Events

Beats, expressive dance behaviors and festive contexts are basic references of the imaginary collective of the coco oral tradition in the Brazilian Northeast. Life stories and performance practices of coquistas have inspired symbolic values represented as aesthetic concepts of both participative and presentational art contexts (Turino 2008) that have served cultural policies and globalizing trends of consumption. The black, indigenous and mestizo nuances associated with this expressive dance category emerge as classification vectors of coco and the people associated with it. This conceptual world linked to the art of coco doing, induced in the common sense, constitutes the central object of my study that follows an ethnomusicological perspective searching problems of representation of the coco music category in the construction of the Pernambucan identity of national projection.

Fernando Souza is a researcher in INET (Instituto de Etnomusicologia da Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas da Universidade Nova de Lisboa in Portugal), in the Núcleo de Etnomusicologia da Universidade Federal de Pernambuco and in the Grupo de Estudos em Etnomusicologia da Universidade Federal do Paraná in Brazil. He is a percussionist, composer and teacher of Popular Percussion of the Escola Técnica Estadual de Criatividade Musical – ETECM, do Governo Estadual de Pernambuco, Brazil. Currently he is finishing his PhD thesis in Musical Sciences: Ethnomusicology under the academic supervision of Maria São José Côrte-Real at the DCM of the FCSH/ NOVA on the influences of the religious experiences in the performance of coco in the Pernambucan coast. He has a MA in Ethnomusicology on coco performance related aspects from FCSH/NOVA under the academic supervision of Salwa El-Shawan Castelo-Branco.