Dance, as Lucía Suárez suggests, is ‘a place of translations’ (p. 13). Translations that connect, that create, that restructure how we might see ourselves and others – in space, in our communities and across difference. Dancing Bahia explores these conversations in the Afro-descendent dance worlds of Brazil's north-eastern state of Bahia, an area synonymous with African diaspora culture in Brazil and globally, where embodied practices have long occupied a central place in the cultivation of dynamic and evolving representations of African heritage. This wide-ranging, empirically grounded volume draws together the work of researchers, dancers, community activists and educators engaged in investigating, teaching and performing Afro-Bahian dance to consider how, in a context of pervasive prejudice and marginalisation, dance works to create and sustain critical spaces of education, memory and political possibility.
The eight main essays in the volume are set out under four headings: ‘Bahian dance in action’; ‘Memory, resistance, and survival through dance education’; ‘Reflections: paths of courage and connections’; and ‘Defying erasure through dance’. Interweaving theory, practice and personal reflection, chapters tell of experiences and memories from over four decades of dance in Bahia as well as offering artist life histories and conceptual work on dance as socio-political action. These are stories that deal with the complex space that Black dancing bodies inhabit in Bahia, at once part of essentialist touristic imaginaries of joyful tropical culture and central to projects of Black emancipation. Together they explore dance's hard labour in redefining Blackness in the state. Dance is shown to be a pivotal tool in social and community activism, becoming the grounds for transforming colonial educational systems (Pilar Echeverry Zambrano), for enacting social responsibility (Yvonne Daniel) and for cultivating collective memory (Suárez). Ultimately – through bodies moving with practices of candomblé, samba de roda, carnivalesque blocos afros, marabaixo and modern/contemporary dance, amongst others – we come to see dance as a site for making and perpetuating powerful forms of cultural citizenship.
Taken as foundational to understanding dance in Bahia, Black activism underscores many chapters’ approaches to dancers’ creative and pedagogical work. A number highlight the central role of bodily practice in ‘African matrix’ education, particularly since 2003 when national law made African and Afro-Brazilian heritage an obligatory part of primary and secondary education. In a process that entangles aesthetics and politics, dance educators work not only to dignify, reframe and make visible Afro-descendent knowledge and people, but to undo persistent essentialised imaginaries of Black bodies and reconceptualise the ‘individualised’ body as a site of collective historical, environmental and cosmic relations.
Intersecting with discussions on education, the volume also offers some fascinating work on dance as memory, including reflections on racial self-making through personal danced histories (Deborah A. Thomas), intergenerational relations in the samba de roda following its designation as UNESCO intangible heritage (Danielle Robinson and Jeff Packman) and the wide-ranging practitioner–activist networks that have been central to dance's creative cultivation and survival (Suárez). These essays raise critical questions on belonging, ownership and intergenerational knowledge-making in dance practice. Importantly, they also discuss danced memory not just as history but as dynamic translocal dialogue, drawing out the complexities that governmental and institutional frameworks so often negate. Suárez suggests that Afro-descendent traditions and practices in Bahia are ‘fraught between remembrance and forgetting, honoring African heritage and assimilating to Brazil's larger visions of modernisation, salvaging of memory by the elders and disparagement of this memory by local circumstances’ (p. 188). The book does much to elucidate these tensions, paradoxes and contradictions that dance-makers must navigate in Bahia. It offers some valuable discussions on danced authenticity, for example, as practitioners work with dance both as a site of memory/tradition and ongoing dynamic reinvention in the making of danced futures.
In showing how dancers move within (and often in spite of) precarious institutional support structures, volatile social contexts and a society where Afro-Bahian culture is at once celebrated in the national image and subject to daily denigration, all chapters together make clear the complexity of what it might mean to ‘dance Bahia’. Where some may dance with commercialised stereotypes as part of Bahia's ‘survival economy’, practice is also a vital site for the claiming of ‘danced dignity’ – as education, as paid work and social mobility, as critical cultural agency. In exploring multiple and diverse experiences here, Dancing Bahia challenges unified ideas of ‘Blackness’ and the ways practitioners might engage with its politics. It also shows Afro-Bahian dance and its activism as constantly evolving, foregrounding the adaptability and creative reinvention that, authors argue, have made it a key source of cultural resilience and survival.
Like the dances it explores, Dancing Bahia emerges from acts of translation – between bodily practice and page, between Portuguese and English, between activist, practitioner and scholarly worlds. In these crossings there is much to value. The book is rich in place-based knowledge and experience, and in Brazilian scholarly work, some of which is made available here for the first time in English. The volume also makes space for a plurality of voices in thinking critically with and through dance practice in Bahia. This in turn can present interesting challenges: chapters vary in style, literatures and points of reference, and it is often down to the reader to bridge the gaps. This also, however, made me think about the voices that I am most familiar with hearing in text and reflect, once again, on what that might mean for how my own understandings are constructed. Some readers unfamiliar with Bahia might wish for further context in some chapters and, as a book that works across Brazilian and Euro-American literatures, a clearer sense of where these debates intersect, diverge or feed into one another might have been a useful additional contribution. However, these points are minor compared to the value of the book in exploring dance's work as a practice of performance, pedagogy and politics that moves – critically, subtly and enduringly – with both colonial legacies and ongoing violences in the making of possible futures. It will be of interest to dance scholars, scholars of Brazil and others looking to think about race, memory and education from a postcolonial, bodily perspective.
The book also resonates as a testament to the love and power of dancing. The volume ends with a call for building connection, collaboration and a sense of shared struggle. With current developments in Brazil, where Afro-descendants face rising institutionalised violence and racism denial, such arguments are even more urgent for the country's artistic and social worlds. In scholarship too, as we turn to the challenge of decolonising the academy and look to cultivate plural and dialogic forms of knowledge, it seems to me that volumes like this – that move between languages, practices and perspectives – are what is needed to further that project.
