Celebrate Brazilian Arts and Culture

This month, Oberlin College celebrates the arts and culture of Brazil with Oberlin-O-Brasil: Festa Brasileira, from April 11 to 16. The festivities will include lectures, film screenings, and musical performances, as part of a multi-year project to increase the presence of Brazil-focused content and Portuguese language instruction at Oberlin.

Brazilian jazz singer Kenia will kick-off the week with a performance at Severance in Hall in Cleveland on Friday, April 11. On Saturday, April 12, Festa Brasileira continues with a lecture on the history of Carnival in Craig Lecture Hall at 1 p.m. On Sunday, April 13, at 7 p.m., Festa Brasileira will host a screening of Mystery of Samba, a documentary about Rio de Janeiro's Portelo Samba school, in Dye Lecture Hall.

On Tuesday, April 15, Oberlin's Performance and Improvisation (PI) ensembles will be joined by drummer Marcus Santos and percussionist Adriano Dos Santos for a 10 p.m. concert at the Cat in the Cream in Oberlin. The ensembles are part of a class that studies different music from across the world and their respective improvisation styles. Prior to their April 15 performance, the groups will be working with pianist and composer Klaus Mueller. Events culminate on Wednesday, April 16, with a performance and dance featuring Kenia, Mueller, Santos, Dos Santos, and one of the PI ensembles in Hales Gym. A samba workshop starts at 8 p.m., and the dance starts at 8:30 p.m.

"This programming involves so many different people from the campus community: conservatory and college students and faculty," says Sebastiaan Faber, director of the Oberlin College Center for Languages and Cultures, who helped organize Festa Brasileira. “This week combines music, dance, culture, language, and history—and that is only possible at a place like Oberlin."

Festa Brasileira is sponsored by the Performance and Improvisation Program, the Mary Goetze World Music Fund, Oberlin Center for Languages and Cultures, Latin American Studies, Africana Studies, Off-Campus Study/International Programs, Ethnomusicology Department, Hispanic Studies, the Music Education Division, and the Oberlin Brazil Project. For more information, see Oberlin’s events calendar.