Fred Jordao- Memories of Recife Carnival

This conversation took place after Fred Jordão’s photo exhibition at the Casa America Latina in Lisbon, Portugal, which ran from April to June 2014, and is still remembered on their website:

https://casamericalatina.pt/cal/fred-jordao-irreverencia-e-a-marca-do-carnaval/

It is reproduced in full here as it was lost during a hack of the website where it was published in 2014, www.theprisma.co.uk. When the link is restored it will be provided so that readers can also see the accompanying images.

Fred’s work can be accessed on his website: https://fredjordao.com.br/

Do you think that the Recife Carnival will turn into a series of shows as happened in Rio or that it will be more resistant?

I think it is already rapidly transforming into shows. The Mayor’s Office and some multinational sponsors are putting on more than 30 stages at different places of the city with musical shows. From international attractions of pop music to bolero and forró, and foreign music. The worst thing is that the municipality and the media support and spread the news about this as if it was the essence of carnival. In the last 15 years, the street carnival has been pushed out from the centre to the edge of the city which is difficult to reach and where there is no tourist infrastructure. So the more traditional carnivalis becoming more and more inaccessible for the tourist.

It's necessary to explain that in Maracatu, things like a Caboclinho or The Bear can’t be put on a stage, because each group has between 40 and 200 people, who need a lot of space for their choreography. Where there’s a stage there’s no street carnival: the two are incompatible. Besides the fact that the audience of a stage show are passive, they just watch, whereas in the street the public takes part, dancing and moving along between a block and the satirists. This is the difference between the two.

In your reply to someone in the audience at CAL you also talked about the opportunities for corruption that are offered in putting on a series of shows.

 The municipalities and the government contract the shows and the logistics companies that build the stages and other infrastructure. Some of these companies and music groups are used to divert public money, because they are very often chosen without due diligence and are used to overcharging. And as the festivals continue growing, it becomes difficult to control so much public money and keep it separate from that from the sponsors. The Public Prosecutor has investigated festivals in many Brazilian cities and in general there are a lot of problems connected with the management of accounts related to festivals sponsored by local authorities and governments.

You also mentioned the strong influence of US culture in Brazil during the dictatorship: Did that also influence popular culture like carnivals?

The dictatorship caused a big increase in the spread of typical US values, including eating habits, language and costumes. The whole culture and lifestyle in Brazil had indigenous, African and European influences.

During the ditadura there was a move towards low quality music and cinema from the US. Traditional festivals began to be viewed as a primitive and out-of-date culture. This encouraged prejudice against Indigenous and African traditions. Modernity comes from the US and Europe is the past. Carnival, being a period of irreverence, was always a territory of resistance and political criticism, a time when people could express their criticisma in a humorous way. Turning carnival into a spectacle encouraged a change in this principle. The over-organization of public space and a process of sanitising, linked to the turning of a roots culture into a spectacle, brought about a very big transformation in a short period of time. Put this together with the advance of digital technology through the internet, smart phones and social media, and you havea gentrification of carnival, which has the capacity to be very toxic to the culture of carnival.

I’m not a purist who believes that everything should stay the same, but I think there is a process of sterilization in detriment to the values that are part of our cultural identity. Without these features, the carnival can turn into a music festival just like any other in other places on the planet. What I hope for is that our traditions are valued more and there is space for them in this enormous festival, so rich and so sought-after by the media, which is carnival in Brazil. I’d like to see the focus split between the traditional and the the modern, so that something new can arise, as happened with the Manguebeat movement in the 1990s.

What are the main differences between the carnivals of Recife and nearby Olinda, in terms of images and symbols?

The main difference is geographical. Olinda is a city boxed into a hill, with its colonial topography of slopes and two-story houses. Recife is flat and surrounded by rivers and bridges. Carnival has its foundations in rituals of mixed Indigenous, African and European origin, and it was always similar in the two places. They had Maracatus, Blocos de Frevo, Troças de Sujos, and many people wore masks and fancy dress.

For many years, Olinda was where the Frevo bands paraded and drew the revellers to dance and sing on the slopes. Everybody went to Olinda. Refife had a small carnival during the day, with its carnival groups and satirists restricted to the streets and working-class areas. Until the 1990s it was a small thing, with people taking chairs out to sit on the pavement with their neighbours. Olinds became the capital of carnival, there were so many people that there were no more processions, and the bands couldn’t move through the city. So, then Recife started this carnival of stages and shows, called it the Multicultural Carnival and created ‘Happiness Points’ at various places in the city with stages for musica performances. Rock, bolero, forró, pop -every kind of music.

There was also a growth of a block that incorporated trios with electric instruments from Bahia into their procession, and so in little over 15 years the Galo da Madrugada (the Dawn Cockerel) became a phenomenon with over 1 million people. The publicity campaigns by the governors and the promoters have brought more and more tourists to the Pernambuco Carnival, and this seems less and less like what we know as carnival, and more like Rock in Rio that happens in Lisbon. And this doesn’t seem like a very intelligent transformation. I think that people will soon discover that they’ve lost more than they’ve gained. And we’re talking of oral traditions that were transmitted from father to son. Poetry, choreography, costumes, set design, and sound and gestures.