Baile da melhor idade no Parque da Água Branca: os modos de estar e de vestir-se

Abstract

This dissertation addresses interactions between elderly people who attend the Baile da Melhor Idade (Senior Citizen Ball) at the Parque da Água Branca in São Paulo. The general aim of this study is to understand how alterities are expressed through the dance of dressed bodies, the ways of being and interacting and how they organize the construction of belonging to the group in which they participate. It also aims to examine how, in the light of social semiotics, the manifestations of alterity occur and also to map the regimes of interaction, meaning and risk expressed by those attending the event. The hypotheses are that: i) despite the prescriptive control, appearance and ways of acting, the music and dance environment promote hours of relaxation that bring back memories and motivate euphoric states of life for the regular attendees; ii) relaxed sociability is a time marked by a resignifying rupture in the stressful lives of the regular attendees, which extends into the daily and programmed activities and life strategies; iii) with its varied rhythms and marked by a presence on the music scene, live music leads people to do much more than structure a contract of adhesion, leading them to surrender and become involved in the socializing ambience of the dance; and iv) the role of the musicians and singers who cheer up the ball contributes to the construction of meaning for those who take part in the event and visit it in order to dance and socialize. In order to understand the social interactions of the elderly at the event, the research was carried out through the semiotic analysis of the situations — in which the structure of the context and its apprehension takes place in the act of occurrence — and, in order to support it, videos, photos and a logbook were recorded during visits to the Baile da Melhor Idade throughout 2023 and 2024. For the analysis, the main theoretical-methodological contribution comes from the contributions of structural semiotics and its social semiotics developments, as well as studies of the plasticity of the plane of expression. It can be seen that the regular attendees, who are segregated outside the dance, during the event become senders of themselves and make meaning in the interaction with others, by dance, dress and music. Through the regime of strategy, these elderly individuals intentionally adopt the habit of leaving their homes in order to remove themselves from the surrounding reality, and they are able to experience moments of pause that make them visible. By discovering the charm of singing and dancing together, there is a resemantization of their experience by the alterities and they become free to create meaning in old age. In the course of the research, we noticed a movement promoted by capital to exclude existing alterities from the park to detriment of profit in a public space