The blood of Brazil's three dominant racial strains—Portuguese, Indian and Negro—flows in the veins of supple young Eros Volusia. But the dances that have made her Rio de Janeiro's outstanding dance artist come straight from African jungles. As a child, Eros Volusia lived in exotic Baía, where the inhabitants, predominantly Negro, have retained the sinuous steps, the pulsing rhythms and the primitive witchcraft practiced by their Congo ancestors. (“Brazil's Eros Volúsia Does Negro Witch Dance” 1941)
In September of 1941, Brazilian dancer and choreographer Eros Volúsia was featured on the cover of Life magazine and introduced as “Brazil's Top Dancer.” In the wake of Carmen Miranda's meteoric rise in Hollywood, photographer Hart Preston was sent to Brazil to photograph Volúsia, who performed on the same elegant casino stages in Rio de Janeiro where Miranda was “discovered” (Bishop-Sanchez Reference Bishop-Sanchez2016, 70; Pereira Reference Pereira2004, 55). The text in the epigraph above—packed with primitivist fantasies about Afro-diasporic religious practices in Brazil—is excerpted from the short article that accompanies the eleven photographs published in Life, which featured a scantily clad Volúsia performing her signature solo, Macumba, inspired by Afro-Brazilian religions.Footnote 1
Contrary to Miranda, the “Brazilian bombshell” who starred in more than ten blockbuster Hollywood musicals between 1940 and 1950 and became one of the highest paid female performers in Hollywood (Ovalle Reference Ovalle2011, 54), Volúsia's experience abroad was short-lived and disappointing. In this article I explore the contrasting narratives of race and nation that framed Volúsia's dances in Brazil and in the United States, and analyze her inability (or unwillingness) to achieve “bombshell” status in the United States. I examine Volúsia's racialized stage persona of national mestiça in relationship to her European features and light skin, and frame both her choreographic and pedagogic projects as integral to the construction of Brazil as a “racial democracy” in the first half of the twentieth century. I propose that her whiteness, combined with ballet technique, functioned as an important legitimizing element in the performance of the dances of Brazil's racialized “folk.” I contrast Volúsia's reception in Brazil—as a staged mestiça whose stylized “folk” dances were celebrated as high art—with her reception in the United States, where Volúsia's dances were reduced to Latin exotica, and her staged mestiça reconfigured through the one-drop rule as a primitive “Negro dancer.” Recent scholarship on authorship and copyright in dance has elucidated the ways in which whiteness entails and enables both subject position and property rights (Kraut Reference Kraut2011; Picart Reference Picart2013). I argue that Volúsia's decision to return to Brazil after her first film participation in the United States stems from the “loss of whiteness”—and ensuing losses of status as artist and author—she experienced in Hollywood.
While Volúsia often stressed her intellectual and artistic labor in modifying Brazil's dances for the stage, she also insisted on their authenticity. Her claims to both authorship and authenticity parallel Zora Neale Hurston's paradoxical claims of authoring her stagings of “original Negro folklore” while simultaneously preserving their authenticity (Kraut Reference Kraut2008). However, Volúsia's approach to collecting dances of Brazil and adapting them for the stage shared more similarities with La Meri's (Russell Meriwether Hughes) “ethnologic” dance repertory than with Hurston's folkloric stagings. Like La Meri, Volúsia collected dances in the places she toured, which were then adapted and added to her repertoire. Unlike La Meri, however, who decidedly performed “the other” in her appropriations of dances from around the world (Ruyter Reference Ruyter, Shay and Sellers-Young2016), Volúsia was able to claim a kind of “native” ethnographer status through shared citizenship and alleged kinship ties with the national “others” whose dances she appropriated.
Despite her great success in Brazil, both as a performer and as the director of the dance division of the National Theater Service (1939–1969), Volúsia's work as a dancer, choreographer, researcher, and pedagogue has received relatively little scholarly attention. Volúsia is mentioned briefly in Eduardo Sucena's A dança teatral no Brasil (Reference Sucena1989), and in Ida Vicenzia's Dança no Brasil (Reference Vicenzia1997).Footnote 2 Brazilian dance critic Helena Katz, in her book O Brasil descobre a dança descobre o Brasil (Brazil Discovers the Dance Discovers Brazil) (Reference Katz1994), omits Volúsia's work entirely and claims that it was not until the 1960s that Brazilian choreographers “discovered” and began exploring Brazilian themes in their dances. In the only article published to date in English about Volúsia, Sandra Meyer analyzes Volúsia's solos in relationship to Brazilian modernism. Her analysis, however, lacks a discussion of the racial complexities of Volúsia's work and seems to take at face value Volúsia's implicit and explicit claims of being a mestiça (Meyer Reference Meyer, Gitelman and Palfy2012, 141–42).Footnote 3 The only significant research on Volúsia to date was published by Brazilian dance historian and Volúsia's biographer Roberto Pereira, who analyzes her work in the context of the emergence of a national Brazilian ballet in the first half of the twentieth century (Pereira Reference Pereira2003). Pereira argues that Volúsia's dances embodied mestiçagem, the racial mixture that defined Brazilian national identity during the first half of the twentieth century, and pays attention to Volúsia's labor of estilização (stylization), the term used at the time to refer to a process of balleticized “improvement” of national (i.e., folk) dances.
I extend Pereira's analysis to suggest that Volúsia's stylization through ballet, a dance technique she considered universal, exposes the ideology of branqueamento (whitening) that lurks within purportedly harmonious and conciliatory projects of mestiçagem. In reframing Volúsia's dances as performances of whiteness cloaked by the rhetoric of mestiçagem, I answer Patricia de Santana Pinho's (Reference Pinho2009) call to name, study, and visibilize whiteness in an effort to destabilize it. At a historical moment when worn-out nationalist claims of Brazil's color blindness and racial harmony are making a comeback in Brazilian politics and policy—as exemplified by one of President Jair Bolsonaro's campaign slogans, “My color is Brazil” (“A minha cor é o Brasil”)—exposing the prestige, power, and privilege of whiteness takes on renewed significance.
Bailado Brasileiro: Dancing Mestiçagem
In her 1947 book on Afro-Brazilian religion in Bahia, The City of Women, U.S. anthropologist Ruth Landes famously endorsed Brazil's alleged racial harmony, widely accepted as fact in the fields of sociology and anthropology at the time: “This book about Brazil does not discuss race problems there because there were none” (Landes [Reference Landes1947] 1994, xxxvi). At precisely the same time Landes conducted fieldwork in Brazil (1938–1939), Eros Volúsia's career as a dancer, choreographer, and educator was gaining national recognition. In 1939 Gustavo Capanema, Getúlio Vargas's minister of education and health (and de facto minister of culture) hired Volúsia to direct the dance division of the Serviço Nacional de Teatro (National Theater Service) in Rio de Janeiro (Volúsia Reference Volúsia1983, 43),Footnote 4 where she taught until her retirement in 1969. Under the auspices of Vargas's autocratic New State, Volúsia developed her bailado brasileiro, or “Brazilian ballet,” a nationalist dance style that allegedly combined movement elements from Brazil's “three races”—the same racial mixture celebrated by sociologist Gilberto Freyre, whose 1933 Casa Grande e Senzala (translated as The Masters and the Slaves in 1946) popularized the emerging idea that Brazil's miscegenation should be valorized rather than regarded as the source of Brazil's backwardness.Footnote 5
In an article published in Dance Magazine, Volúsia explained that “the dance of Brazil proclaims the marriage and fusion of the three major racial groups living within [the country's] borders” (Volúsia Reference Volúsia1948, 18). In the same way that European blood was seen as the ingredient capable of improving Brazil's indigenous and Afro-diasporic racial stock in this eugenicist racial triad, Volúsia's bailado brasileiro employed ballet—the quintessential European dance form—as a tool to “improve” the dances of Brazilian “others,” dances she had learned through a somewhat haphazard ethnographic research practice that ranged from visiting Afro-Brazilian religious temples to watching indigenous ceremonies staged for her. As other Brazilian artists of her generation, Volúsia used the dances of racialized national “others” as fodder for her own nationalist artistic production.Footnote 6
Volúsia was born Heros Volúsia Machado in 1914 to the poets Rodolpho and Gilka Machado; she grew up around Rio de Janeiro's intellectual and artistic elite, although the family was far from wealthy and even struggled financially after her father's death in 1923 (Pereira Reference Pereira2004, 13). Her mother Gilka was a prolific and well-known poet whose sensual poetry pushed the boundaries of early twentieth-century propriety. Machado's poems are often simultaneously erotic and nationalist, celebrating a feminized mestiçagem as the core of Brazilian national identity. Her 1938 poem “Samba” evokes images of a brown female body, a morena, overflowing with a sensuality that merges the morena's dancing body with both land and nation: “Brazilian morena /It seems as if the ground/Moves to your samba/It desires you,/it seeks you,/it wants to devour you! … /Brazilian morena/What a strong attraction your limbs exert/On the land where you thrive” (Machado [Reference Machado1938] 1978).Footnote 7 Here Machado establishes a relationship of kinesthetic interdependence and sexualized desire between an anthropomorphized Brazilian ground/land and the dancing body of the brown morena.Footnote 8 Samba, the dance form that would come to symbolize Brazil during the first half of the twentieth century, as danced by the Brazilian mestiça, could move the ground that desired, and in fact wanted to devour, this dancing morena—an apt metaphor for how mestiçagem fed Brazilian nationalism. Volúsia choreographed a solo titled “Cascavelando” (a gerund created from the word “cascavel,” or “rattlesnake”) inspired by Machado's “Samba,” which premiered at Rio de Janeiro's elegant Teatro Municipal in 1937. Dressed in a shiny skintight dress resembling the skin of a snake, Volúsia's hip movements alluded to the movements of a snake's rattle while moving to the rhythms of samba.Footnote 9 The hip undulations of Cascavelando were reprised as part of a program that commemorated the fiftieth anniversary of the abolition of slavery on May 13, 1938. The fervently patriotic program included various nationalist anthems, speeches by politicians, and a salutation to President Getúlio Vargas. Ironically, this celebration of Brazil's African heritage did not include Afro-Brazilian bodies on stage (“Cinquentenário da Abolição” 1938; Pereira Reference Pereira2003, 180)Footnote 10; Volúsia's staged brownness seemed to offer sufficient “color” for the occasion.
Volúsia carefully crafted her image on stage as that of the Brazilian morena, while her phenotype and social standing allowed her access to elite “high art” spaces such as the Municipal Theater of Rio de Janeiro as well as the municipal ballet school (escola de bailados), where she began studying ballet in 1928 at age fourteen. Her uneventful acceptance into the escola de bailados corroborates my reading of Volúsia as socially white,Footnote 11 since it was not until 1948, twenty years later, that the first black dancers were admitted into the corpo de baile of the municipal theater (Melgaço da Silva Júnior Reference Melgaço da Silva Júnior2007, 18–20). In 1932, after only four years of ballet classes, Volúsia decided she had learned enough ballet and left the school to begin creating her Brazilian-themed dances. This abbreviated ballet training, however, gave Volúsia the tools to “cultivate” Brazil's “folk dances” (a term she always writes in English, signaling the newness and foreignness of the classificatory rubric she used for grouping the dances of her “own” people) (Volúsia Reference Volúsia1983, 40). She believed that ballet technique was useful as a foundation, but not as an end in itself; through ballet training, she believed dancers could master what she believed to be universal movement principles, such as the use of breath, balance, elevation, and flexibility (Volúsia Reference Volúsia1939, 11). In a published report about the dance program at the National Theater Service, Volúsia explained that “a classical foundation prepares [students] for the good performance of any dance” (Volúsia quoted in Pereira Reference Pereira2003, 186). She believed that ballet training was able to “fine tune the body” and bring about “harmony of movement” (Volúsia Reference Volúsia1939, 12).
Not surprisingly, then, bailado brasileiro included a ballet barre followed by the practice of folk dances in the center;Footnote 12 it employed turn out, demi-pointe, an elongated and erect torso, use of long arm gestures (arms extending upward and outward), various pivot turns such as soutenus, leg kicks such as grand battements, and leaps such as grand jetés. Bailado brasileiro did occasionally break with ballet's vertical alignment in its use of torso, hip, and head movements: in Macumba, her signature solo featured in Life, Volúsia performed what she called “head fouettés,” head circles that progressively increased in speed and drew enthusiastic applause from her audiences (Volúsia Reference Volúsia1983, 42).Footnote 13 Although she became known for her samba na ponta (samba on pointe), which she performed on the stages of Rio's elegant casinos, Volúsia never liked dancing on pointe; she believed that pointe technique was unnatural and stifled individual expression (Volúsia Reference Volúsia1983, 40; Reference Volúsia1939, 12). Instead, she made ample use of demi-pointe, often in conjunction with flexed knees. She believed that dancing on demi-pointe was more than enough “elevation” in dance: “The Greeks … who were often beautiful and cultivated dance more than any other group, only performed on demi-pointe, not needing any more elevation for the spirituality of their wise choreography” (Volúsia Reference Volúsia1939, 15). Volúsia found in demi-pointe a compromise between the need to “elevate” Brazil's folk dances, both literally and symbolically, and her desire to preserve their connection to the ground, the land, and the nation. The vast majority of the photographs included in her autobiography—from photos of a feather-clad, bow-and-arrow toting “Indian” to photos of candomblé-inspired dances—show Volúsia balancing on the balls of her feet. Her dancing carried markers of otherness while clearly staying within the realm of ballet, a technique she believed to be the ingredient that allowed her to “bring to large audiences, to a civilized audience[,] the barbarous chants of [Brazil's] afro-amerindian folk-lore” (Volúsia Reference Volúsia1939, 16). Volúsia believed that her training in ballet, combined with her knowledge of Brazilian folk dances, placed her in the ideal position to civilize and elevate Brazil's “barbarous” folklore. In addition, she claimed that her humble origins and contact with Brazil's poor allowed her to acquire, to “fix” in her limbs, the “unpredictable choreography of our people” (19).
Volúsia constructed her own dance pedigree by downplaying her ballet training and foregrounding her close connection with the “folk.” She claimed to have taken her first dance steps in a macumba temple: “I lived across the street from a well-known macumba [temple], the macumba of João da Luz. When I was four years old, I would sneak out of the house to dance at the temple of Father João. And it was there that I took my first dance steps. These first impressions will always be engraved in my memory” (Volúsia Reference Volúsia1983, 132). Pereira points to the importance of this origin story in establishing the legitimacy of Volúsia's bailado brasileiro, noting that it asserted an “almost biological” link between Volúsia and Afro-Brazilian culture (Pereira Reference Pereira2003, 191).Footnote 14 Volúsia's phenotype was read as white in Brazil; her dark, wavy hair, however, combined with her olive skin, provided her with enough of a foundation on which to build her (auto)exotic image of mestiça. The very etymology Volúsia constructed for her first name reinforced her narrative of brownness: Eros derived from her birth name Heros, which she mistook for the English word “heron” and believed meant “garça morena” (brown heron) in English (Volúsia Reference Volúsia1983, 35).Footnote 15 She often mentioned having a grandmother from Bahia, the Brazilian state known for its thriving Afro-Brazilian culture, thus asserting a biological link to the Afro-Brazilian folklore she stylized for the stage. Explaining her “ancestral” connection to her dancing, she stated: “I do not dance from [received] information[;] in my body of proud mestiça the atavistic manifestations were awoken very early on” (Volúsia Reference Volúsia1939, 19). At the same time as she claimed a blood-based, “atavistic” connection to Brazil's folk dances, which were “awoken” in her body rather than learned, she paradoxically emphasized her labor in reshaping these dances in the same way a jeweler prepares a gem: “I have been teaching in minutes what has taken me years of research and creative work. Nobody reflects, when looking at an ornament made of rare gems, on the work of the artist who cut the gems and assembled the jewel” (Volúsia Reference Volúsia1939, 19).
In addition to her allegedly ancestral, blood-based knowledge of dances of Brazil, Volúsia attributed her dance knowledge to the time she spent among “os miseráveis”—the abject poor (Volúsia Reference Volúsia1939, 19). She legitimized her bailado brasileiro through her research “in loco” among these poor others;Footnote 16 Volúsia, who had no formal training in anthropological research, nonetheless engaged in embodied, participatory research—gesturing toward new trends in ethnographic participant observation without, however, ever engaging in long-term or in-depth field research. Aside from brief descriptions of the dances she observed, published in expanded proceedings from a lecture delivered in 1939 titled Dansa Brasileira, Volúsia's research trips did not yield any kind of significant ethnographic archive—no field notes, no photographs, no audio recordings. Instead, Volúsia's research was embodied: the act of collecting folklore happened through her body as she learned the dances herself. Her research trips to Salvador and Recife in 1937 and to Salvador again in 1945 had the dual purpose of allowing her to perform her bailado brasileiro in the cities she visited and research new local dances, which would be used to renew and broaden her repertoire of folk dances. The photographs that illustrate Dansa Brasileira—twenty-four studio portraits of Volúsia in glamorous costumes performing stylized versions of the dances she learned in the field—make clear that the purpose of Volúsia's research was not to study the dances she researched, nor was it intended to preserve them for posterity (often the rationale for research on “folkloric” practices in the first half of the twentieth century). Instead, her purpose was to use the choreography of Brazil's “folk” as a “contribution for the creation of a classical Brazilian dance” (Volúsia Reference Volúsia1939, 42).Footnote 17 Using the verb “aproveitar,” she refers to the process of selecting choreographic elements that were “useful” while discarding others in the appropriative creative process she understood as “stylization.”
When writing about the dances of possession she observed in terreiros of Afro-Brazilian religions,Footnote 18 Volúsia rectified the common misconception that these religious dances were merely “convulsions,” and identified the specific “steps, gestures, expressions and attitudes” which would lend themselves “conveniently for a perfect stylization” (Volúsia Reference Volúsia1939, 42). Volúsia's research, albeit well-intentioned in that she aimed at destigmatizing and valorizing Afro-Brazilian culture (Volúsia Reference Volúsia1983, 131),Footnote 19 had the clear goal of collecting choreographic elements that she would then “stylize” in the process of creating her bailado brasileiro—literally lending style to “folk” choreographies. While stylization distanced these dances of possession from their religious context, Volúsia claimed that her dances, on several occasions, actually induced trance: “the dancers were really possessed by the spirits and fell into trance, and the same happened with part of the audience, who would stand up and rush to the lobby of the theater until the trance wore off, which lent the scene an authentic spectacle of great beauty” (Volúsia Reference Volúsia1983, 130). Despite taking pride in her artistic labor in stylizing the dances of Brazil, Volúsia repeatedly insisted on their authenticity.
Although Volúsia seems to have spent a significant amount of time in terreiros observing ceremonies of Afro-Brazilian religions, her experiences observing indigenous dances were much more limited. She admitted that she had little knowledge of indigenous dances and had acquired this knowledge as a child (Volúsia Reference Volúsia1939, 51). In her autobiography, she recounts how she came in contact with Brazilian índios:
With a league of indians recently arrived from the margins of the Araguaia [river] brought by catechism teacher Daltro, a close friend of my parents, who housed them on our farm in Tinguá, I also had the opportunity to feel the beauty of the indigenous songs and of their ceremonies: festive, funeral, of war and also fetishistic[.] It was with them that I learned and was able to stylize all the beauty of their dances, completely different from the black rhythms, but possessing, as well, that nostalgia, that mysticism, those impressions that so inebriated me. (Volúsia Reference Volúsia1983, 133)
This displaced “league of indians,” housed temporarily at Volúsia's family farm at the request of a family friend who was a catechist, most likely did not perform full funeral or war ceremonies, and are even less likely to have performed “fetishistic” ceremonies in the presence of a catechist. It is unlikely that Volúsia witnessed more than contrived fragments of indigenous dances at her family's farm; however, these fragments were enough to cause lasting “impressions” that would later be used in her process of stylization.
Despite having done practically no research on indigenous dances, Volúsia spoke with authority about them:
These people who dance to commemorate all social events of their tribes; who owe a contemplative indolence to their adoration of nature; who sing imitating the voice of the birds and the beasts, of the waters and the wind; who praise in their songs the beauty of the environment that surrounds them; these people who have war dances and liturgical dances, festive [dances], [dances] of love and hate, of immolation and sacrifice, necessarily possess in their depths a vast choreographic array, [and] have to reflect, without a doubt, the marvelous spectacles of Brazil's nature in their dances. (Reference Volúsia1983, 133)
Volúsia's “indians” did not purposefully create dance and song, but instead, merely reflected and imitated the sounds and movements that exist in nature—a nature they worshipped in “contemplative indolence.” Their dances were innate rather than a conscious, creative process—something they already “possess[ed] in their depths” (133). In stating that they “dance to commemorate all social events of their tribes,” Volúsia echoes the theories about “primitive” dances disseminated through the writings of German musicologist Curt Sachs. In his 1937 book, A World History of the Dance, Sachs affirmed that “on no occasion in the life of primitive peoples could the dance be dispensed with. Birth, circumcision, and the consecration of maidens, marriage and death, planting and harvest, the celebration of chieftains, hunting, war, and feasts … —for all of these the dance is needed” (Reference Sachs and Schönberg1937, 4–5). Like Sach's fantasies about the dances of all peoples he considered primitive, Volúsia's ideas about indigenous dances were no more than “impressions that so inebriated” her, combined with preconceived primitivist notions about indigenous dance and culture.
The highly balletic movement vocabulary she used in her “indian” dances, such as grand jeté leaps and jumps with both legs in plié, allegedly derived from “jumps, attitudes and spins” she learned from the índios she met at the family farm (Volúsia Reference Volúsia1939, 51). For Volúsia, indigenous dances were characterized by straight lines and “sober” movement—her embodiment of the stereotype of the “noble savage.” She believed that these straight lines and sobriety of movement were able to soften the “simiesque expressions, exaggerated hip-shaking, and violent foot-stomping” of African dances (51). Although Volusia's goal was to visibilize and valorize Brazil's folk dances, and even though she presented herself as a racially mixed, working-class woman who belonged to these communities of Brazilian others, her writings often reflect the racist thinking prevalent at the time, in which índios laze about in nature and blacks are “docile, malleable” (1939, 28) and dance with “simiesque expressions.”
Volúsia's bailado brasileiro embodied the mestiçagem celebrated by Brazilian nationalism and its thinly veiled whitening ideals; through a European dance aesthetic, Brazilian ballet “improved” and “elevated” the dances of Brazil's “primitives.” This process of appropriation was smoothed over by a rhetoric of national unity and harmonious miscegenation that Volúsia explained as the “loving intertwining of three dissimilar races” (Volúsia Reference Volúsia1939, 23). Volúsia paradoxically claimed authenticity through her alleged “atavistic” knowledge of Brazilian dances while simultaneously claiming authorship by foregrounding her labor in transforming these dances in the same way a jeweler lapidates a rock into a gem—gems that she now claimed as her own intellectual property.
Stylizing the Folk: Volúsia's Mestiçagem as High Art
Volúsia's self-fashioning as the national mestiça was so successful that critics unanimously read her body on stage as the authentic representation of a new Brazilian corporeality; Volúsia's performances were praised as “spontaneous,” “naïve,” and she was seen as possessing “natural grace” (Pereira Reference Pereira2003, 181). However, critics did recognize the craft involved in Volúsia's approach to choreographing mestiçagem and praised her labor in translating, transposing, and stylizing Brazil's “folk dances” into high art.
When Volúsia was invited to perform as a guest soloist with the resident ballet company of the Municipal Theater of Rio de Janeiro in 1943, she was cast in roles that highlighted her mestiça persona. In this season, Volúsia performed in two ballets: Leilão (Portuguese for “auction,” in this case “slave auction”) and Uirapuru (a bird found in the Brazilian Amazon), both choreographed by resident choreographer Vaslav Veltchek.Footnote 20 In Leilão, Volúsia danced two roles: a escrava (the female slave) and o moleque (the black boy)Footnote 21; in Uirapuru, Volúsia danced the role of a índia caçadora (the indigenous huntress) (“Temporada Oficial” 1943).
The libretto for Leilão recounts the hegemonic narrative of abolition as a benevolent gesture of the Brazilian monarchy, one that erases the labor and the struggle of many Brazilian abolitionists. The first act depicts a slave merchant's house where slaves are seen playing, fighting, and dancing; a farmer enters and buys a female slave, leaving her male companion distraught. In the second act, Brazil's Princess Regent Isabel, after dancing a polka at a royal ball, dramatically tears the “slavery law” and signs the decree of abolition. The ballet ends in a celebratory note with a carnaval parade, although within this celebration there is room for a dash of social critique: the formerly enslaved male companion reappears looking for his lover, whom he will never find (“Temporada Oficial” 1943).
Volúsia accepted the invitation to perform in Veltchek's Leilão on the condition that she would be allowed to choreograph her own dances (Pereira Reference Pereira2004, 73). By 1943, Volúsia's mestiça persona had been firmly established; her fame preceded her as the creator of bailado brasileiro, and critics consistently praised her performances even in mixed reviews of the program as a whole. At a historical moment of heightened nationalism, her dances were lauded as a transformation of Brazil's “folk dances” into national high art. Writing about Volúsia's performance in Leilão, one critic stated: “A rare and strong instinct and a lively intelligence allowed her to create, for the international ballet, an intrinsically Brazilian performance. Her agile grace, her varied and impassionate knowledge of our choreographic folklore, render her an authentic master of the art of dance specifically ours” (A. M. Reference A. M.1943).Footnote 22 Volúsia combined “instinct” with “intelligence” in her embodiment of mestiçagem, a mixture that resulted in an “intrinsically Brazilian” dance style suitable for the international stage. Significantly, Volúsia's performance was seen as authentic and based on “impassionate” knowledge of Brazilian folklore.
Authenticity, however, proved to be a double-edged sword. Volúsia should be authentic but not too authentic. Another critic writing about Leilão considered the ballet a failure in terms of nationalist representation:
In terms of the extremely difficult performance of the choreography, due to its rudimentary and naïve nature, [and] to the barbarian and fetishistic element of the African, we will highlight the performance of Eros Volúsia, full of talent and devilish fantasy, in these exotic creations, which are not really nationalist, because certainly we are not Africans (despite the desires of those ignorant in geography). (J. I. C. Reference J. I. C.1943)Footnote 23
The “intelligent” mestiçagem praised in the previous review was lacking in the opinion of this critic, and Volúsia's “talent and devilish fantasy” were the only redeeming aspects of this representation of Brazilianness, deemed “barbarian” and “fetishistic.” In another review, this same critic concluded disparagingly that Leilão was “pure Africanism” and “not Brazilian at all” (J. I. C. Reference J. I. C.1943).Footnote 24 Brazilians, after all, were certainly not Africans!
Critic Mario Nunes, who had been influential in the creation of the escola de bailados in 1927, agreed that the choreography of Leilão fell short of transforming “raw” Africanity into high art, despite “the well intentioned efforts of Eros Volúsia.” Nunes believed that Afro-Brazilian art could only be attained through “the transposition onto the spiritual plane of the impulses of a purely sexual sensuality, such as that which overflows from the tunes and dances of African origin” (Nunes Reference Nunes1943).Footnote 25 For this critic, Volúsia's choreographic mestiçagem had not gone far enough in taming the “purely sexual sensuality” that allegedly overflowed from African dances.
Dance scholar Susan Leigh Foster analyzes the strategies of desexualization employed by Isadora Duncan, Ruth St. Denis, and Ted Shawn in the process of creating a chaste and thus legitimate form of art dancing in the early twentieth-century United States. These chaste dances, as Foster notes, were often supported by a racist narrative that distanced them from the purportedly “lascivious” dances of Africans and “Negroes” (Reference Foster and Desmond2001, 151–169). In order to establish her bailado brasileiro as high art, Volúsia faced the difficult task of distancing herself from a racialized sexualization while at the same time performing an alluring and desirable mestiça.
As the indigenous huntress in the ballet Uirapuru, also choreographed by Veltchek, Volúsia was perhaps more successful in attaining the “spiritual sensuality” desired by Nunes. Critic Ruben Navarra recognizes a “lyrical” sensuality in Volúsia's performance: “In her ‘role’ of an índia in love, her movements are convincing because of their lyrical sensuality and in them we feel not only the dancer, but the woman, the fêmea” (Navarra Reference Navarra1943). Dancing as the índia, Volúsia conveyed a “lyrical” rather than sexual sensuality; this critic could “feel” Volúsia as not only a dancer, but a fêmea. By using the word “fêmea,” a word typically used to refer to the sex of animals, Navarra both sexualizes and dehumanizes the indigenous woman that Volúsia represents. While Volúsia may have achieved a certain “lyricism” in her performance, she maintained enough sexual allure for this critic to be able to “feel” her animalistic femininity.
In the same review, Navarra praised her acting skills but noted her deficiencies in ballet technique: “Her dancing itself, despite a few fortunate details—like the way she jumps with both feet in ‘plié’ in a very indigenous way, and falls with the feet crossed—lacks however a certain academic sophistication” (Navarra Reference Navarra1943).Footnote 26 Despite, or perhaps because of her perceived lack of sophistication, critics understood Volúsia's work as authentic and assumed that anything that deviated from an “academic” ballet vocabulary must necessarily be drawn from Volúsia's research of Brazilian folklore (such as the jumps with both legs in plié, which this critic interprets as “very indigenous”). In fact, this critic noted a lack of technical rigor throughout the ballet, in which the dancers were allowed to be “‘at ease,’ as if those índios were in nature and not on stage”; the choreography, he continued, was so simple that it could, with a little bit of technique and goodwill, even be danced by real índios (Navarra Reference Navarra1943). Critics expected choreography on nationalist themes to convey a sense of authenticity without being “too authentic”; prominent use of ballet technique was necessary for national themes to be sufficiently whitened and “improved” to be recognized as high art.
The critical reception to the Teatro Municipal's 1943 ballet season reflects the same stereotypes held by Volúsia herself—of primitive Africans and lazy nature-loving “indians,” as well as the belief that ballet, a European dance form, was the necessary ingredient to render their dances “national.” Critics read Volúsia precisely as she had constructed herself: a mestiça white enough be accepted on high art stages, simultaneously instinctual and intelligent in her stylization of Brazil's dances, and, most importantly, an embodiment of Brazil's harmonious and democratic blend of the “three races.”
Photo 1. “Brazil's top dancer,” Eros Volúsia on the cover of Life magazine, September 22, 1941. Photo by Hart Preston/The LIFE Premium Collection via Getty Images.
From White Mestiça to Negro Dancer: Volúsia in Hollywood
In 1941, two years before Volúsia danced the lead roles in Leilão and Uirapuru at the Teatro Municipal, Life magazine photographer Hart Preston invited Volúsia for a photo shoot on the stage of the Cassino Atlântico (Pereira Reference Pereira2004, 50); Preston's photographs put her on the cover of Life, which led to an invitation to take part in a Metro Goldwyn Mayer (MGM) film. On the cover photo, Volúsia is shown from the hips up: she wears a full skirt, which she pulls up delicately with both hands, a gesture that draws attention to the bead bracelets that decorate her wrists and upper arms and cover her bustier. Like Miranda and several performers before her, Volúsia embodies the baiana, the sexualized working-class brown woman from Bahia that became a stock character in Rio de Janeiro's teatro de revista, casino stages, and carnaval parades (Shaw Reference Shaw2011). Instead of the baiana's signature fruit basket, however, Volúsia adds her unique touch to the costume by wearing a large bow atop her cascading brown curls.Footnote 27
Inside the magazine, the two-page photo story titled “Brazil's Eros Volusia Does Negro Witch Dance” echoes Volúsia's self-presentation as a mestiça, but in fact emphasizes the “Negro” aspect of her dancing. The brief text of this piece is worth quoting in its entirety:
The blood of Brazil's three dominant racial strains—Portuguese, Indian and Negro—flows in the veins of supple young Eros Volusia. But the dances that have made her Rio de Janeiro's outstanding dance artist come straight from African jungles. As a child, Eros Volusia lived in exotic Baía, where the inhabitants, predominantly Negro, have retained the sinuous steps, the pulsing rhythms and the primitive witchcraft practiced by their Congo ancestors. Nightly from her back yard young Eros could hear the hypnotic tom-tom and see the frenzied invocation of jungle gods. It was natural, therefore, that Eros, though schooled in classical ballet, should in maturity revert to the dances of her people. On this page she dances the macumba with which Brazilian slaves once used to invoke fierce African deities to avenge their wrongs. Originally beaten out by dusky feet on giant drums, it begins with a slow hypnotic sway, quickens into violent tremors and undulations as the spirit invades the body and ends with a vaulting leap as the spirit departs. Sometimes a performer in Rio's casinos, Eros is more interested in her work with the Brazilian Ministry of Education, which commissioned her to create a native ballet. Heretofore unreceptive to U.S. offers, she now contemplates a good-neighbor tour north. (“Brazil's Eros Volúsia Does Negro Witch Dance” 1941, 57)
What is striking about this text is how quickly the author moves from Volúsia as mestiça to Volúsia as the embodiment of the “primitive witchcraft” of dances that “come straight from the African jungles,” allegedly practiced by her Congo ancestors. In this short article, the author conflates Africa and Brazil and undoes Brazil's carefully crafted whitening-as-mestiçagem, in which the European element “civilizes” and “improves” Brazil's racialized others. In fact, the dance critic that deemed Leilão far too African, and hence not Brazilian enough, may have been referring directly to this article in the closing statement of the review, in which he protested that “certainly we are not Africans (despite the desires of those ignorant in geography)” (J. I. C. Reference J. I. C.1943).
On the first page, the story features Macumba, one of Volúsia's signature pieces. Nine photos of Volúsia in action give the reader a glimpse into a dance of possession—the “Negro witch dance” promised in the headline. Volúsia's costume, reminiscent of the orientalist garb of early twentieth-century US modernist choreographers, is far more revealing than the one worn for the cover photo. Her bejeweled bustier is connected to her neck and otherwise bare belly by delicate ornamented chains; snake-shaped arm bands wrap around just above her biceps, and metal bangles adorn her wrists. Over a bikini bottom she wears a belt-like garment with zigzag print that sits low on her waist; on her left side, a slightly longer piece of fabric, attached asymmetrically and adorned by pendants and tassels, suggests a short skirt while leaving her legs fully exposed. Her bare feet, almost always in demi-pointe, are adorned by similarly ornate anklets. Although the photo shoot also included photos of Volúsia and her students in baiana costumes, most of these photos never made it to print; while Volúsia's stylized baiana costume, the same from the cover photo, did reveal her midriff and even a peak at her breasts under her bustier of beads, the costumes of her students were perhaps “too authentic” in their modesty.Footnote 28
The photos of Volúsia dancing Macumba in her diminutive costume are published in chronological sequence, giving the reader a sense of the progression of the dance. Volúsia begins with her arms raised, gaze down, legs together, standing high on the balls of her feet. In the next photo, her knees bent, she teases the viewer by shifting her weight to the right while rolling her left shoulder forward. The next shot catches Volúsia in midturn, and in the next she tosses her head back, lowering her arms delicately by her sides. One more turn is followed by another ecstatic moment, head thrown back. In a move that seems to belong to another dance, the next photo shows Volúsia looking straight at the camera, smiling coquettishly, in mid grand battement à la seconde, her arms to her sides, with soft elbows and broken wrists. Next, Volúsia seems to quote Isadora Duncan's signature upward reaching gesture—arms forward, palms facing up—but, with a few more degrees of bend in her back, this gesture goes from supplicant to ecstatic. Volúsia's choreographed possession is unequivocally sexualized. The last photo matches the reporter's description of the dance's finale, when Volúsia “ends with a vaulting leap as the spirit departs.”
The same “African” sexual excess that was shunned by Brazilian critics was prominently featured in this article for a US readership. This reporter fails to recognize Volúsia's labor of choreographic mestiçagem, and instead frames her dancing as a retention of the “jungle dances” of her alleged Congo ancestors. The barefoot modernity of Volúsia's dances and the “academic” European ballet aesthetic through which she stylized her dances were lost in her introduction to US audiences. The one-drop rule meant that Volúsia would be read as a Negro in the United States, albeit an exotic Latin American one; without the “civilizing” power of her whiteness, Volúsia was no better than the “barbarous” and “indolent” others whose fetishistic and inebriating dances had inspired her balletic creations. Through a binary, North American racial gaze, Volúsia was no longer a socially white choreographer respected in Brazil's intellectual and artistic circles; instead, she was conflated with her stage persona and assigned a full-fledged primitivist Afro-Latin alterity.
Carmen Miranda, under contract with Twentieth Century Fox, had set the other studios on a quest to find their own Brazilian bombshells. In the same year Volúsia appeared on the cover of Life, she signed a contract with MGM and traveled to the United States with her mother to take part in the film Rio Rita, starring the comedic duo Abbot and Costello.Footnote 29 Despite the initial excitement about the invitation to choreograph for a Hollywood film, upon her return Volúsia reported a disappointing experience in the United States, marked by misunderstandings and diverging expectations (Pereira Reference Pereira2004, 67).Footnote 30
Volúsia worked with a group of “girls” assigned to her, teaching them several of her Brazilian dances over a period of six weeks; when only two of the dances were chosen for the final recording, she remembers “almost fainting” from the disappointing news. After teaching all the “secrets of her art” to these dancers, she was appalled that they would only want to film two dances (Pereira Reference Pereira2004, 62). She resented teaching her Brazilian dance technique for a month and a half—in effect sharing her intellectual property—and seeing only a small fraction of that work on screen. Volúsia was very proud of her bailado brasileiro, which she declared to be Brazil's “classical dance” (Pereira Reference Pereira2004, 53). However, while artistic authorship was of great concern to Volúsia, her dances were largely seen as authorless “folklore” and unmediated Afro-Latin exotica by the film's dance director, David Robel. Her dance number in Rio Rita, in fact, is introduced as “an authentic native dance” from Brazil.Footnote 31
After Volúsia's insistence on dancing only to Brazilian music, a compromise with the director of Rio Rita was reached, and she performed to a musical potpourri arranged by a US conductor, Nilo Barnett, who rendered the Brazilian songs barely recognizable. The potpourri begins with a few notes from Ary Barroso's Na baixa do sapateiro, also known as Bahia, and moves quickly to Zequinha de Abreu's hit Tico-tico no fubá, the song that inspired Volúsia's famous samba na ponta (samba on pointe), which she had performed on the stages of Rio's casinos.Footnote 32 The second dance of the potpourri is a version of Macumba, the same dance featured in Life. Instead of the primitivist bare feet, bare legs, and midriff decorated with beads and tassels, in the film Volúsia wears heels and copious “pan-latin” ruffles on both her shoulders and skirt—a skirt that features a low-cut waist that reveals the upper sides of her buttocks, teetering just on the edge of propriety. Macumba danced in heels and ruffles adds a coquettish lightness to the dance's “raw” primitivism, rendering it incongruous—neither a “serious” dance of possession nor a fun Latin divertissement.
Volúsia does not seem at ease in front of the camera—she often seems unsure about where to direct her gaze, and her facial expressions range from an awkward smile to a dramatic or concentrated frown. During a couple of moments when Volúsia joins the group of dancers, Volúsia appears to give verbal directions to her dancers during the performance—her zeal for the correct execution of her bailado brasileiro clashing with the demands of Hollywood for a straightforward festive, exotic, and sexualized Latinness.
Her participation in the film received positive reviews in the United States, many noting the festive, sensuous, and even “volcanic” qualities of her dancing (“Rio Rita at Rialto” 1942; “It's Easy but for Slang” 1942). Critics found Volúsia picturesque and glamorous, and advance publicity credited her with the creation of samba “and other native dances” (“Rio Rita Has Abbott-Costello Team” 1942). Journalists racialized Volúsia as being “the color of a chocolate malted” (Smith Reference Smith1941) and “young and beautiful as an Indian princess” (Scheuer Reference Scheuer1941).
A short note about Volúsia, published in the San Jose News shortly before the release of Rio Rita, exemplifies Volúsia's reduction to “generic Latina” and sexual object in the United States. The writer ridicules Volúsia's accent by phonetically transcribing her accented speech— much the same way that Miranda's English was often mocked in print (Roberts Reference Roberts1993)—and comments on the revealing costume she had worn for the photo shoot during which the interview took place (probably the same costume featured in Life a year earlier). Trying for humor, he notes that Volúsia “kicked off her sandals, thereby removing half of her clothes” (Harrison Reference Harrison1942). However, this writer reports on several instances when Volúsia pushed back against her own objectification and “Latinization.” When someone tried to play a Cuban rumba during the photo shoot, she protested: “Ess not the moosica of my contree. Since I have come here I try to explain Brazilian dance ees not like Cuba, not like Argentina, not like anytheeng” (Harrison Reference Harrison1942). Unlike Miranda, Volúsia was not willing to embrace the role of generic Latina.Footnote 33 He also notes, somewhat surprised, that Volúsia “wore an attitude of academic detachment, like a lecturing ethnologist. As a matter of fact she is one, having been commissioned by the Brazilian government to evolve a truly national ballet.” Several published excerpts of interviews with Volúsia reflect her insistence on educating journalists about her position in Brazil as a state-sponsored pedagogue and artist. In her efforts to reject the label of generic Latina, Volúsia also denied the very African heritage she had claimed in Brazil: the US press reports that Volúsia had Portuguese and Indian blood, surely reproducing information provided by Volúsia herself, who attempts to counter her earlier classification as a “Negro” dancer by Life magazine.
Brazilian reviews of Rio Rita differed dramatically from US reviews in that they acknowledged Volúsia as an established artist: one critic expressed patriotic pride in her participation, however brief, in a Hollywood film, and referred to her as the “quintessential tropical morena, daughter of two great poets, [who] in fact dances with the temperament of a poetess, whose soul is located in her [dancing] feet” (quoted in Pereira Reference Pereira2004, 132). In Brazil, despite representing the “tropical morena,” Volúsia was first and foremost an established dance artist and daughter of renowned poets, who herself was able to create poetry through her dancing. In Hollywood, Volúsia loses her social status, white privilege, and position as author and artist; her painstaking stylization is rendered invisible, and her dances are treated as authorless folklore and festive Latin entertainment.
Contrary to her reception in the United States as just another exotic Latin performer, theatergoers in Brazil were able to distinguish the performer from her role, despite the critical praise Volúsia received for the authenticity of her dances. Her whiteness was clearly visible underneath her staged brownness, and her labor in “lapidating” the dances of Brazil's folk was recognized. Always on demi-pointe, Volúsia “elevated” Brazil's dances through the white universality of ballet. To critical acclaim and with government support, Volúsia successfully embodied Brazil's desired whiteness and carefully crafted myth of racial democracy. While in Brazil Volúsia's bailado brasileiro embodied the country's allegedly democratic and harmonious racial mixture, in the United States Volúsia was equated with the very natives whose dances she sought to improve and render suitable for “civilized” audiences.
