Expanding Borders: Activism, Effervescence, and Rhythms in Brazil’s HONK! Rio
Michel Moreaux and Maria Cláudia M. M. Pitrez
Translated by Andrew Snyder
Versão original em português
Introduction
Spatial occupations and transformations of the city are a characteristic element of HONK! festivals around the world, helping to create collective celebration of art and politics with what Émile Durkheim called “effervescence” (1915), which dissolves senses of individual distinction and creates experiences of community. To play in the streets and squares of the city is a way of rethinking and remaking city spaces, as well as establishing new exchanges and social relations. This paper focuses on HONK! Rio in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil to explore how this now transnational festival network manifests locally in distinct city spaces. The festival has taken place here annually since 2015, and it is an example of the growth and expansion of the HONK! festivals as they have passed through the borders of their country of origin in the United States, gaining new territory in other countries.
This panorama of expansion of the festivals beyond the American context and the intensification of annual meetings has contributed to innumerous exchanges between the participants, such as musical and performance styles, organization styles, and, above all, the forging of a communal sentiment and sense of belonging to the global and local HONK! communities. It has globally forged what we will call a “HONK! ethos:” to be collaborative, to occupy public spaces, and to bring fun and political reflection to the streets. As we have followed the creation of HONK! Rio since 2015 and compared it with other HONK! festival in the United States, as well as the creation of HONK! festivals in São Paulo and Brasília, we have witnessed the dissemination of this ethic. On the one hand, there have been shared attempts to respectfully maintain the premise of the original festival to be collaborative without seeking profit while, on the other hand, there are differences and particularities that every new culture and space engenders. Every city and its festival assembles normative and counter-normative “rhythms” (Lefebvre 1992; Stavrides 2016) creating distinct performance scenarios.
This research is the result of fieldwork during the preparation, realization, and post-festival discussions of the 2018 edition of HONK! Rio, as well as many experiences in previous years’ festivals since 2015 and other experiences in HONK! in Boston, PRONK!, and HONK NYC! in 2013, and HONK! Texas in 2017. We have observed, participated in, conversed with, and conducted formal and informal interviews with the producers, musicians, and participants of HONK! Rio. We prepared a questionnaire for the interviewees and created an online form that has allowed us to interview and generate data after the festival, above all with the musicians and producers.
We have heard many accounts of an altered emotional state forged during HONK! Rio, above all from the musicians and organizers who highlight the strengthening of communal ties and experience of effervescence. This research has led us to consider the festival as an urban musical ritual that offers a break in everyday life and establishes a different emotional experience, what Victor Turner (1978) calls “communitas,” a distinct spatial-temporal dimension in which, at HONK! Rio, routinely frequented work zones are transformed into stages and the streets into parade corridors.
How has the festival emerged distinctly in Rio de Janeiro, given the city’s context of street carnival, the pre-existing alternative brass movement of neofanfarrismo (“new brass bandism”), and the recent transformations of the city? How does the HONK Rio! festival transform the ephemeral emotions of the participants and the rhythms of the city? How can we understand the effect of this momentary suspension that appears to transform the emotions of participants and ruptures the rhythms of the city?
In what follows, we reflect on the past four years of the festival, as well as the research carried out during the 2018 edition, in four sections: rituals and urban rhythms; street music and social activism; times of politics, art, and feminism; and the occupation of new spaces and the creation of new city rhythms.
Rituals and Urban Rhythms: Rupture, Effervescence, and Communitas
Beyond a musical term, “rhythm” is an analytical and methodological concept introduced by Henri Lefebvre (1992) to identify a complex of movements and dynamics that coexist and act in a given time and space. However, although the idea of rhythm is linked to repetition, it does not preclude the possibility for changes, discoveries, or innovations because for Lefebvre repetition also reveals differences. Thus, “rhythmanalysis” is a critique of daily life, and it is based on observations of transformation, considering the relational dimension of space and discerning processes of continuity and discontinuity in social temporalities.
Both rhythms and rituals help to demarcate social life in ordinary and extraordinary moments in a dialectical relationship. Rituals cause interruptions in routine life, giving rise to a new social, emotional, and creative framework of effervescence. They create a form of rupture with transformative potential, an extraordinary event with symbolic relevance and transformative potential for life in community. Mariot (2001) shows how Émile Durkheim understands effervescence as specifically related to the ritual action itself, with festivity having a primordial role for creating this “state of exaltation” that transports “man outside himself, distracted from his ordinary preoccupations and concerns” (Mariot 2001: 714). The ritual is transformative for those who participate in it, and participants adhere to it because of the contagion of emotional intensity.
In our interviews with the musicians, many spoke about an emotional alteration during HONK! Rio, that provoked a state of unity between musicians and participants: “HONK! creates a collaborative feeling and emboldens us to continue filling the streets with art.” “[The festival] brings the pleasure of playing to all. This pleasure seems to infect all those involved, both musicians and listeners.” “[In HONK!], we are not isolated in our cities. A collective feeling around the same concerns is generated, which is amazing.” “I am very touched by HONK! Rio. I feel so much love for all the musicians and people who worked to get it right, for the event to happen. Sometimes in the middle of the festival, I stop and watch people, and there are so many happy people in this moment, even with our chaotic politics... It makes me believe in a better world."
Considering the above statements, it is clear that HONK! Rio breaks with certain rhythms of daily life during the five days of the festival, generating altered emotional states with a view of something subversive in which one can “believe in a better world,” what Victor Turner would call a “liminal” moment of communitas. Turner defines liminality as a marginal moment, a transitory process and a phase in which a new configuration of “antistructure” is experienced, a state of communitas that breaks with the “natural” and hierarchical order of society. For Stavrides (2016), certain performances and practices can institute discontinuities in public spaces, establishing other rhythms and new possibilities of being affected, which can occur immediately or even after a time, through shared collective memory. The author is interested in the extent to which “the space of the city can express and foster practices and values that are distinct or even opposed to the dominant ones” (31).
This line of thought has led us to observe how “rupture” might occur in HONK! Rio. Brazilian anthropologist Roberto da Matta (1997), who analyzed religious processions, military parades, and carnival, argues that rituals and performances dialogue with and can even reinforce dominant values. Whether instilling dominant or subversive values, they always establish a special aura, with symbolic power and effervescence for their participants. A new emotional state is created, forging a communal feeling that strengthens individual relationships. Thus, for Da Matta, who follows Turner’s framework, the breaking of the quotidian with new rhythms and feelings through ritual and performance does not only result from rituals that break social values opposed to the dominant ones. The ritual itself is already a special moment that already establishes a new time and space. The distinctiveness of HONK! Rio, therefore, from everyday rhythms certainly make the festival a transformative ritual in the senses provided by Turner and Da Matta, but it is worth asking whether the festival effectively instills values and practices counter to the dominant ones.
Street Music and Social Activism
The programming of HONK! Rio 2018 was intense with five uninterrupted days from Wednesday to Sunday, November 14 to 19. The organizers chose to program HONK! Rio with the national holiday of Wednesday November 15, which helped bring together more of the public, especially foot traffic and tourism through the center of the city. It also increased the participation of bands coming from other cities in Brazil, as many of these musicians have formal jobs. To create the programming of HONK! Rio, the organizers take various issues into account, from finding available hours for all the bands, suitable spaces for performance, and performance proposals. As one organizer pointed out, they take care in the selection of bands in accordance with musical style and performative themes—such as the varying formations of a bloco or banda,[1] circus, the theme of feminism, and many others—to create a musical climate that is fairly continuous but not repetitive. In 2018, there were 65 performances scheduled through the five days of programming. These included five parades involving nine brass bands, five oficinas or workshops involving subjects such as clowning for brass bands and dynamics of collective composition, a session of three debates on Wednesday, as well as unprogrammed events which often included musicians playing together until the sun rose.
The quantity of bands participating in HONK! Rio has grown and for the first time—some bands were rejected so as not to surpass the limit of 30 bands in the programming.[2] Within this growing number of Brazilian brass bands, the “boom” of brass bands in the city of Rio de Janeiro is especially notable. In the first edition of HONK! Rio, in 2015, the programming counted sixteen bands from Rio, a large number of local bands compared with other HONK! festivals, where there are often only a handful of bands from the locality of the festival. As Andrew Snyder has written (2018), this large and growing number of brass bands is linked to the particular street musical context of the city of Rio de Janeiro.
Since the 2000s, there has been an exponential growth of street carnival. Herschmann (2013) has called this phase the “boom of street carnival,” with the emergence of new groups and musical workshops of carnival blocos scattered throughout the south zone and central city. As Barros (2013) points out in the carnival of 2010, 465 blocos were registered that brought almost 5 million people to the streets of the city, and these numbers have only grown. This effervescent carnival scene has been reviving the musical scenario and creating new artistic urban occupations of the streets, with the emergence of new disputes about public space and the right to the city (SAPIA, 2016).
An American musician and organizer of HONK TX, who has lived in Rio de Janeiro and participated in different HONK! festivals in the United States, comments that a noticeable difference between HONK! Rio and American HONK! festivals is Rio’s preexisting experiences of public festivity that the carnival culture helped to foment. That is, the city of Rio de Janeiro already knows how to have a street party:
Rio already has such a great culture of street music from the blocos of carnival . In the US, HONK!-style bands are still very rare and unusual, and most people have never seen one. So every show in Rio has a large audience, and the city already knows how it works; the city knows how to party in the street, coordinating musicians, mobile beer and food vendors, and the audience. In the US, we do not have carnival (except in New Orleans) and people are not accustomed to street music, big bands, or shows outside bars or theaters. The public does not know what to do. (Anonymous)
It is in this context, connected to carnival and the blocos, that the movement of alternative brass bands known as neofanfarrsimo emerged in Rio and came to associate itself with the international HONK! festivals. However, these same carnivalesque influences in HONK! Rio can be perceived to have a negative impact on the festival. If on the one hand Rio’s carnival has enabled this kind of festive occupation of the street, it also “carnivalizes” the HONK! festival, complicating its activist and engaged preoccupations that are supposedly at the heart of the festival. If in some HONK! festivals, the mere fact of occupying the street and playing is already considered an activist and engaged act through rupturing everyday life and creating new rhythms in the urban context, in the case of Rio de Janeiro, considering its strong culture of festivity and street music, this component doesn’t appear sufficient. This debate has brought numerous critiques and changes in the festival over its four-year history. One of the organizers reflected,
This movement of brass bands, that is very much linked to carnival, presents a challenge, which is to distance the festival from particular stereotypes and behaviors that carnival instills of total craziness and subversion of the norms! Does every musical intervention in the street have to transform into carnival? We need to find a way to disconnect HONK! Rio from some of the elements of craziness and think about public space and how we care for it as well as about the audience members and how we can maintain connections throughout the year with various locales. (Production team)
This challenge regarding a “carnivaleque ethos” in Rio de Janeiro was an element of many interviews, not only with organizers but with musicians and the public in general. According to Andrew Snyder (2018), who studied neofanfarrismo in Rio de Janeiro and participated in the production of the first HONK! Rio, a preoccupation with social activism had been gradually developing in this context. He observes that, little by little, individual and collective political awareness had been emerging in these festive spaces, bringing new questions of responsibility around the act of playing in the streets and what it means to create a festival based in activism. This awareness can be perceived throughout the five days of the festival, including among the bands that come from outside of Rio de Janeiro and have participated in other HONK! festivals, as well as other participating groups, such as street artists and cultural movements that act in public and peripheral spaces of the city. The debate around the concept of “activism,” which has been part of festival’s name since the first year in 2015, is an example of how thinking has evolved over the course of the four editions: from “Festival of Activist Brass Bands” in 2015 and 2016, to “Festival of Engaged Brass Bands” in 2017, to “Activist Festival of Brass Bands” in 2018. These minute changes reflect care and many debates between organizers and musicians about the effectiveness of HONK! Rio’s activism in the streets and public spaces of the city. According to the organizer of Honk Texas:
HONK! Rio is more political than HONK! TX, more activist. Protests in the US are very tame—they happen, but they are less intense than they seem in Brazil, probably a function of the comfortable bubble that [many] Americans live in. I was especially impressed by HONK! Rio’s organzing of events in spaces that are perhaps more dangerous, as a way to reintegrate them in the city. This is really a powerful aspect of HONK! Rio. We also try to cross some of these boundaries by going to the poorest neighborhood schools here in Texas. But I think this engagement is deeper and more critical in Rio, because Boston, Seattle, and Austin, for example, are fairly rich and quiet cities. HONK! Rio takes on more risks by occupying a range of performance spaces. In this way, it's a lot stronger than the American festivals. (Anonymous)
For her, the very culture of street music and carnival is already a political act of occupation of the city and public space. But when compared with other cities that hold HONK! festivals in the USA, HONK! Rio gains even more political potential by creating a street festival in the middle of a large and intense city with conflicts and social inequalities, seeking to integrate new urban regions every year. The issue of social activism is related to the sociocultural space in which the festival takes place. As we have observed over four years of the festival, this has been a debate for both organizers and musicians that has brought changes, ruptures, and innovations every year.
Times of Politics, Art, and Feminism
The question of social engagement and performance that the HONK! festival brings to the table has become ever more significant as the current political context of Rio de Janeiro contends with many complications regarding the ordering and spontaneous occupations of public space. The creation of HONK! Rio, ever since the pioneering idea came to Rio’s band Os Siderais when it toured to HONK! in Somerville in 2013, has occurred during a turbulent political, economic, and social time in Brazil, with intense protests that began with the movements of June 2013 that critiqued the hosting of mega-sporting events (the World Cup in 2013 and the Olympics in 2016), to the impeachment of the socialist president in 2016, and to the movement Ele Não (Not Him) that rejected the presidential candidacy of the extreme right-wing Jair Bolsonaro in 2018. In Rio de Janeiro, this intense reality amounted to crises and the fall of the state government in 2016 and 2017, resulting in the election of an evangelical mayor who positions himself against popular and musical manifestations in the streets. The context in which HONK! Rio has arisen has brought much reflection to the festival regarding how activism might be manifested in the performances of the brass bands and the occupation of public spaces that the festival creates. Notably this year was a troubled moment with the murder of black socialist councilwoman Marielle Franco and the presidential elections. As Palmeiras and Heredia (1995) argue, these periods inaugurate a “time of politics,” in which everyday life is governed by a set of practices and values corresponding to the electoral year.
In contrast to the openly misogynist presidential candidate, the 2018 festival was run by a team of majority women. The 2018 edition of HONK! Rio presented some explicitly political performances related to female empowerment, such as the “Bloka,” a neologism based on the feminization of the word bloco and an ensemble of all female musicians. One of the participants noted, “The Bloka was a group created for HONK! with the objective of giving visibility to women who, despite being ever more involved, are still a minority in neofanfarrismo with limited visibility. Several play in the open brass blocos of carnival but don’t have their own bands. This is a feminist bloco that puts protest music at the forefront of the repertoire.”
The Bloka was the culmination of a movement of increasing numbers of women playing together in the streets, and it brought together more than sixty participants playing and stilt-walking together. The musicians displayed unity with green and silver colors and shirts made by a member with a design symbolizing feminist struggle. The protest was manifested as much by their clothed and unclothed bodies as by the songs chosen for the repertoire, with lyrics modified with messages about the struggles, challenges, and victories of women. The Bloka also invited the participation of a black feminist collective, called Slam das Minas, with rap and poetry in one of the songs. The performance effects of the costumes and stilt walkers, as well as the sheer quantity of women united excited the public. According to reports, the emotion created was impactful: "Having the Bloka at the opening of the festival, with repertoire and participation of Slam das Minas, was an important and very exciting feminist protest;" "Bloka in Cinelandia was beautiful, lots of amazing woman wanting to scream, sing, play and vibrate together"; "I found Bloka did a fantastic job bringing female street artists to share their work and promote feminist thinking."
Another all-women brass band, Sagrada Profana from Minas Gerias, which had done ample artistic and political work in Belo Horizonte, also performed during HONK! Rio with a smaller formation with only twelve members, and the marked presence of flutes and clarinets without trumpets and tubas. With pink and silver colors and a distinct original repertoire composed by dance performance, singing, and circus, the group involved everyone. The public participated singing the lyrics of the songs and coming closer to the women who made every song into a distinct performance. The arrangement of the percussion changed every song, modifying influences from a wide variety of Brazilian rhythms. Some songs were sung with modified lyrics that provoked questioning about control and heteronormative rules of the female body. The very name Sagrada Profana is a joke about the social stigma women confront between saint (Sagrada) and whore (Profana).
In the interviews with the public, many people commented that they were fascinated by the sonority of the band and that it was possible to even hear the flutes and clarinets. The impact of feminism seemed to cross generations. A woman of seventy years of age who was passing the Praça Saens Peña in Tijuca was touched by their performance and went to look for her older sister at home to bring her to the square: “I really loved these women, the intervention with the public, the repertoire, the costumes, the musical execution, and choreographies. They have fangs and suaveness, and they are very secure when playing. I was very touched when they cried out ‘Mariele Presente,’ because she was my city councilwoman.”
The French brass band Les Muses Tangent was mentioned many times by interviewed musicians and the audience members as a particularly impactful band. Consisting of twenty French women, the band played with sweetness and force. The lush harmonies of the arrangements and the presence of the euphonium, an instrument that is not much used in Brazilian brass bands, generated curiosity. The fact of being an international brass band also generated a kind of expectation and the public was not disappointed.
Each of the three all-women bands presented very distinct performances. Different from the other feminist bands in which the public was more attentive to the political messages that were sung and written on the musicians’ bodies, the French band shook it up with pulsating rhythm, and the women’s bodies sent the message through sound itself. All the three bands of women were highlighted in the interviews with general public and musicians. The combination of musical performance and political stance emotionally involved everyone in the context of the current sociopolitical situation, while also helping participants to remember the histories and feminist struggles of other peoples and generations. The political message of the performance crossed national and international barriers and created an emotive dialogue, generating, according to one interview, “the expansion of the body and the affects.” Another claimed that “music transforms us into more sensitive people,” while another suggested that “it gives us happiness to live by, seeing people so animated in our country’s situation, reminding us that we have power to transform reality.”
Occupying New City Spaces and Creating New Rhythms
HONK! Rio has sought to spatially decentralize the performances throughout the city as part of the festival's activism. The festival has thus sought to move beyond its middle-class insularity, which is based geographically in the central and south neighborhoods of the city, where the majority of the participants in neofanfarrismo live. The choice to play in marginalized areas and work with local partner groups has been important for the construction of bridges and continued social actions beyond the festival. In this section, we explore the efforts of HONK! Rio to expand its actions throughout the city and reach new audiences.
In 2017, the HONK! “Attacks,”[3] emerged in order to perform beyond the days of the festival, preparing and connecting HONK! Rio with the city. One of the goals of the Attacks is to hold events that might help forge bonds throughout the year with social movements the festival intends to support and public spaces it plans to occupy during the days of the festival. In 2018, there were two such Attacks: one in Praça da Harmonia in the Port Zone, which has been in the midst of an intense gentrification process and where HONK! Rio has worked annually with local partners. Before the two brass bands played, there was a roundtable conversation with local cultural actors about the history and changes of the neighborhood. The second attack happened in front of the Chamber of Deputies, in Cinelândia square, an important political space in Rio de Janeiro that HONK! Rio has been occupying since 2016 with the opening events of the festival. On the same day there was an on-site event called "23 Motives to Support the 23," a political action that has been taking place periodically in defense of 23 protesters' arrested in 2013 and the right to demonstrate without criminalization. Besides publicizing the festival, the central idea of the Attacks is to build partnerships with such groups and give visibility to debates and social struggles.
The expansion to new locales also raises difficulties. The logistics of bringing brass bands to certain areas of the city is not necessarily easy. In 2017, going to the distant neighborhood of Campo Grande, where the HONK! Rio band Crispy Brass Band lives, was a challenging experience. According to the organizers, the back and forth of extremely full trains was not easy to contend with for certain participating bands with large instruments. These are details to which we are becoming more attentive, and it is difficult to resolve all the details to go beyond the more accessible areas of the city. In 2018, the parade planned on Saturday in the favela of the Morro do Alemão did not happen, due to rumors of police actions. The parade was canceled at the last minute, which was lamented by many participants of HONK! Rio and, above all, by local partners.
In the choice of places this year, the biggest debate concerned the decision to transfer Sunday’s events, which had occurred in previous years on the beach in the privileged south zone of the city, to the Parque Quinta da Boa Vista, a green park and historic place of the city, where a more diverse public can be reached. This change was well received, as the environment of the park turned out to be more favorable to exchanges between the musicians the public.
The rupturing of city rhythms also stems from the ambulatory mode of the brass bands. In Rio, parades (cortejos) cross streets and squares of the city, without previous notice of the residents or authorities, moments that are often highlighted by the foreign bands participating in HONK! Rio. The parades permeated the programming of the 2018 edition, with five scheduled parades mobilized by nine bands. The parades are some of the most popular events for the public and musicians. Often when approaching the end of the performances, one hears cries of “Parade! Parade!,” sparking collective movement. The modality of the parade originates from Rio’s carnival and the practices of various blocos and fanfarras who have participated in HONK! Rio.
The parades leave behind what is planned, submitting to various improvisations. Some speak of the feeling of “being lost,” of “letting oneself be led by the bands.” Only those in front of the parade know where they are leading and others are often surprised at where they end up. Some interact; others smile, take photos, and converse between themselves. Participants are mindful of car traffic, and there are always people who help the festival volunteers to create corridors for the cars to pass. People sit on the ground to rest, they delight and dance close to the bands, mobile beer sellers take the parallel streets to find the best place at the right time, in front of the passage of the bands, to sell the most beer to the paraders. In the case of the parade in the favela of the Morro da Providência, the residents didn’t much join the parade, as they were rather caught off guard, but they acclaimed the event nonetheless. The surprise factor and the environment created by the bands brought much laughter, exclamations, dancing, and many cell phone videos.
The parades are clear examples of rupture in the routine rhythms of the city (Lefebvre 1992; Edensor 2010), with sense of effervescence and diverse emotions. There is almost an absence, or a very discrete presence, of the police, allowing the crowd to manage all this overflowing emotion and create a shift in the rhythms of the bodies through the streets traveled. They allow more interaction with a larger public. Many people cross familiar streets or even their own houses on the route of the parade unaware of where they are. This fluidity multiples the possibilities of interaction and involvement between bodies and the city. The effervescence arising from this movement, together with the sonic dimensions of the parade, affects participants and leaves memories that impact participants’ imaginary of the city, a singular experience for the participants. These moments are photographed and remembered with nostalgia even by people who only witness the parade from their windows. They present definite challenges for the organizers in relation to transit and cleaning. But they are well worth the effort and generate solidarities and care, mobilizing the contributions of various “spontaneous” volunteers.
Final Reflections
The HONK! Rio festival, an urban ritual that has been attracting more people each year, has enabled us to experience new ways of feeling and acting in urban spaces, ruptures with the everyday rhythms of the city. The notable growth of the festival, its influence on the formation of new brass bands, and the creation of HONK! festivals in other Brazilian cities has created an ever-expanding movement. HONK! Rio has become an expected ritual moment for many bands that prepare in different ways, with new repertoire and performances, throughout the year.
As we have shown, the HONK! festival concept is created distinctly in each new social context. The affective dimension of HONK! Rio is a portrait that mirrors both the carnival and street culture of Rio and the importance of being part of a larger international movement of music and activism that goes beyond the physical and cultural space of the locality. Together with this communal affective dimension, we have shown how the issue of social activism has generated debates and transformations in the organization and performance of the participating bands. The year 2018 was especially impactful with the presentations, roundtable discussions, and participation of women and other minority groups, as well as putting at the forefront the drive to occupy marginalized city spaces and interact with local groups. Future years will bring new innovations both from the local and global context. That is to say, the festival is not a closed format. It is open, alive, and changing, in dialogue with the intense social issues confronting Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and the world.
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[1] A bloco is a more participatory ensemble that can easily grow much larger than a banda.
[2] Criteria for participation include musical quality and activist commitment. Of the thirty bands in the programming, twenty-one were from Rio de Janeiro, seven from other cities in Brazil (three from São Paul, two from Belo Horizonte, and two from Brasília), and two from France. Since 2017, São Paulo has founded its own HONK!, and Brasília created a festival in 2018.
[3] In Rio, an “attack” (ataque) of music in the streets refers to a DIY action of bringing music to the streets.
Michel Moreaux and Maria Cláudia M. M. Pitrez
Translated by Andrew Snyder
Versão original em português
Introduction
Spatial occupations and transformations of the city are a characteristic element of HONK! festivals around the world, helping to create collective celebration of art and politics with what Émile Durkheim called “effervescence” (1915), which dissolves senses of individual distinction and creates experiences of community. To play in the streets and squares of the city is a way of rethinking and remaking city spaces, as well as establishing new exchanges and social relations. This paper focuses on HONK! Rio in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil to explore how this now transnational festival network manifests locally in distinct city spaces. The festival has taken place here annually since 2015, and it is an example of the growth and expansion of the HONK! festivals as they have passed through the borders of their country of origin in the United States, gaining new territory in other countries.
This panorama of expansion of the festivals beyond the American context and the intensification of annual meetings has contributed to innumerous exchanges between the participants, such as musical and performance styles, organization styles, and, above all, the forging of a communal sentiment and sense of belonging to the global and local HONK! communities. It has globally forged what we will call a “HONK! ethos:” to be collaborative, to occupy public spaces, and to bring fun and political reflection to the streets. As we have followed the creation of HONK! Rio since 2015 and compared it with other HONK! festival in the United States, as well as the creation of HONK! festivals in São Paulo and Brasília, we have witnessed the dissemination of this ethic. On the one hand, there have been shared attempts to respectfully maintain the premise of the original festival to be collaborative without seeking profit while, on the other hand, there are differences and particularities that every new culture and space engenders. Every city and its festival assembles normative and counter-normative “rhythms” (Lefebvre 1992; Stavrides 2016) creating distinct performance scenarios.
This research is the result of fieldwork during the preparation, realization, and post-festival discussions of the 2018 edition of HONK! Rio, as well as many experiences in previous years’ festivals since 2015 and other experiences in HONK! in Boston, PRONK!, and HONK NYC! in 2013, and HONK! Texas in 2017. We have observed, participated in, conversed with, and conducted formal and informal interviews with the producers, musicians, and participants of HONK! Rio. We prepared a questionnaire for the interviewees and created an online form that has allowed us to interview and generate data after the festival, above all with the musicians and producers.
We have heard many accounts of an altered emotional state forged during HONK! Rio, above all from the musicians and organizers who highlight the strengthening of communal ties and experience of effervescence. This research has led us to consider the festival as an urban musical ritual that offers a break in everyday life and establishes a different emotional experience, what Victor Turner (1978) calls “communitas,” a distinct spatial-temporal dimension in which, at HONK! Rio, routinely frequented work zones are transformed into stages and the streets into parade corridors.
How has the festival emerged distinctly in Rio de Janeiro, given the city’s context of street carnival, the pre-existing alternative brass movement of neofanfarrismo (“new brass bandism”), and the recent transformations of the city? How does the HONK Rio! festival transform the ephemeral emotions of the participants and the rhythms of the city? How can we understand the effect of this momentary suspension that appears to transform the emotions of participants and ruptures the rhythms of the city?
In what follows, we reflect on the past four years of the festival, as well as the research carried out during the 2018 edition, in four sections: rituals and urban rhythms; street music and social activism; times of politics, art, and feminism; and the occupation of new spaces and the creation of new city rhythms.
Rituals and Urban Rhythms: Rupture, Effervescence, and Communitas
Beyond a musical term, “rhythm” is an analytical and methodological concept introduced by Henri Lefebvre (1992) to identify a complex of movements and dynamics that coexist and act in a given time and space. However, although the idea of rhythm is linked to repetition, it does not preclude the possibility for changes, discoveries, or innovations because for Lefebvre repetition also reveals differences. Thus, “rhythmanalysis” is a critique of daily life, and it is based on observations of transformation, considering the relational dimension of space and discerning processes of continuity and discontinuity in social temporalities.
Both rhythms and rituals help to demarcate social life in ordinary and extraordinary moments in a dialectical relationship. Rituals cause interruptions in routine life, giving rise to a new social, emotional, and creative framework of effervescence. They create a form of rupture with transformative potential, an extraordinary event with symbolic relevance and transformative potential for life in community. Mariot (2001) shows how Émile Durkheim understands effervescence as specifically related to the ritual action itself, with festivity having a primordial role for creating this “state of exaltation” that transports “man outside himself, distracted from his ordinary preoccupations and concerns” (Mariot 2001: 714). The ritual is transformative for those who participate in it, and participants adhere to it because of the contagion of emotional intensity.
In our interviews with the musicians, many spoke about an emotional alteration during HONK! Rio, that provoked a state of unity between musicians and participants: “HONK! creates a collaborative feeling and emboldens us to continue filling the streets with art.” “[The festival] brings the pleasure of playing to all. This pleasure seems to infect all those involved, both musicians and listeners.” “[In HONK!], we are not isolated in our cities. A collective feeling around the same concerns is generated, which is amazing.” “I am very touched by HONK! Rio. I feel so much love for all the musicians and people who worked to get it right, for the event to happen. Sometimes in the middle of the festival, I stop and watch people, and there are so many happy people in this moment, even with our chaotic politics... It makes me believe in a better world."
Considering the above statements, it is clear that HONK! Rio breaks with certain rhythms of daily life during the five days of the festival, generating altered emotional states with a view of something subversive in which one can “believe in a better world,” what Victor Turner would call a “liminal” moment of communitas. Turner defines liminality as a marginal moment, a transitory process and a phase in which a new configuration of “antistructure” is experienced, a state of communitas that breaks with the “natural” and hierarchical order of society. For Stavrides (2016), certain performances and practices can institute discontinuities in public spaces, establishing other rhythms and new possibilities of being affected, which can occur immediately or even after a time, through shared collective memory. The author is interested in the extent to which “the space of the city can express and foster practices and values that are distinct or even opposed to the dominant ones” (31).
This line of thought has led us to observe how “rupture” might occur in HONK! Rio. Brazilian anthropologist Roberto da Matta (1997), who analyzed religious processions, military parades, and carnival, argues that rituals and performances dialogue with and can even reinforce dominant values. Whether instilling dominant or subversive values, they always establish a special aura, with symbolic power and effervescence for their participants. A new emotional state is created, forging a communal feeling that strengthens individual relationships. Thus, for Da Matta, who follows Turner’s framework, the breaking of the quotidian with new rhythms and feelings through ritual and performance does not only result from rituals that break social values opposed to the dominant ones. The ritual itself is already a special moment that already establishes a new time and space. The distinctiveness of HONK! Rio, therefore, from everyday rhythms certainly make the festival a transformative ritual in the senses provided by Turner and Da Matta, but it is worth asking whether the festival effectively instills values and practices counter to the dominant ones.
Street Music and Social Activism
The programming of HONK! Rio 2018 was intense with five uninterrupted days from Wednesday to Sunday, November 14 to 19. The organizers chose to program HONK! Rio with the national holiday of Wednesday November 15, which helped bring together more of the public, especially foot traffic and tourism through the center of the city. It also increased the participation of bands coming from other cities in Brazil, as many of these musicians have formal jobs. To create the programming of HONK! Rio, the organizers take various issues into account, from finding available hours for all the bands, suitable spaces for performance, and performance proposals. As one organizer pointed out, they take care in the selection of bands in accordance with musical style and performative themes—such as the varying formations of a bloco or banda,[1] circus, the theme of feminism, and many others—to create a musical climate that is fairly continuous but not repetitive. In 2018, there were 65 performances scheduled through the five days of programming. These included five parades involving nine brass bands, five oficinas or workshops involving subjects such as clowning for brass bands and dynamics of collective composition, a session of three debates on Wednesday, as well as unprogrammed events which often included musicians playing together until the sun rose.
The quantity of bands participating in HONK! Rio has grown and for the first time—some bands were rejected so as not to surpass the limit of 30 bands in the programming.[2] Within this growing number of Brazilian brass bands, the “boom” of brass bands in the city of Rio de Janeiro is especially notable. In the first edition of HONK! Rio, in 2015, the programming counted sixteen bands from Rio, a large number of local bands compared with other HONK! festivals, where there are often only a handful of bands from the locality of the festival. As Andrew Snyder has written (2018), this large and growing number of brass bands is linked to the particular street musical context of the city of Rio de Janeiro.
Since the 2000s, there has been an exponential growth of street carnival. Herschmann (2013) has called this phase the “boom of street carnival,” with the emergence of new groups and musical workshops of carnival blocos scattered throughout the south zone and central city. As Barros (2013) points out in the carnival of 2010, 465 blocos were registered that brought almost 5 million people to the streets of the city, and these numbers have only grown. This effervescent carnival scene has been reviving the musical scenario and creating new artistic urban occupations of the streets, with the emergence of new disputes about public space and the right to the city (SAPIA, 2016).
An American musician and organizer of HONK TX, who has lived in Rio de Janeiro and participated in different HONK! festivals in the United States, comments that a noticeable difference between HONK! Rio and American HONK! festivals is Rio’s preexisting experiences of public festivity that the carnival culture helped to foment. That is, the city of Rio de Janeiro already knows how to have a street party:
Rio already has such a great culture of street music from the blocos of carnival . In the US, HONK!-style bands are still very rare and unusual, and most people have never seen one. So every show in Rio has a large audience, and the city already knows how it works; the city knows how to party in the street, coordinating musicians, mobile beer and food vendors, and the audience. In the US, we do not have carnival (except in New Orleans) and people are not accustomed to street music, big bands, or shows outside bars or theaters. The public does not know what to do. (Anonymous)
It is in this context, connected to carnival and the blocos, that the movement of alternative brass bands known as neofanfarrsimo emerged in Rio and came to associate itself with the international HONK! festivals. However, these same carnivalesque influences in HONK! Rio can be perceived to have a negative impact on the festival. If on the one hand Rio’s carnival has enabled this kind of festive occupation of the street, it also “carnivalizes” the HONK! festival, complicating its activist and engaged preoccupations that are supposedly at the heart of the festival. If in some HONK! festivals, the mere fact of occupying the street and playing is already considered an activist and engaged act through rupturing everyday life and creating new rhythms in the urban context, in the case of Rio de Janeiro, considering its strong culture of festivity and street music, this component doesn’t appear sufficient. This debate has brought numerous critiques and changes in the festival over its four-year history. One of the organizers reflected,
This movement of brass bands, that is very much linked to carnival, presents a challenge, which is to distance the festival from particular stereotypes and behaviors that carnival instills of total craziness and subversion of the norms! Does every musical intervention in the street have to transform into carnival? We need to find a way to disconnect HONK! Rio from some of the elements of craziness and think about public space and how we care for it as well as about the audience members and how we can maintain connections throughout the year with various locales. (Production team)
This challenge regarding a “carnivaleque ethos” in Rio de Janeiro was an element of many interviews, not only with organizers but with musicians and the public in general. According to Andrew Snyder (2018), who studied neofanfarrismo in Rio de Janeiro and participated in the production of the first HONK! Rio, a preoccupation with social activism had been gradually developing in this context. He observes that, little by little, individual and collective political awareness had been emerging in these festive spaces, bringing new questions of responsibility around the act of playing in the streets and what it means to create a festival based in activism. This awareness can be perceived throughout the five days of the festival, including among the bands that come from outside of Rio de Janeiro and have participated in other HONK! festivals, as well as other participating groups, such as street artists and cultural movements that act in public and peripheral spaces of the city. The debate around the concept of “activism,” which has been part of festival’s name since the first year in 2015, is an example of how thinking has evolved over the course of the four editions: from “Festival of Activist Brass Bands” in 2015 and 2016, to “Festival of Engaged Brass Bands” in 2017, to “Activist Festival of Brass Bands” in 2018. These minute changes reflect care and many debates between organizers and musicians about the effectiveness of HONK! Rio’s activism in the streets and public spaces of the city. According to the organizer of Honk Texas:
HONK! Rio is more political than HONK! TX, more activist. Protests in the US are very tame—they happen, but they are less intense than they seem in Brazil, probably a function of the comfortable bubble that [many] Americans live in. I was especially impressed by HONK! Rio’s organzing of events in spaces that are perhaps more dangerous, as a way to reintegrate them in the city. This is really a powerful aspect of HONK! Rio. We also try to cross some of these boundaries by going to the poorest neighborhood schools here in Texas. But I think this engagement is deeper and more critical in Rio, because Boston, Seattle, and Austin, for example, are fairly rich and quiet cities. HONK! Rio takes on more risks by occupying a range of performance spaces. In this way, it's a lot stronger than the American festivals. (Anonymous)
For her, the very culture of street music and carnival is already a political act of occupation of the city and public space. But when compared with other cities that hold HONK! festivals in the USA, HONK! Rio gains even more political potential by creating a street festival in the middle of a large and intense city with conflicts and social inequalities, seeking to integrate new urban regions every year. The issue of social activism is related to the sociocultural space in which the festival takes place. As we have observed over four years of the festival, this has been a debate for both organizers and musicians that has brought changes, ruptures, and innovations every year.
Times of Politics, Art, and Feminism
The question of social engagement and performance that the HONK! festival brings to the table has become ever more significant as the current political context of Rio de Janeiro contends with many complications regarding the ordering and spontaneous occupations of public space. The creation of HONK! Rio, ever since the pioneering idea came to Rio’s band Os Siderais when it toured to HONK! in Somerville in 2013, has occurred during a turbulent political, economic, and social time in Brazil, with intense protests that began with the movements of June 2013 that critiqued the hosting of mega-sporting events (the World Cup in 2013 and the Olympics in 2016), to the impeachment of the socialist president in 2016, and to the movement Ele Não (Not Him) that rejected the presidential candidacy of the extreme right-wing Jair Bolsonaro in 2018. In Rio de Janeiro, this intense reality amounted to crises and the fall of the state government in 2016 and 2017, resulting in the election of an evangelical mayor who positions himself against popular and musical manifestations in the streets. The context in which HONK! Rio has arisen has brought much reflection to the festival regarding how activism might be manifested in the performances of the brass bands and the occupation of public spaces that the festival creates. Notably this year was a troubled moment with the murder of black socialist councilwoman Marielle Franco and the presidential elections. As Palmeiras and Heredia (1995) argue, these periods inaugurate a “time of politics,” in which everyday life is governed by a set of practices and values corresponding to the electoral year.
In contrast to the openly misogynist presidential candidate, the 2018 festival was run by a team of majority women. The 2018 edition of HONK! Rio presented some explicitly political performances related to female empowerment, such as the “Bloka,” a neologism based on the feminization of the word bloco and an ensemble of all female musicians. One of the participants noted, “The Bloka was a group created for HONK! with the objective of giving visibility to women who, despite being ever more involved, are still a minority in neofanfarrismo with limited visibility. Several play in the open brass blocos of carnival but don’t have their own bands. This is a feminist bloco that puts protest music at the forefront of the repertoire.”
The Bloka was the culmination of a movement of increasing numbers of women playing together in the streets, and it brought together more than sixty participants playing and stilt-walking together. The musicians displayed unity with green and silver colors and shirts made by a member with a design symbolizing feminist struggle. The protest was manifested as much by their clothed and unclothed bodies as by the songs chosen for the repertoire, with lyrics modified with messages about the struggles, challenges, and victories of women. The Bloka also invited the participation of a black feminist collective, called Slam das Minas, with rap and poetry in one of the songs. The performance effects of the costumes and stilt walkers, as well as the sheer quantity of women united excited the public. According to reports, the emotion created was impactful: "Having the Bloka at the opening of the festival, with repertoire and participation of Slam das Minas, was an important and very exciting feminist protest;" "Bloka in Cinelandia was beautiful, lots of amazing woman wanting to scream, sing, play and vibrate together"; "I found Bloka did a fantastic job bringing female street artists to share their work and promote feminist thinking."
Another all-women brass band, Sagrada Profana from Minas Gerias, which had done ample artistic and political work in Belo Horizonte, also performed during HONK! Rio with a smaller formation with only twelve members, and the marked presence of flutes and clarinets without trumpets and tubas. With pink and silver colors and a distinct original repertoire composed by dance performance, singing, and circus, the group involved everyone. The public participated singing the lyrics of the songs and coming closer to the women who made every song into a distinct performance. The arrangement of the percussion changed every song, modifying influences from a wide variety of Brazilian rhythms. Some songs were sung with modified lyrics that provoked questioning about control and heteronormative rules of the female body. The very name Sagrada Profana is a joke about the social stigma women confront between saint (Sagrada) and whore (Profana).
In the interviews with the public, many people commented that they were fascinated by the sonority of the band and that it was possible to even hear the flutes and clarinets. The impact of feminism seemed to cross generations. A woman of seventy years of age who was passing the Praça Saens Peña in Tijuca was touched by their performance and went to look for her older sister at home to bring her to the square: “I really loved these women, the intervention with the public, the repertoire, the costumes, the musical execution, and choreographies. They have fangs and suaveness, and they are very secure when playing. I was very touched when they cried out ‘Mariele Presente,’ because she was my city councilwoman.”
The French brass band Les Muses Tangent was mentioned many times by interviewed musicians and the audience members as a particularly impactful band. Consisting of twenty French women, the band played with sweetness and force. The lush harmonies of the arrangements and the presence of the euphonium, an instrument that is not much used in Brazilian brass bands, generated curiosity. The fact of being an international brass band also generated a kind of expectation and the public was not disappointed.
Each of the three all-women bands presented very distinct performances. Different from the other feminist bands in which the public was more attentive to the political messages that were sung and written on the musicians’ bodies, the French band shook it up with pulsating rhythm, and the women’s bodies sent the message through sound itself. All the three bands of women were highlighted in the interviews with general public and musicians. The combination of musical performance and political stance emotionally involved everyone in the context of the current sociopolitical situation, while also helping participants to remember the histories and feminist struggles of other peoples and generations. The political message of the performance crossed national and international barriers and created an emotive dialogue, generating, according to one interview, “the expansion of the body and the affects.” Another claimed that “music transforms us into more sensitive people,” while another suggested that “it gives us happiness to live by, seeing people so animated in our country’s situation, reminding us that we have power to transform reality.”
Occupying New City Spaces and Creating New Rhythms
HONK! Rio has sought to spatially decentralize the performances throughout the city as part of the festival's activism. The festival has thus sought to move beyond its middle-class insularity, which is based geographically in the central and south neighborhoods of the city, where the majority of the participants in neofanfarrismo live. The choice to play in marginalized areas and work with local partner groups has been important for the construction of bridges and continued social actions beyond the festival. In this section, we explore the efforts of HONK! Rio to expand its actions throughout the city and reach new audiences.
In 2017, the HONK! “Attacks,”[3] emerged in order to perform beyond the days of the festival, preparing and connecting HONK! Rio with the city. One of the goals of the Attacks is to hold events that might help forge bonds throughout the year with social movements the festival intends to support and public spaces it plans to occupy during the days of the festival. In 2018, there were two such Attacks: one in Praça da Harmonia in the Port Zone, which has been in the midst of an intense gentrification process and where HONK! Rio has worked annually with local partners. Before the two brass bands played, there was a roundtable conversation with local cultural actors about the history and changes of the neighborhood. The second attack happened in front of the Chamber of Deputies, in Cinelândia square, an important political space in Rio de Janeiro that HONK! Rio has been occupying since 2016 with the opening events of the festival. On the same day there was an on-site event called "23 Motives to Support the 23," a political action that has been taking place periodically in defense of 23 protesters' arrested in 2013 and the right to demonstrate without criminalization. Besides publicizing the festival, the central idea of the Attacks is to build partnerships with such groups and give visibility to debates and social struggles.
The expansion to new locales also raises difficulties. The logistics of bringing brass bands to certain areas of the city is not necessarily easy. In 2017, going to the distant neighborhood of Campo Grande, where the HONK! Rio band Crispy Brass Band lives, was a challenging experience. According to the organizers, the back and forth of extremely full trains was not easy to contend with for certain participating bands with large instruments. These are details to which we are becoming more attentive, and it is difficult to resolve all the details to go beyond the more accessible areas of the city. In 2018, the parade planned on Saturday in the favela of the Morro do Alemão did not happen, due to rumors of police actions. The parade was canceled at the last minute, which was lamented by many participants of HONK! Rio and, above all, by local partners.
In the choice of places this year, the biggest debate concerned the decision to transfer Sunday’s events, which had occurred in previous years on the beach in the privileged south zone of the city, to the Parque Quinta da Boa Vista, a green park and historic place of the city, where a more diverse public can be reached. This change was well received, as the environment of the park turned out to be more favorable to exchanges between the musicians the public.
The rupturing of city rhythms also stems from the ambulatory mode of the brass bands. In Rio, parades (cortejos) cross streets and squares of the city, without previous notice of the residents or authorities, moments that are often highlighted by the foreign bands participating in HONK! Rio. The parades permeated the programming of the 2018 edition, with five scheduled parades mobilized by nine bands. The parades are some of the most popular events for the public and musicians. Often when approaching the end of the performances, one hears cries of “Parade! Parade!,” sparking collective movement. The modality of the parade originates from Rio’s carnival and the practices of various blocos and fanfarras who have participated in HONK! Rio.
The parades leave behind what is planned, submitting to various improvisations. Some speak of the feeling of “being lost,” of “letting oneself be led by the bands.” Only those in front of the parade know where they are leading and others are often surprised at where they end up. Some interact; others smile, take photos, and converse between themselves. Participants are mindful of car traffic, and there are always people who help the festival volunteers to create corridors for the cars to pass. People sit on the ground to rest, they delight and dance close to the bands, mobile beer sellers take the parallel streets to find the best place at the right time, in front of the passage of the bands, to sell the most beer to the paraders. In the case of the parade in the favela of the Morro da Providência, the residents didn’t much join the parade, as they were rather caught off guard, but they acclaimed the event nonetheless. The surprise factor and the environment created by the bands brought much laughter, exclamations, dancing, and many cell phone videos.
The parades are clear examples of rupture in the routine rhythms of the city (Lefebvre 1992; Edensor 2010), with sense of effervescence and diverse emotions. There is almost an absence, or a very discrete presence, of the police, allowing the crowd to manage all this overflowing emotion and create a shift in the rhythms of the bodies through the streets traveled. They allow more interaction with a larger public. Many people cross familiar streets or even their own houses on the route of the parade unaware of where they are. This fluidity multiples the possibilities of interaction and involvement between bodies and the city. The effervescence arising from this movement, together with the sonic dimensions of the parade, affects participants and leaves memories that impact participants’ imaginary of the city, a singular experience for the participants. These moments are photographed and remembered with nostalgia even by people who only witness the parade from their windows. They present definite challenges for the organizers in relation to transit and cleaning. But they are well worth the effort and generate solidarities and care, mobilizing the contributions of various “spontaneous” volunteers.
Final Reflections
The HONK! Rio festival, an urban ritual that has been attracting more people each year, has enabled us to experience new ways of feeling and acting in urban spaces, ruptures with the everyday rhythms of the city. The notable growth of the festival, its influence on the formation of new brass bands, and the creation of HONK! festivals in other Brazilian cities has created an ever-expanding movement. HONK! Rio has become an expected ritual moment for many bands that prepare in different ways, with new repertoire and performances, throughout the year.
As we have shown, the HONK! festival concept is created distinctly in each new social context. The affective dimension of HONK! Rio is a portrait that mirrors both the carnival and street culture of Rio and the importance of being part of a larger international movement of music and activism that goes beyond the physical and cultural space of the locality. Together with this communal affective dimension, we have shown how the issue of social activism has generated debates and transformations in the organization and performance of the participating bands. The year 2018 was especially impactful with the presentations, roundtable discussions, and participation of women and other minority groups, as well as putting at the forefront the drive to occupy marginalized city spaces and interact with local groups. Future years will bring new innovations both from the local and global context. That is to say, the festival is not a closed format. It is open, alive, and changing, in dialogue with the intense social issues confronting Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and the world.
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[1] A bloco is a more participatory ensemble that can easily grow much larger than a banda.
[2] Criteria for participation include musical quality and activist commitment. Of the thirty bands in the programming, twenty-one were from Rio de Janeiro, seven from other cities in Brazil (three from São Paul, two from Belo Horizonte, and two from Brasília), and two from France. Since 2017, São Paulo has founded its own HONK!, and Brasília created a festival in 2018.
[3] In Rio, an “attack” (ataque) of music in the streets refers to a DIY action of bringing music to the streets.
Bloka – Opening of Honk! Rio 2018 - Praça Cinelândia, November 15. Credit: PH Noronha
