Dance to Cure Homesickness - Reflections on Using Video in a Music Re-creation Experience

Abstract

Among the vehement topics in contemporary ethnomusicological debates, the relations between music and memory, especially musical recreations, have provided a fertile ground for reflections. Inserted in these discussions, the present article discusses a process of musical recreation produced in a joint effort between researcher and ethnographic subjects. Namelly the “Baile para matar saudades”, a dance party held in Campinas, in 2014, with the purpose of reproducing the black dances of the 1950s in the innerside of São Paulo. The images of this event, its preparation and other musical practices of my interlocutors in the present days, were used In my homonymous feature film as a way of disseminating the research. In ethnomusicology, as well as in anthropology, the question of the forms of representation and native expression presents challenges, given their ethnographical nature. The development of these subjects by visual anthropology also serves ethnographies interested in human interactions mediated by music, for reasons ranging from the extratextual possibilities of expression of dance and music to ethnographic dialogue and the representativeness of subjects in the field. The final scope of this article, therefore, is to discuss the roles of filmmaking in a research interested in the emergence of memories through musical re-creation.