Samba: Resistance in Motion by Barbara Browning
In the summer of 1984, I was returning to New York after having spent one year on a Fulbright grant in Salvador, Bahia. Though my grant had been to research popular poetry, during my time there I was completely taken by the dance I encountered, and in truth I spent most of that year taking classes in capoeira and “dança afro.” Back in New York, I was staying with a former boyfriend in Alphabet City, which at the time had a vibe of simultaneous risk and festivity not entirely unlike what I’d felt in Pelourinho, the old city center of Salvador. (Both neighborhoods have been pretty radically transformed since then.) But despite the back-beat and creative response to precarity on Avenue A, I was badly missing the particular rhythms, smells and colors of Salvador. And my body was yearning to move to those rhythms.
”I called the Brazilian consulate to ask if there were anyone teaching Afro-Brazilian dance in the city and was immediately referred to Loremil, and given the address of the Clark Center. I went there as soon as I could, and as soon as I walked into the studio, I felt like I’d been transported directly back to Salvador.”
It was clear that I wasn’t the only one seeking to recreate a sense, for the time we were in that space together, of being in that other gritty and gorgeous metropolis. The drummers were a mix of homesick Bahians and non-Brazilians who either yearned, like me, to get back to Brazil, or who still hadn’t been there but found a home in its rhythms.The dancers were beautifully diverse – not just in nationality or ethnicity but also age, gender, sexuality, and “skill,” which in truth was less a question of physical prowess than of being able to find a home in the rhythms that pounded through the space.
I believe that I saw M’bewe Escobar at that first class, and was mesmerized by her samba – though she’d learned it, apparently, in that very room, nearly five thousand miles from its point of origin.
“And of course, at the front of the room, creating all of that, holding together our collective desire to be in that magical place, was Loremil. It’s very difficult to communicate the energy he managed to work up, somehow infusing everyone in the space – drummers and dancers alike – with a kind of commitment to the rhythm that was both focused (agile, sharp, precise) and authentically joyous.”
When he led us across the floor to the Agere rhythm of Oxossi, the orixá of the hunt, his elbow would jerk back with perfect specificity, and his pivot had both grace and exactitude. But his samba de caboclo was a whirl of pure brio. How could anyone in that room not fall in love – with those dances, or with the man who gave them to us with so much generosity and pleasure?
Some time later I began to understand that both Loremil and his fellow Bahian Jelon Vieira had been bringing the moves and rhythms of their home not only to students at the Clark Center, but also sometimes into the public schools of New York City, and I am quite certain that their larger presence in the city inflected many of the ways that dance developed here, including break dance. It’s very difficult to give precise lineages of the ways that dance vocabularies are communicated and travel, but there’s no doubt that Loremil and Jelon profoundly impacted dance history in ways that may never be fully documented or quantified.
But for those of us who encountered Loremil in the studios of the Clark Center, the trace and the impact was profound – for many of us, life-changing – and impossible to forget.