AFROCIDADE

Content

How are Washington DC and Brazil's Salvadore Bahia connected? All is revealed in Afrocidade, a unique, original, and entertaining performance exploring in, music, song, dance and stories, the shared culture and history between these seemingly very different places.

Powered by a 10 piece ensemble of musicians, vocalists, dancers and narrators, Afrocidade interprets the music of popular bahian artists like Gilberto Gil, Olodum, Caetano Velloso, Luedji Luna and more to recount the explosion of Black consciousness in Salvador from its onset with the Samba ensemble Ile Aiye (meaning ‘House of Life’ in Yoruba) in 1974 to the present. Heavily influenced by the African American civil rights movement and steeped in the unbroken traditions of Afro-Bahian ancestry, this outpouring of Afro-centricity successfully overcame longstanding stereotypes about Blackness in Brazil and changed mainstream culture in Bahia from its music to Carnaval itself.

In the spirit of building cultural bridges, a key and unique element of the Afrocidade performance is the translation of both lyrics and musical structure. Each musical piece is translated from Portuguese to English on a screen throughout the show. Additionally, the ensemble demonstrates in real time how shared African rhythms link musics as disparate as Samba & Go-go and how American Icons from Michael Jackson to Stevie Wonder have consciously used them to make the entire world dance.

A musical production that is more than a concert and not quite a musical, Afrocidade (Afro-city) is a real time cultural bridge, an elegy to ancestry, a revelation of erased history and a clarion call for a better, more empathetic future. It is a performance that demonstrates through sound and spoken word that African-American, Afro-Caribbean, Afro-Latin and Afro-Brazilian cultures are truly branches of the same tree that deserve to feel proud and seen. Afrocidade can be performed by a group of between four and ten musicians, dancers and actors/narrators depending on staging facilities and budget.

The creator of the Afrocidade project, Jean-Francis Varre, is a Washington D.C. native musician who’s parents immigrated from Senegal and Cape Verde. He first heard the music of Bahia as a child when his father religiously tuned in to D.C.’s weekly radio program ‘Birimbau’ on W.P.F.W 89.3 with Judith King. Driven by his own diaspora heritage, Jean-Francis majored in sociology for his undergraduate studies and frequently traveled to the African continent and centers of the diaspora from New Orleans to Salvador to absorb the culture through its music. In the spirit of the West African Griot, it is his conviction that art should be appreciated for more than its esthetic beauty; that the music be more than felt but understood for its intentions of education, pride, love and resilience.

While the infectious rhythms and melodies will move you out of your seats, the revelations of shared heritage and decades of reciprocal influence between these two cities will compel you to re-examine what you know about both nations, the African Diaspora and humanity. “‘If all races were made aware of the offerings of Africans and their New World descendants, a better world would develop’” Dr. Lorenzo Turner.
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Background

Today, more than ever, the peoples of the African Diaspora are increasingly aware of their shared heritage and social condition around the world. As a direct reaction to growing populism, nationalism & xenophobia around the world, discussions about the condition and identity of African descendants have grown on major platforms from TikTok to 'X' formally known as twitter. Concurrently, popular media art from music to the Black Panther motion picture have increased interest in Afro-descendant history and culture both within and without the diaspora. Now, as it was for pre-colonial Africa, music is still a vessel of memory and knowledge, a vehicle for communication and a tool for protest.

In the cities of Washington DC and Salvador, Bahia Brazil, the historically Black majority residents have christened their homes “Chocolate City” and “Afrocidade” (Afro-City) respectively. These names refer not only to the historically Black majorities of these municipalities but also to their distinct Afro-descendant contributions that shaped so much of the national cultures of both the United States and Brazil.

The first pioneer to link D.C and Salvador through this cultural lens was Dr. Lorenzo Dow Turner whose 1940-41 research in Salvador underscores the Afrocidade production. A graduate and later department head at Howard University, Dr. Turner earned his masters from Harvard, his Doctorate from the University of Chicago and became “The first African American with professional training in linguistics”. With his seminal work ‘Africanisms in the Gullah Dialect’, he was the first person to legitimize not only the culture of the ‘Gullah’ peoples of the Carolina coastal islands but of African descendants from Brazil to Canada. Crucially, Dr. Turner was keenly aware of the oral nature of African cultures and understood that the music of these cultures was key to understanding them. He showed that these ‘Africanisms’ in culture transcend the English, French, Spanish & Portuguese languages imposed on the colonies and created a bridge of commonality and affirmation across boarders. Dr. Turner championed the idea that these discoveries would not only affirm the dignity of Black people to themselves but benefit the world at large.


Jean-Francis Varre
BLACK ATLANTIC
www.blkatlantic.com
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