Estrelas em constelação: considerações sobre o conceito de tropicália

Abstract

The following dissertation intends to signify the word tropicália as a esthetical concept on the brazilian culture, aiming to substantitiate elements of this neologism at it's elementary conditions. We'll be narrating the history of this concept on it's initial steps: Since it's creation by Hélio Oiticica; It's appropriation on Caetano Veloso's song; It's explosion by the national press; It's esthetic development at an empirical level. Simultaneously, the text objectives to expose facts and contexts of it's time, wich led the cultural imagination to perceive an artistical phenomenon going on at the country, wich the press classified as movimento tropicalista (Tropicalist Movement). The dissertation will occupy itself, in a bigger extent, to elucidate why this phenomenon had been designated as such: Tropicália. Then entwined, two semantical perspectives over the same word: As an adjective and as a noun respectively: the tropicália-concept and Tropicália as a cultural and artistic movement. Aiming to assist it's reading and exposure of the present ideas, the dissertation develops as a metaphor the constellation: as the artists and their works of art called tropicalistas would appear as stars composing an astral design, the concept of tropicália would be an invisible link the synergy wich congregates and gives sense to this sidereal corpus called Tropicália. Here covered, as stepping stones of this cosmos, the following masterpieces produced in 1967: the production of Oswald Andrade's play O Rei da Vela, by the Teatro Oficina group; Glauber Rocha's film Terra em Transe; and the Tropicálias by Caetano Veloso and Hélio Oiticica. It is postulated here how, from the elective affinities between these works, a tropicalist aesthetic was instituted.