Os escritos de Maribel Portinari e a dança cênica no Rio de Janeiro (1969 – 2002)

Abstract

The central objective of this study is to analyze the construction of a History of Dance created by Brazilians through materials published by journalist and historian Maribel Portinari, during the second half of the 20th century. Maribel Portinari is a Brazilian journalist born in Rio de Janeiro in 1939. At the age of twenty-one she went to study in Paris, where in 1963 she graduated in journalism from École Supérieure de Journalisme. Shortly after returning to Brazil, she began working at the newspaper O Globo, but only in 1971 did she start writing in the newspaper's second section. She was mainly responsible for writing film criticism and articles about dance (texts, reviews and interviews). At a more mature moment in her career she produced two works: Nos Passos da Dança (1985), a work in which she makes a conglomeration of some of her own interviews and research (those that she considers most important), published in a book by Nova Fronteira; and soon after, she also published the work História da Dança (1989), in which she elaborates an overview of the History of Dance, highlighting elements of 20th century dance linked to the techniques of Classical Ballet and Contemporary Dance. In the 2000s, in contribution to a project by the Municipal Theater of Rio de Janeiro, he published three biographies: Eugenia Feodorova: a Dança de Alma Russa (2001), Dennis Gray: Eterno em Cena (2001) e Bertha Rosanova: nossa Primeira Odete-Odille (2002). When we think about Maribel Portinari, a name that may be unknown to some, we can see in these lines her importance for the History of Dance in Brazil, as a critic who participated in this process and a researcher who was concerned with recording in Portuguese works that had as the dissemination of this bias in History in Brazilian lands is central. We start from the assumption that through understanding Maribel Portinari's publications that involved dance we can glimpse an aspect that matches Brazilian society and culture in the second half of the 20th century.