Activity

The Tropicalia Effect

Concert series

"Tropicalismo" refers to the contextualisation of an aesthetic tradition at a particular time and place: the late sixties in Brazil, where the plastic arts meet bossa nova, samba and anarchism, experimental theatre and rock'n'roll. Not really an attempt at rupture, Tropicalismo was more like a reinvention of popular memory.

Critic Pedro Alexandre Sánches called it «the beautiful decadence of samba.» But Tropicália went beyond the music – above all, it was a gesture of freedom, an act of cultural cannibalism inspired by the poet Oswaldo de Andrade's 1928 Cannibal Manifesto and fuelled by tradition and the avant-garde in equal parts.

The likes of Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil, Maria Bethania, Gal Costa, Tom Zé, Os Mutantes and Rogério Duprat, among others, brought elements like samba, bossa nova, rock and roll and experimental music together on a single plane. Tropicalismo emerged during the dictatorship of the military junta responsible for the coup, which wielded power in Brazil between 1964 and 1985. In this context, cinema (Glauber Rocha, Nelson Pereira Dos Santos and Joaquim Pedro de Andrade), theatre ( Zé Celso Martinez Correa) and the plastic arts (Hélio Oiticica's 1967 installation Tropicália gave the movement its name) aligned themselves with music for the purpose of reinventing the traditional signs of popular culture within a cosmopolitan modernity that in itself already represented direct opposition to the regime.

		
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Concert series

“Tropicalismo” refers to the contextualisation of an aesthetic tradition at a particular time and place: the late sixties in Brazil, where the plastic arts meet bossa nova, samba and anarchism, experimental theatre and rock’n’roll. Not really an attempt at rupture, Tropicalismo was more like a reinvention of popular memory.

Critic Pedro Alexandre Sánches called it «the beautiful decadence of samba.» But Tropicália went beyond the music – above all, it was a gesture of freedom, an act of cultural cannibalism inspired by the poet Oswaldo de Andrade’s 1928 Cannibal Manifesto and fuelled by tradition and the avant-garde in equal parts.

The likes of Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil, Maria Bethania, Gal Costa, Tom Zé, Os Mutantes and Rogério Duprat, among others, brought elements like samba, bossa nova, rock and roll and experimental music together on a single plane. Tropicalismo emerged during the dictatorship of the military junta responsible for the coup, which wielded power in Brazil between 1964 and 1985. In this context, cinema (Glauber Rocha, Nelson Pereira Dos Santos and Joaquim Pedro de Andrade), theatre ( Zé Celso Martinez Correa) and the plastic arts (Hélio Oiticica’s 1967 installation Tropicália gave the movement its name) aligned themselves with music for the purpose of reinventing the traditional signs of popular culture within a cosmopolitan modernity that in itself already represented direct opposition to the regime.