Sensor de Temperatura del Aire aspirado ATS o IAT

In the 1920s, the anthropophagy movement in Brazil addressed the issue of Brazilian modernity, describing Brazilian uniqueness and calling for aesthetic and economic progress that would allow the country to stand on equal terms with developed nations. In particular, Oswald de Andrade forged an imaginary national identity through his exegesis of the Manifesto antropófago. His text states, “Anthropophagy alone unites us . . . Socially. Economically. Philosophi- cally . . . sole law of the world . . . My sole interest is in that which is not mine. Law of humankind.”5_{The basic premise of the discourse of anthropophagy was} that Brazil was able to ingest all that was foreign and give it a special twist, thus transforming colonial and imposed European ideology and philosophy into a uniquely Brazilian phenomenon. Andrade’s anthropophagy inverted the nega- tive representations cultivated in the sixteenth century that portrayed Brazil- ians as “natives who collected Brazil-wood for trading with Europeans, or by those who collected Europeans in order to devour them in complex anthro- pophagous rituals.”6_{For Castro Rocha,}7_{“anthropophagy is central to Brazilian} culture and has been present in three fundamental stages of Brazil’s intellectual history, namely, in Romanticism, Modernism, and Tropicalism.”8_{For me, an-} thropophagy is ever present, particularly, in dance and performance.

In the 1950s, modernist architecture had a key moment of success with the construction of Brasilia. However, in a larger sense, successful modernism, where perpetual renovation is ‹nancially possible, has been constantly fore- closed by dictatorships, military regimes, and general government corruption. In the popular imaginary, Brazil is relegated to the status of a tourist country: the site of samba, sex tourism, exotic pleasures, and daring ecological travel. Brazilians have looked up to Europe and the United States, adopted their most attractive ideologies and patterns, and changed these to ‹t the particularities of Brazil’s national circumstances. Because of Brazil’s history as a colonized and

postcolonial space, nothing seems to be new but, rather, an imitation, repeti- tion, or translation. Critics such as Brazilian Wander Melo Miranda have de- scribed this phenomenon in terms of a late modernity in Brazil.

Brazil’s late modernity engages novelty and celebration in both its accom- plished feats and setbacks. The modernist project is, as Jurgen Habermas has insisted, an un‹nished one. For this reason, I propose that, rather than looking with sadness at the cities that stand alone in the middle of the Sertão or amid the glaring poverty in the neighboring favelas as they struggle to rise to an un- attainable greatness of modern symbolism with their short cycles of evolution, we should view and evaluate all of the attempts toward modernization with pride. I suggest that the project of modernity in Brazil is one of audacity and energy. It is an ever-new adventure that responds to the huge impediments im- posed by national economic failures and the disintegration of sociopolitical stability.

Social critics have insisted that Belo Horizonte, the fourth largest city in Brazil, is a haven of the cruel contradictions of modernization in an economi- cally and politically challenged country. For example, in the introduction of Ar- quitetura da modernidade, Brazilian critic Leonardo Barci Castriota quotes Claude Lévi Strauss’s observations from a visit in the 1930s published in Tristes Tropiques. Lévi Strauss wrote that the cities of the New World suffer from a sense of “decadence.” As soon as they are completed, these cities are immedi- ately in need of reconstruction. The neighborhoods resemble a fair or an inter- national exhibit constructed to last for a few months, rather than an urban space that would be a lasting symbol of the cities’ modern status. With the lapse of time, the celebration ends, and the cities fall apart. Lévi Strauss concludes that they are not new cities as contrasted with ancient cities; instead, they are cities with a very short cycle of evolution. Barci Castriota agrees with Lévi Strauss’s observations of the developing Americas and discusses how it applies to Belo Horizonte, where the city barely manages to establish itself before being engulfed by what he refers to as the destructive logic of modernization.9_The city attempts to become modern, both economically and aesthetically, but these attempts are precluded by lacking economic resources.10_{Continual renovation} and renewal is not possible. Consequently, urban decay becomes an integral part of the city. Theoretically, then, the central focus extends beyond any tradi- tion of ruptures and continuities. Thus, understanding the city requires accept- ing the layers of ruin that result from failed attempts of modernization. As such, the city is organic. It is in constant transition, always responding to the re- lentless elements. Like most major cities in Latin America, Belo Horizonte ex-

ists in a constant state of transitoriness. Its attempts at modernization are ceaselessly plagued by the reality of social and economic ruin, which is overtly visible in the streets—through homelessness and crumbling buildings. In his seminal works, Walter Benjamin has described that history is presented in tran- sitory nature: “the process of natural decay marks the survival of past history within the present.”11

I would like to avail myself of these concepts of city in a state of ruin and of ruin as a natural state of transitoriness to entertain my own musings about the ways in which dancing bodies expose potential in space and thus intersect the city. If transitoriness is a viable state through which the ruins of sociopolitical failures can be challenged, then perhaps the human body and its movement in space offer a site of contestation. Perhaps bodies, albeit physical, real, and ma- terially present, can be compared to the city, as they are never static. From birth, they are en route to death, through experiences of ›ourishing and inevitable decay. Bodies in space, in perpetual movement, defy decay. Unlike the cities— which have proven to fail at the modernizing project—bodies engaged in a long legacy of dance traditions defy annihilation and historical erasure. Arguably, dance memory performed by dancers, both in the streets and on the stage, keep alive multiple and multiplying rhythms, steps, choreography, languages, and gods and challenge class, gender, and racial categories.

Art, dance, music, and community projects are active interveners against human and moral ruin through discipline and memory. They offer models of survival for individuals, communities, histories, and traditions. The arts chal- lenge the state of aesthetic, economic, and social decay that so af›icts cities like Belo Horizonte. In this light, the arts are vital to processes of democratization. However, the process is convoluted and often not so simple to trace. In the fol- lowing sections, I hope to support this af‹rmation by drawing out the more complex sociocultural interactions existent between a history of aesthetic modernity, elite choreography, African dance traditions, and market represen- tations of violence through ‹lm. How do all of these signi‹ers of Brazilian re- ality intersect to present a larger narrative of rights, citizenship, and violence? How does dance play a pivotal role to counter the negative realities of poverty?

grupo corpo—the beginning: representing the