"Maracatu de baque solto” is a performance combining music, poetry, and dance that takes place in the Zona da Mata Norte region of Pernambuco, Brazil. During Carnival, maracatu musicians and dancers describe feeling exposed to illness, which they attribute to the “envious eye” (olho grande) of their rivals. This prompts them to adopt several defensive practices, both in a symbolical-religious dimension and an aesthetic one. More precisely, to perform safely they need to “close the body” (fechar o corpo). This expression is synonymous with a powerful and healthy body, while an “open body” refers to a vulnerable one, susceptible to the attacks of negative entities aroused by the enemies’ envious eye. My hypothesis is that this “corporeal locking” is only effective when maracatu members achieve a heightened level of interpersonal coordination, expressed locally by the concept of “consonance” (consonância). Conversely, poorly coordinated acts of music and dance generate “holes” (furos) that can “fracture” (desmantelar) the group, exposing its members to a variety of health problems. Relying on long-term fieldwork, multi-track audio recordings of maracatu percussion, and a computer simulation of the dancers’ collective movements, I will show in this paper how maracatu rhythmic and choreographic patterns relate to these local concepts of “closeness” and “consonance.” Furthermore, I will suggest that in this cultural context – and probably in others as well –, coordinating intentions and movements in common actions is the best antidote against envy, a social emotion that is often conceived as dangerous for individual health and collective wellbeing.

Bachata is a music and dance genre that developed around the 1960s in the Dominican Republic. Today, bachata is practiced throughout the world at bachata dance congresses – large gatherings of dancers who learn and dance together for four days in a hotel. At the congresses, rather than practicing Dominican bachata, dancers namely engage in a sensualized version of bachata dance called sensual bachata. Sensual bachata amplifies full body rolls and close partnerwork and is performed to urban bachata songs (bachata mixed with hip hop and R&B sounds) and bachata remixes (popular songs overlayed with bachata beats). During the congresses, bachata DJs dictate the style of bachata music that is played and are expected to understand the various styles of bachata music and dance. What is the significance of the DJ in bachata social dance spaces? How can DJs shape dancers’ knowledge about bachata? In this paper, I argue that bachata DJs function as sensory-makers, meaning that their choices in music act as the catalyst for sensorial connection. I build upon the work of Tomie Hahn (2007, 2021) who suggests that the senses provide deeper revelations about embodied experiences. Further, the sensorial connections that DJs foster positions them to also act as educators in the dance space due to their ability to expose congress participants to the developmental progressions of bachata music and dance through their song selections. I rely upon interviews with dancers and DJs from my fieldwork in 2023 at several congresses in Florida to support this research.

The counterculture of the 1960s has sustained a vast legacy. As a result of the startling contemporaneous rise of rock artists, as well as the consequent discourse generated since then, popular media has gradually erected functional archetypes to these musicians, often rendered platitudinous. A category of bodily action from Hendrix has been chiefly framed in popular media as either a demonstration of the profound technical mastery Hendrix had over the, or a mode of affective hyper-expression which emanating from his guitar playing – acting as a psychosomatic response characterized by illicit substances. While these actions are important to consider, there is more to be understood about Hendrix’s own bodily movements as fuelling a countercultural saga.

In this paper, I compare Jimi Hendrix: Live at Woodstock (1999) with the concert footage from Music, Money, Madness ... Jimi Hendrix in Maui (2020), and show how the presentation of bodily movement, both audience and of Hendrix’s, diverge between the films. Specifically, I will analyse how the latter film places Hendrix’s movement in the context of the audience’s bodily gestures, and how the implicit narrative of the film maintains teleological dependency upon the degree of a collective bodily movement, and how the audience’s bodily movements correspond with musical structures. I draw upon work in affect theory (Thompson and Biddle 2013; Grant 2020). The implication of this research is that it shows how audience bodily movement in media might be used to identify nodes of representation which divert from a dominant commentary.