Identifisignificados

67

Tropicália

February

Gilberto Gil spends two months in Recife and its surroundings, getting to know both the local avant-garde as well as traditional culture – such as Caruaru’s “banda de pífaros” or flute band. The songwriter incorporates these influences into his Tropicalist ideas.

April

– In the visual arts exhibition Nova Objetividade Brasileira (New Brazilian Objectivity), held at Rio de Janeiro’s Museum of Modern Art, the Carioca (inhabitant of Rio de Janeiro) Hélio Oiticica exhibits his great work “Tropicália”, a labyrinth-like environment with parrots, plants, sand, texts, and a television, which visitors are able to enter.

May

– The film Terra em Transe (Enchanted Earth), by Bahian filmmaker Glauber Rocha, is released.

–  Gilberto Gil releases his first LP, Louvação (Praise). Although the record’s songs do not have Tropicalist subject matter, the songwriting partnerships with José Carlos Capinan, Torquato Neto and Caetano Veloso show that the movement was in the process of forming.

June

The album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, by the Beatles, is released in the U.K.

– The book Panamérica, by José Agripino de Paula, is published.

July

The record Domingo (Sunday) is released, with Caetano Veloso and Gal Costa. Despite emphasizing his links to Bossa Nova, Caetano warns in the liner notes that his ideas are moving in a different, more radical, direction.

September

The play “O Rei da Vela (“The Candle King”), written in 1933 by modernist poet Oswald de Andrade, is produced by the Paulista (inhabitant of São Paulo) director José Celso Martinez Corrêa, and premieres at São Paulo’s Oficina Theater.

October

– The songs “Alegria, alegria” (“Joy, joy”), by Caetano Veloso, backed by the Beat Boys, and “Domingo no parque (“Sunday in the park”), by Gilberto Gil, backed by the Mutantes, are presented by the authors at TV Record’s Third Festival of Brazilian Popular Music (MPB), in São Paulo. Caetano’s song comes fourth, and Gil’s second. Tropicalism is born.

November

On the 29th, in Salvador, the “pop-wedding” of Caetano Veloso and Dedé Gadelha takes place; the ceremony and the reception turn into a happening that even makes the cover of O Cruzeiro magazine.

– The concretist poet Augusto de Campos publishes two articles defending the work of the Tropicalists, one in the Correio da Manhã newspaper the other in the São Paulo daily O Estado de São Paulo.