A dança nos clubes sociais da cidade do Salvador: 1912 a 1935

Abstract

This study discusses the presence of dance in the social clubs of the city of Salvador in the first decades of the twentieth century. The investigative question arises from the following question: How dance, present in the clubs in the city of Salvador, between the decades of 1912 and 1935, expressed the social and cultural changes arising from the modernization process? The general objective of the study was to analyze how the modernization process dialogued with the dance present in the social clubs of the city of Salvador. As specific objectives it was sought to map the social clubs in which the dance was present at the time, highlighting its historical aspects and its main characteristics; identify the danceable cultural manifestations present in the different social clubs of the capital of Bahia in the time period established in the survey; and discuss the relations between the dances present in the different clubs of the city of Salvador and the cultural aspects of the Soteropolitan population. This is a qualitative, descriptive and historical research, whose methodology is based on the New Cultural History (NHC). To obtain the data, we focus on some of the periodicals in circulation at the time, among them the newspapers "A Capital", "O Imparcial", "Gazeta de Notícias", "Etc - BA", "O Combate", "A Notícia" and the newspaper "A Tarde". The time frame of the research comprised the years between 1912 and 1935. This clipping is given, initially, because we consider this period, two landmarks of ideas of odernity relevant. The year 1912 was chosen as the beginning of the investigation, for being an introductory milestone of a project of modernization of the city of Salvador that provided several changes in the urban structure and consequently in the habits of sociocultural life of the population. Already the year 1935 was chosen as the final delimitator of research, for being an important milestone in the modernist agenda of Bahia, with the realization of the Week of Urbanism, promoting to the population another spacetime when it comes to the urban vision and its consequences on the sociocultural aspects of those who lived in the capital of Bahia. Soon, it was possible to identify the striking presence of different dances in some of the clubs also identified as important social and cultural spaces of the Soteropolitans and the people who lived in the city of Salvador. In this sense, one can infer, through different dance manifestations, the social and cultural consequences of the ideas of modernity and civility that marked the first decades of the twentieth century in the city of Salvador, often expressed in the symbolic elements present in the daily life of the Soteropolitan elite and the general population.