São Paulo – The fusion between Arab and Northeastern Brazilian cultures will be the theme of a Rio de Janeiro-based June festival [festa junina] square dance group this year. The Cultural Association Quadrilha Junina Geração Realce announced the theme ‘Sertão das Arábias’ [‘Arabian Sertão’] for 2023, authored by cultural producers Ricardo Lizio and Wilson Mendes.
In an interview with ANBA, Wilson Mendes informed the theme pays homage to the Arab people who arrived in Brazil from the 19th century. It draws a parallel between the Arabian desert and the northeastern hinterlands, the Sertão, portraying the influence of Arab, Moorish, and Muslim civilizations in the Brazilian Northeast.
Geração Realce is a folkloric square dance group that also has social projects. Each year, it brings a different theme. Last year, it presented the nativity of St. John the Baptist (patron saint of Brazil’s June festivals) and the origins of the celebrations (pictured above).
Geração Realce was founded 28 years ago and, in 2019, became part of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Rio de Janeiro. The group is the current state champion and representative of Rio de Janeiro in the Brazilian National Square Dance Contest [Concurso Nacional de Quadrilhas], to be held in Pará from July 7 to 9.
“The group was founded based on Brazilian singer-songwriter Gilberto Gil’s 1979 song ‘Realce.’ My father [Ricardo Lizio] was the founder, and that year, they assembled a carnival street party, which later became a square dance group. They entered a hiatus in 1986, and I resumed the group in 1994,” said Mendes.
The group performs in June and July in shopping malls, cultural centers, samba schools, and public squares in Rio de Janeiro and other municipalities and states.
The idea for the theme, according to Mendes, came from reading a series of ANBA stories on correlations between Arabs and the Brazilian Northeast and cordéis (a format of popular booklets in Brazil), such as the collections of short stories ‘Ali Babá e os quarenta cangaceiros’ [‘Ali Babá and the forty cangaceiros’] and ‘Xerazade, a Onça e o Saci’ [‘Scheherazade, the Jaguar, and the Saci’], both by Tiago de Melo Andrade; and ‘O Pavão Misterioso’ [‘The Mysterious Peacock’], by José Camelo de Melo Rezende; and ‘Sertão das Arabias’ [‘Arabian Sertão’], written and illustrated by Fábio Sombra.
The group will tell the story of the fictional city of ‘Sertão das Arábias’ [‘Arabian Sertão’], where Moors, Muslims, Arabs, and Brazilian Northeasterners live in the countryside of Ceará. “The group’s main couple of dancers will be an Arab man who falls in love with a woman from the Brazilian Northeast, and she thinks she cannot marry him because of their cultural differences,” he said.
“We saw many correlations in music, clothing, food, and things we didn’t know. Coco and baião [typical northeastern rhythms], the repentista [improvisation poet], the viola caipira player, the fiddler, the herder clothing, the adornments of clothes, and much more things. So we started working from that,” said Mendes.
The cultural producer says, in his research, he found Arab influences in all nine states of the Brazilian Northeast. “There is Our Lady of Lebanon in Piauí, in Bahia, there is couscous; we are collecting all these influences and putting them on the group’s allegories, songs, and dances. The group will have two belly dancers, and all songs will have some Arab influence. We will dance to an Arab-style baião, an Arabian forró,” he illustrated.
The costumes will also show this confluence of cultures. “We will have a herder with a turban, a Bedouin with a cangaceiro hat… all that mixture of influences and confluences,” he said.
Mendes said the group’s presentation is like a samba school parade, except it’s all in the same place instead of a moving spectacle, bringing together 40 couples with different songs and costume changes.
The performances will occur during the June festival season from June to July. “We are in the phase of putting together the presentation, the rehearsals last two months, we have to present a technical rehearsal in May, without costumes, only with songs and dances, and then presentations will start in June,” he informed.
Geração Realce Square Dance Group is seeking sponsorship for the Quadrilhas Juninas National Contest, to take place in Pará in July, where they will square off against other groups from all around the country to be Brazilian champions.
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Translated by Elúsio Brasileiro
