits, and encouraging participation. The force of everyone singing together was more important than the precision of the harmonies, which were roughly parallel thirds. The musicians traded improvised verses, many of which referred to the fact that they were being filmed.
Most of the dancers’ steps included a slight shuffle/slide that emulated the swish of the shaker, a touch that was easier to sustain in everyday leather- and rubber-soled shoes than it would be later in wooden sandals, which require an emphatic, precise stomp. There was much more variation in how the dancers accented the basic steps than at later performances on stage. When a song began its rapid-fire embolada section, the dancers stopped singing and focused on the quicker-stepped trupé dance. While later crowds, such as those in Recife, would take their cues from the dancers on stage, with everyone striving to execute the RlrLrlrl pattern, in this roda some dancers preferred rLrlrLrl, or even Rl.lR1.1, flowing with or against the grain of the shaker and triangle parts.5
The room was small for the thirty or so people who were dancing in it, and the proximity of bodies circulating counterclockwise resembled circles found in candomblé terreiros (houses of Afro-Brazilian religion), the initiates packed one after the next, all moving in the same direction around the axis point in the center of the room. In this videotape members of all three families, Lopes, Calixto, and Gomes, were seen celebrating with friends and neighbors—a scene one would not have seen a few years earlier, when the families danced separately, and did not see a few years later, when a family feud had broken out between the Lopeses and Calixtos.
The 1996 video was one of the earliest remaining recordings of the samba de coco revival in Arcoverde. The footage had been taken soon after Fundarpe had worked with Lula Calixto to gather the three families of musicians and convince them to resume playing, singing, and dancing samba de coco. Prior to this moment certain members of the families had played together before—Lopes and Gomes, for example—but others had not. The revival of samba de coco in Arcoverde in the mid-1990s involved the negotiation of musical style. Lula Calixto’s notion of the genre included a love for midtempo cocos, while Ciço Gomes and Biu Neguinho, who had a long history of playing with the Lopes family, would storm through songs at blazing speeds. Biu’s previous experience leading a Rio-style samba school influenced his distinctive sticking patterns.
Through their sponsorship, Fundarpe and the SESC cast samba de coco as heritage, fitting them within a register of restorative nostalgia. This led to the downplaying of stylistic gaps between samba de coco families in order to unite and consecrate the genre as representative of the city. Far from being an easy narrative of progress from the home and the street to the stage, this video merely documents the beginning of the latest chapter in the history of samba de coco. After patriarch Ivo Lopes’s death in 1987, the musicians stopped playing for the most part, but if one dug deeper into the past, Ivo, Ciço, and Biu were no strangers to public performance. In the 1970s they had mounted shows during the São João Festival with municipal support as well as the sponsorship of beer companies. Ivo had written cocos that during that time were popular radio hits, interpreted by forró stars such as Genival Lacerda. But the private dimension of the genre, played informally at birthday parties and other family gatherings, continued to be a key site for the music, and in 1996 this recording of the performers without their stage dress provided footage that could be seen as evidence that the genre lived off the stage as well as on it.
FOLKLORE AS A HIGH SCHOOL SCIENCE FAIR PROJECT
The video footage of Dora’s birthday party was recorded as part of Micheliny Verunschk’s research into samba de coco in Arcoverde. During this time Lirinha and the guitarist Clayton Barros accompanied Micheliny as she spoke to musicians who were once a part of the family-centered and semiprivate coco salons that had been happening in Arcoverde at least as far back as the 1930s. Lula Calixto taught them about the music and its history and joined them in their efforts to gather more information about how it had been practiced.
The science fair, held at the high school where Lirinha studied, offered students a folklore option, reflecting nineteenth- and early twentieth-century classifications of the study of folklore as a science. At the science fair Lirinha and Clayton performed samba de coco and reisado repertoire, as well as poetry recitation with guitar accompaniment, on a stage in the cafeteria. The performance was received well enough to garner the attention of the director of the SESC Arcoverde. The SESCs of the state of Pernambuco had been on the lookout for promising, regionally relevant cultural programming that could be sent on tour, and Lirinha and Clayton were invited to produce and rehearse a theatrical folklore revue.
CORDEL’S FIRST PERFORMANCE
A videotape of Cordel’s first performance at the SESC begins with the cast walking on stage, illuminated only by open flame kerosene lanterns. Lirinha declares, “Bless Master Chudu,” paying tribute to a popular troubadour and poet from a nearby municipality. Before the rest of the show comes on, he recites “O Cordel Estradeiro,” asking this dead poet for permission to “become authentic,” to “become a messenger of the force of your thunder.” Upon Lirinha’s uttering the word verdadeiro (true or authentic), Clayton Barros played a pleasant, innocuous accompaniment in a major key that underscored this tribute to local elders. But calling for permission