Congratulations to Dr. Ana Paula Höfling for the achievement of her book “Staging Brazil: Choreographies of Capoeira” being reviewed and featured in the 55th Volume of the Dance Research Journal, published by Cambridge University Press.
“Staging Brazil” examines Brazilian capoeira—an African diasporic “street-fighting” practice and art presented in folkloric shows for tourists, contextualizing the rise of the two main styles of capoeira through the lens of the twentieth-century race and nation of Brazil. Reviewer Associate Professor Cindy García from the University of Minnesota writes, “Höfling deftly weaves together the knowledge from her lived experience as well as dance scholarship from the United States and Brazil. She generously analyzes and translates the significance of her findings for those of us who do not have this multidimensional, transnational expertise with capoeira.”
García also states “One of my favorite aspects of this book is the way that Höfling, as both a dance scholar and capoeira practitioner, embodies the archive by putting the illustrations from capoeira manuals into motion. Several illustrations from the manuals in chapter 1 exemplify the kind of material from which Höfling derives this dance-based methodology. Her trained capoeira-dancing body speculates the moves that must happen in between the illustrations of a series of moves so that she could recreate a more fluid performance of the practice. Her strategy of archival embodiment extends ways in which earlier dance scholarship has focused on the thick description and interpretation of dancing bodies within photos or drawings (see for example, Savigliano 1995, 149). By bringing movement to her analysis, she is able to make the connections between the images as her “body bridges the historical gaps” (14).”
The Dance Research Journal is a peer-reviewed publication for dance scholarship produced by the Dance Studies Association. It is published three times per year by Cambridge University Press.
For additional information about this article visit https://muse.jhu.edu/article/914969