ANIMA music

In its 30 years trajectory, ANIMA has built a solid and award-winning career in Brazil and abroad, disseminating and exposing Brazil's popular traditional musical imagination in a chamber music language. In all there are 5 CD's and musical musical performances, 2 collectives and a DVD. The ensemble was awarded prizes for chamber music and popular traditional music. ANIMA presents its work throughout Brazil, from the Amazon Forest to the Municipal Theater of São Paulo, in the USA, Canada, Argentina, Mexico, Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia - Misiones de Chiquitos, Colombia, Germany, Switzerland, Luxembourg, Austria, Italy and France, in theaters and series of early music and chamber music. In addition to the concerts, the ensemble ANIMA also organizes workshops and courses, exposing its dynamics of collective musical creation and the Brazilian traditional music sources and origins.


FUNARTE Prize for Brazilian Music - Ministry of Culture APCA Award - São Paulo Association of Art Critics V Carlos Gomes Award - Secretary of State for Culture, São Paulo Brazilian Popular Music Movement Award


Brazilian cultural diversity has forged in its nuclear form an array of aesthetic movements where music can find its fluidity spontaneously in every corner of the country. ANIMA’s music could be defined as a true Brazilian way of making “old music” in a “new” country. The chronologic absence of a Brazilian Medieval period doesn’t means that there are no troubadours around us. The Sertão, the vast inland territory that inspired some of our best literature, is full of imaginary castles, ladies and loyalty codes. Romances and songs brought with Portuguese colonizers, centuries ago, were transformed in the Mundo Novo with indigenous Indian and African cultures, shaping the contemporary Brazilian melting-pot culture. Similarly, some “old” musical instruments, such as the rabeca and the Brazilian 10-string guitar or viola brasileira, survived in these islands of “medievality”, bringing to us a colourful pallet that ANIMA combines still with Middle Eastern and afro-Brazilian percussion and European recorders, harp and organetto.


For the last thirty years, ANIMA's music has been reflecting the affinity between music made in the “traditional” society of unlettered Brazilian communities, far from industrialization, and the lettered musical heritage of the Middle Ages, Renaissance and Baroque periods in Europe. Assembling the repertoire involved intensive preliminary research in historical and ethnomusicology, as well as work on collective construction of arrangements and musical compositions. Staging these elements meant translating them to a language with certain features of chamber music in a constant dialogue between past and present, traditional culture and classical culture, on a chamber music and dramaturgical construction.


This permeable musical aesthetic is based on the origins of the musical instruments used, as well as the eclectic background of the group's members, as Luiz Fiaminghi (Brazilian fiddles, vielle) and Valeria Bittar (European historical recorders and Brazilian indigenous recoders (Yãkwá), Paulo Dias (percussion and organetto), Hugo Pieri (voice), Silvia Ricardino (troubadour harp), and Gisela Nogueira (viola de arame/Brazilian baroque guitar); Ogã Leandro Perez (guest artist – Afro-Brazilian percussion and voice, Mar Anterior); Marlui Miranda (guest artist-voice, indigenous instruments, Encantaria) and Cecilia Arellano - Argentina (guest artist – voice, Encantaria).


The work of the ensemble´s dramaturgical construction up to the stage performance is elaborated together with important Brazilian directors such as Maria Taís and Márcio Medina (Balagan Theater Company), Lu Favoretto and Cláudia Shapira (Oito Nova Dança), Raquel Irsum and Jesser de Souza (Lume) and Raquel Araújo Fuser (EAD USP).


ANIMA has focused on this kind of musical creative work since 1988, with a totally new approach in aesthetic and conceptual terms, joining Brazil's musical tradition to its origins and influences in the African, Indigenous-indian and medieval, Renaissance and Baroque periods mainly in Spain and Portugal. Their work has earned recognition at performances in Brazil's leading concert halls and a series of venues associated with early music, chamber music, as well as internationally from certain sections of “world music.” The group's concerts are the result of intensive research into performance based on the music of non-lettered communities located far from urban centers in Brazil, and the music of the Middle Ages and Renaissance in Europe. ANIMA constantly weaves dialog between ethnomusicology, historical musicology, andcontemporary theater, thus staging a musical story in which time is non-linear, with presentation and stage as ritualized space-time for musical realization in the full sense of the term. Europe's Middle Ages and Renaissance come together on the stage in the music of Brazil's non-urban oral tradition, with arrangements devised by the performers themselves, or elaborated collectively or by guest composers. ANIMA’s repertoire is structured and arranged on the basis of a central theme in a space-time-instrument intersection, using the language of chamber music to stage ongoing dialog between past and present, popular and classical culture. In 2010, ANIMA released its new CD DONZELA GUERREIRA (WARRIOR MAIDEN) – under Selo SESC – at Festival Tage alter Musik Regensburg in Germany; at Pfingstfestival für alte Musik in Feldkirchen, Austria; at the 41st. Festival Internacional de Inverno de Campos do Jordão, Brazil. DONZELA GUERREIRA was presented St. Ambroix en Cevenne, França (2010); Labeaume en Musiques, Ardèche, França (2010); Festival “Rencontres Musicales de La Vallée de l´Alzette – RMVA”, Luxemburg (2011); Güldener Herbst Festival, Weimar, Germany (2011); Festival INNOVANTIQUA, Winterthur, Switzerland (2013); Sala del Grecchetto-Biblioteca Sormani, Milan (2008); Festival Virtuosi de Recife (2012). ANIMA´s new programme, ENCANTARIA, had its première at Festival INNOVANTIQUA, Winterthur, Switzerland (2013) and was awarded with the national prize “PRÊMIO FUNARTE DE MÚSICA BRASILEIRA”, Brazilian Culture Ministry (2012-2014). ENCANTARIA received the support from selo SESC from the State of São Paulo and toured through 6 Brazilian capitals as concert and workshops in public universities, as well though the state of São Paulo and Santa Catarina.


The group has recorded the following CDs: 1. Espiral do Tempo, winner of the 1997 Brazilian Popular Music Award in the category 'best instrumental CD', and the (1998) São Paulo Art Critics Association (APCA) award in the category 'best chamber-music ensemble'. In 1999, as part of the commemorations of the 500th anniversary of the discovery of Brazil, Anima recorded the 2. CD Teatro do Descobrimento, conceived and directed by singer Anna Maria Kieffer. In 2000, 3. Especiarias (CD) won the 5th Carlos Gomes Award for classical music (made by the State of São Paulo Secretariat for Culture) in the category 'best chamber-music ensemble'. 4. Amares (CD) was sponsored by REDE electric company in 2003. 5. Espelho (CD and DVD) was produced 2006 – 2008 and both were sponsored by PETROBRAS. 6. DONZELA GUERREIRA (2010), Selo SESC and 7. ENCANTARIA (2014-2018), Selo SESC, prizes: “PRÊMIO FUNARTE DE MÚSICA BRASILEIRA”, Brazilian Culture Ministry, PROAC – Secretaria de Cultura do estado de São Paulo. Some highlights of Anima's work with other groups: 2004 – they recorded the commemorative CD Campinas de Todos os Sons with the Campinas Municipal Symphony Orchestra, conductor Cláudio Cruz. In 1994 the group recorded the CD Trilhas, directed by José Eduardo Gramani, which was nominated for the Sharp award in the category “best arrangement.”


ANIMA has been featured on radio and TV in Brazil and other countries, and has toured in North America, Europe and Latin America mainly with support from the cultural section of Brazil's diplomatic service. In 2000, in the United States, they were interviewed for NPR’s All Things Considered series with a program exclusively on their work, which was broadcast again in 2001. In the same year two exclusive programs were carried nationwide by Australia's ABC. Many of ANIMA’s concerts have been recorded or broadcast live on radios and television in the US, Germany, Switzerland, Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay. In March 2003, Canada’s CBC made a live recording of a special concert in Calgary, which was broadcast nationwide.


ANIMA often tours and makes presentations and workshops at concert halls or festivals highlighting chamber music or world music in Brazil and internationally: Regensburg, Weimar (Germany), Feldkirchen (Austria), Luxemburg, Milan, Winterthur (Switzerland), St. Ambroix en Cevenne, New York, Los Angeles, Washington D.C Dallas, Santa Barbara, St. Louis, Portland, Miami, Ashville, Philadelphia, Calgary (Canada), Guadalajara, Bogota, La Paz, Santa Cruz de La Sierra (Festival Misiones de Chiquitos), Sucre, Buenos Aires, Montevideo, Asunción, and other cities.


After thirty years, ANIMA has generated artistic procedures emblematic of its language: - cooperation between musicians collectively writing arrangements and developing dramatic-musical themes, which permeates all repertory research and performance; - creating an approach to performing music as presence-art and scenic-action;