“The dance for forro music is like ballroom dance,” says Mauro Refosco, before continuing in an unexpected direction. “It’s really sexual. Guys get a hard on, girls get their nipples… you can really feel the girl’s body, man. It’s supposed to be like that, everybody sweating, exchanging energy.” Refosco’s the percussionist in Forro in the Dark, the band responsible for the rythmic thump coming from Café NuBlu in New York’s East Village. There’s a long line at the door, and as people spill out of the club occasionaly – sweating uncontrollably, laughing, pulling their sticky shirts from their sticky bodies – the bouncer lets a few people in. The more girls you’ve got with you the better your chances, but there’s probably a higher percentage of girls in this line than in any other line in the city on a Wednesday night.
It’s a strange turn for forro, a music that emerged in the ‘30s from the northeastern farming communities of Brazil. Based around three basic rythms played on the accordion, the triangle and a drum colled zabumba, forro accompained the religious celebrations of plants and harvests until Luis Gonzaga popularized it by taking it on the road throughout the country. As Refosco puts it, “Gonzaga was like a parallel to Hank Williams.”
Altough it came to be seen as a kind of tacky redneck music when the stylish and cosmopolitan bossa nova exploded out of metropolises like Sao Paulo and Rio, it was partially restored in the ‘70s when Gilberto Gil, Caetano Veloso and Gal Costa mixed it into their mash of styles that became known as tropicalia.
That forro was incorporated into tropicalia movement may help explain why the members of Forro in the Dark have been hired by artists like Beck, David Byrne, John Zorn and more, but it doesn’t really shed a light on why an accordion, a triangle and a drum are driving a night of supercharged sweat and almost-sex tonight in the East Villy. Although there’s the occasional brazilian girl shaking like nobody’s staring in the NuBlu crowd, it’s mostly American twenty-somethings in short white skirts and shinning eletric-blue tanks that make the club heave. You’re probably not going to ask for the number of a girl that’s still fixated on her collegiate study abroad experience, but when your sweaty palms meets hers, you’re damn sure down for “exchanging energy.”
Of couse to Refosco, the intricacies of the crowd dynamics at NuBlu are irrelevant – or perhaps just really obvious. “The way we set up, there’s no stage,” says Refosco. “So everyone feels part of it. Everybody’s dancing in the middle of the band and trying to grab our instruments and sweating on us until one of us pushes them out. This kind of set up worked for people 100 years ago. It works for us now.”
- Will Welch