Back

Antonio Nóbrega: at the top of the pop
ByFrank Cherry*

Sometimes it just doesn’t seem fair that we have a cultural bias which values classical performers over their popular counterparts. This issue is not as clear as it used to be, now that crossover artists have become so much in vogue. Antonio Nóbrega is a kind of crossover performer-- someone who was educated and performed in classical molds, and then migrated to popular culture.

A native of Recife, Pernambuco, Nóbrega today represents the complete package of the popular culture of Northeastern Brazil. More significantly, Nóbrega’s achievements are bolstered by scholarship and erudition.

His multi-talents include a) proficiency in 5 musical instruments—he was schooled in the classical violin and played with the Symphony Orchestra of Paraiba and with the Quarteto Amorial in the 1970's; b) composer of regional songs and lyrics which are the result of research in the historical archives of Northeast culture culminating in the creation of erudite music with popular roots; c) he is an actor in plays, many of which are part of the Cordel (string literature) tradition; d) he is a dancer who has mastered all of the regional rhythms and street performer movements, and who performs regularly with the Compagnie Lyonnaise de Ballet in France; e) he is a singer, who studied canto lirico, a raconteur and an embolador who displays compelling artistry as he interprets old, new (contemporary), and newly discovered compositions (the result of his research into archives and interviews with oldsters with strong memories). Much like Alan Lomax, he is a conservationist and defender of the Northeast's popular culture.

But the heart of his repertoire is his creation and personification of a Northeast type known as a brincante (street performer, busker, country bumpkin. harlequin), a figure who can still be found on the streets of Northeast towns and villages, and who embodies all of the brincante movements and artistry mastered by Nóbrega.

Except that Nóbrega has raised the brincante to a cultural and performance level which make him the most versatile performer active in Brazil today. He is close to becoming a cultural icon, a national treasure. His brincante, Tonheta, is a hapless, playful, troll (recalling some of Samuel Beckett’s creations) who can captivate audiences for hours by segueing from one routine to another, picking up different instruments scattered about the stage, pulling a new costume out of a box, donning a different hat to suit the skit…

Nóbrega’s physical appearance is entirely unassuming: he is short, but with a sinewy body, make-up, brown hair now graying and cropped short, and immediately recognizable as a Northeasterner by his heavily charged regional accent. The acrobatics he performs on stage belie his 50-some years.

After years of operating on the fringes of Brazilian culture and being largely ignored by the main stream, Nóbrega today has moved into the spotlight, and is receiving a modicum of the recognition he deserves. It is as if he has been rehearsing for 25 years (his first show, “A Bandeira do Divino” appeared in 1975) and now he has reached the apogee of his career with sold out performances at the Teatro Municipal in São Paulo, and the like. It seems that finally "sophisticated" urbanites are willing to look at popular regional culture not as "folklore" or some exotic art to be relegated to the academic junk pile, but as a vibrant, thoroughly modern aspect of Brazilian culture in the broadest sense. Nóbrega is the apotheosis of the chord struck by Mario de Andrade in his famous foray into the Northeast in 1927-28 where he confessed that these unpolished popular songs moved him in the same fashion as rare works of erudite art.

I first became aware of Nóbrega one weekend in 1994 when I spotted an ad for a performance of regional music in a theater called Teatro Brincante located in Vila Madalena, a beat-up neighborhood in São Paulo which was just beginning to take form as a Brazilian-style Greenwich Village. At that point in time the Vila was a low rent enclave for emerging artists. (The Vila's true-grit authenticity has today had its edge dulled by the inevitable process of gentrification).

The Teatro Brincante was squeezed into a dilapidated, ramshackle building on the rua Purpurina; in a face-saving gesture it was splashed with tropical colors. Barely a theatre, it was more like a workshop space operating on a shoe-string. Because there was no acoustic soundproofing, the owners (Nóbrega and others) received constant complaints from the neighbors. The Brincante worked desperately for sponsorship and grants, with middling success. And, in a cruel way, because they were perceived as a fringe group, they had to charge below-market prices in order to attract their young, penurious audience.

In the ante-room of the theater was a space called the Bar Drincante decorated with posters of regional performers and papier-maché figures dressed in regional garb. Soft drinks, beer and cachaça were available at popular prices. The stage area was a narrow rectangular room with ground level flooring for the stage and an audience area which was like the concrete stairs of a stadium, but without seat backs. Spectators were given a foam rubber cushion which helped attenuate the cold, hard concrete. The Brincante was what you would call “raw space”.

The show was entitled "Na Pancade do Ganzá" and Nóbrega (together with his wife, Rosane Almeida and some other dancers and musicians) was just spectacular. The following weekend I managed to convince some Brazilian friends, suffering from the prejudice against anything “popular”, to come to the Brincante. They, too, were amazed at this classy performance of popular, regional culture.

The show opened with Rosane doing a recitative-type presentation of a folkloric story delivered in Spanish tweaked just enough to make it totally comprehensible to the Brazilian audience. Rollickingly funny.

When Nóbrega came on stage, he captivated the audience first of all by his body movements, in constant acrobatic motion, bobbing and juking from one street performer dance to another, doing acrobatic cartwheels, whirling in circles, plopping to the floor to strike modern dance poses, moving across the floor like a grasshopper, freezing in stasis for a couple of seconds both to catch his breathe and to segue into the next dance movement, mugging to the audience at every turn, contorting his face to accompany the dance, in all, a kinetic explosion of energy and beauty, exhibiting remarkable stage presence.

There were four or five instruments spread around the stage and he picked up one and then another, technical master of all of them, playing and singing, and dancing at the same time, spinning with his violin/fiddle, playing to the delight of the sparse audience.

Six years later, in November of 2001, I saw Nóbrega again in a show series called “Todos os Cantos do Mundo” (“cantos” being a play on words, meaning both “corner” and “songs”) at the Sesc Pompéia. (In the intervening period I saw him at a main line theater in São Paulo, at the Teatro Municipal, at the Theater in the Park in Flushing Meadow Park, Queens, at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, and at the Brincante where he presented his second show called “Madeira que Cupin não Roi”, or ("Wood that Termites don’t Eat").

The Pompéia is a double theater shaped like a rectangle with the stage in the middle and audience seating on two sides so that the performers face the two audiences with their shoulders, turning to face one side and then the other. (For small performances only one side of the seating is opened.) But tonight the wall was down to accommodate the rush, because the show was sold out

When Nóbrega came on stage, he was greeted with whistles and howls of appreciation. Even before he began, members of the audience moved out of their seats and down the aisle where they sat on the stairs, wanting to be as close as possible to this cultural icon. Cameramen were everywhere, with telescopic cameras and two-man teams filming close- ups of the 7-piece band which accompanied Nóbrega. The show was being filmed for TV!

Additional information, including Nóbrega's discography, can be found at www.antonioNóbrega.com.br. Books and CD's can never do him justice--he is a live performer who has to be seen LIVE?