The
Guardian picture essay
Lisbon's back-alley fado legends – photo essay
Adriano
Pina performs for tourists at Tasca do Chico in Bairro Alto, Lisbon.
Photograph: Henri Kisielewski
A portrait
of Lisbon, saudade and the fado folk music of the city and its relationship
with tourism. Henri Kisielewski is the 2019 recipient of the Joan Wakelin
bursary, administrated in partnership with the Royal Photographic Society
Fri 17 Jul
2020 07.00 BST
Fado is
Lisbon’s urban folk music, born in and around the brothels, alleyways and
tascas of the city’s poorest neighbourhoods. Fado is to Lisbon what the Blues
are to the Delta. Written records trace it back to the early 19th century,
though some argue it is much older, connecting it to oral traditions imported
from across the Portuguese empire.
At the
heart of fado is saudade. This elusive word – apparently untranslatable from
the original Portuguese – broadly refers to a sense of sorrow, of yearning, and
a resigned desire for what once was. This is the underlying emotion of all fado
and perhaps of Lisbon itself.
_________________
Fado
performance at Mesa de Frades in Alfama. On the left sits Joel Piña, the
99-year-old musician credited with introducing the acoustic bass to fado. As a
long-time collaborator of Amália Rodrigues, he is considered a living legend
in fado circles.
Alfama is
Lisbon’s oldest surviving neighbourhood: a maze of medieval and moorish
architectures arranged in a patchwork of steep cobbled alleyways and red-clay
roofs, rising up from the Tagus river. Once a close-knit fishing community, it
is now the heart of Lisbon’s tourist industry.
A decade
ago, struggling to recover from a deep recession, Portugal’s government turned
to tourism and opened the real-estate market to foreign speculation. Today,
more then half of all accommodation in Alfama is destined for tourism and
thousands of long-standing residents have been priced out of the city centre.
One after another, the shops that catered to the local community closed to make
way for tourist-facing businesses – many of which are “fado restaurants” – and
now Alfama feels more like a theme park than a living neighbourhood. This
touristification is affecting much of the city. If things keep going the way
they are, one journalist wrote in 2016, Lisbon will soon have to hire extras to
play Portuguese people in its streets.
Seb Varela
in his ‘outdoor living room’ on a street overlooking downtown Lisbon. His
family is considered fado royalty because his great aunt was Amália Rodrigues,
the central figure of 20th century fado.
In 2019, I
spent a month in Lisbon exploring the complicated relationship between fado and
tourism. On one hand, fado is often upheld as the essence of Lisbon, an
incorruptible mainstay in a rapidly changing city. On the other, it is the main
attraction for many of the city’s 4.5 million visitors and is increasingly
commodified to meet this demand.
_________________
The number
28 tram carries tourists and locals up one of Lisbon’s steep hills.
A recurring
feature in many fados is Lisbon itself, in particular what it used to be. In
its long history, many forces have played a hand in altering the city and its
social fabric, the destructive 1755 earthquake being a key example. Today’s
aggressive touristification is another seismic event, the full impact of which
is yet to be fully understood.
Tourists on
the number 28 tram.
In many
cases, the allusions within fado’s poems refer to both a real and an imagined
history, both a concrete remembrance and an imprecise, idealised version of the
way things were. In fado, truth and fiction coexist, history and myth are
tangled.
There is a
parallel between this ambiguous relationship to the city, past and present, and
the experience of modern tourism. In Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino
describes travellers visiting the fictional metropolis of Maurilia. They are
invited to accompany their experience of the present with the help of old
postcards that depict how Maurilia once was, the “postcard city” being key to
appreciating the city as it now stands.
Tourists
look into a shop in Lisbon’s Graça neighbourhood.
Travellers
arrive in a location hoping that it will live up to what they had imagined, and
are quicker to see the postcard city than the place itself. Over time, the
place changes to fit this imagined expectation. It’s paradoxical, wrote the
mayor of Barcelona in 2014, but uncontrolled mass tourism ends up destroying
the very things that made a city attractive to visitors in the first place.
This is
particularly obvious in Lisbon, where the sheer speed of change and lack of
oversight have magnified the problem. Once the locals have left, once all the
menus are in English and, when looking down the ancient, winding alleyways to
the waterfront, one is more likely to see the hulking mass of a cruise ship
than the water of the Tagus river, what remains is a longing for what has been
lost – whether real or imagined. What remains is saudade.
_________________
Fadista
Adriano Pina after a set at the undisclosed fado house.
In an
anonymous back street, far from the tourist gaze, there is one establishment
like no other: a small fado house in a former Italian restaurant where fadistas
meet once their tourist-facing engagements are done with. It’s an institution
in Lisbon’s underground scene, open from midnight to 6am, and not featured in
any guidebooks. I have been asked not to name it for fear that a surge in
popularity might affect its delicate ecosystem.
Inside, old
fado legends glance out from yellowed posters in crooked frames and black
funereal shawls – traditionally worn by female fadistas – hang proudly among
them like team scarves in a football clubhouse. Thick red curtains cover the
windows and the blue formica floor tiles have turned a minty green from decades
of bleach and wine.
Fadistas
play after hours at the undisclosed fado house.
This is the
home of fadovadio, where amateurs and professionals take turns interpreting
the canon. It is not uncommon to see a performance by a taxi driver followed by
a well-known fadista, and then a butcher’s wife. One regular performer is a
respected professor of Medieval bureaucracy.
Any mention
of this place elicits amused disdain from the owners and staff of the more
“respectable” fado houses; fadovadio is not serious, they will say. But it
is known to them all and they, too, can be spotted here on occasion, drinking
from the source.
Manuelo is
the master of ceremonies, a prickly and charismatic octogenarian who made a
name for himself in fado circles in the mid-60s. Donna Lena, his Russian wife,
is a striking blond of ferocious energy. She spends each night serving drinks,
making food and tending to the guests’ every need. Donna Lena and her husband
are the adoptive parents of Lisbon’s fado community. The story goes that she
ran away from the Soviet ballet to marry him when on tour in Portugal. But,
here too, myth and history are tangled.
Fadista
Dina Brito in Alto do Pina, Lisbon.
At 2am, the
performances are about to begin and the air is thick with smoke and
anticipation. Beyond the laughter and chatting, one can make out the gentle
cacophony of string instruments being tuned.
During each
set, the fadista performs four or five pieces. Lulled by wine and the
red-tinged darkness, the audience is gradually swept up by the music, taken on
a hazy voyage that evokes homesick sailors, despairing lovers and death. Some
rest their heads in their hands, others stare wistfully into space. There is
always at least one person who closes their eyes and falls into a deep sleep.
_________________
Fadista
Marta Rosa at her home in Alfama, Lisbon.
One
Saturday, around 5am, Marta Rosa appeared at the door with her small entourage.
We had been introduced early in my stay and she proved invaluable in helping me
navigate the intricacies of Lisbon fado.
Donna Lena
was tallying up the night’s damage for a customer with wine-stained lips. An
old woman was handing Manuelo a framed picture of herself for the wall.
Aside from
the table of white-haired men arguing over a card game, the fadistas had the
place to themselves. Marta joined the others in the back; an L-shaped section
of the room that is the domain of the performers.
A fadista
hands Manuelo a framed picture of herself for the wall at the fado house.
Five or six
musicians and a handful of singers were sitting around the wonky tables that
had, over the years, been demoted from the main room. By pivoting my chair I
was now on the fringes of this new circle. I remember thinking it was a fitting
place for me: neither a fadista nor a guest; an interloper of sorts, a tourist
who looks down on other tourists.
There was a
loud dissonant jumble, like a music lesson before the teacher arrives. Marta
removed her coat and stood with her chin raised, her hands clasped tight in
front of her. Then someone played the opening melody of Amália Rodrigues’ Ai
Mouraria, and the cacophony fell silent. Donna Lena switched off the lights
and accompaniment soon came from two sides as Marta began to sing.
Her voice
was soft to begin with. She floated through the high notes with a plaintive
vibrato, squeezing emotion out of every drooping cadence. Then her song grew
more forceful. By the end, it filled the whole room as she raised her chin
higher, revealing the taught muscles in her neck.
Manuelo
gives advice to a less experienced fadista at the fado house.
Almost as
soon as the piece was over, amidst a few friendly heckles, a new one took off
on another table. Poems succeeded each other in this frenzy into the early
morning with different permutations, styles and rhythms, each singer owning the
room in their own way. Occasionally, during a song, the words “O Fado” escaped
someone’s mouth like a libation, in a voice both hushed and loud. This, I came
to learn, was the signal that fado was happening.
Ricardo
Ribeiro, one of the icons of modern fado, had explained it to me as a
“manifestation”, a moment when everything comes together and all present share
a sort of metaphysical communion. When the instruments disappear to leave only
music, he had said, and the words disappear to leave only feeling, that is
fado.
_________________
On my last
night in Lisbon, I walked down towards the centre of Alfama. I passed a wall
near a shuttered restaurant where the words “Locals Welcome” had been thinly
painted over and new grafitti had appeared: “Welcome Locals”.
During my
stay, I saw fado in cramped apartments and concert halls, street corners,
ballrooms and sticky-floored taverns where tourists queued at the door. I
visited evening classes in a suburb of tower blocks where a new sense of
community has formed around fado. I attended a fundraising concert for a
disabled girl where fado was the order of the day.
The roots
of fado run deep in Lisbon and that doesn’t seem likely to change. More than
once I heard of the three F’s that make up the Portuguese spirit: Fado,
Futebol, Fátima.
Just as it
survived the censorship and co-opting of the Salazar regime, fado’s essence
will likely survive the effects of mass tourism. In fact, singing a more
predictable version to tourists allows the majority of fadistas to live from
their craft and in turn, allows “real” fado to survive.
Paula wears
her “traje”, a traditional academic uniform symbolising equality, respect and
humility.
Students feel a sense of pride in upholding this centuries-old
tradition. It is said that these uniforms influenced JK Rowling in her creation
of those worn in Harry Potter.
Trying to
make sense of it all, I kept coming back to what Ricardo Ribeiro had said. He
wasn’t interested in the distinction between “real” fado or tourist fado,
commodification or authenticity; only that once in a while, wherever it might
be, fado happened.
Beside the
church of Sao Miguel, the terraces of three restaurants share a sloping square
around an old palm tree. In a doorway, a large woman was singing an epic fado
about desire, loss and revenge, but her heart wasn’t in it.
Sem comentários:
Enviar um comentário