Hugo Vaz (ARAD ’24) is an actor, poet, singer-songwriter and cultural entrepreneur from Goiás, central Brazil. Ahead of his band, MAZOMBO, he has performed concerts and recorded albums for over ten years. This summer, Hugo has been working in partnership with the International Brazilian Opera Company to promote the Kimera Festival, a grassroots, open-air, free music festival, which he hopes to establish as a staple cultural event in Morningside Heights.
K: Tell me a little bit about yourself; what is your creative and educational background?
H: I’m 35 years old and I worked in education for 14 years. As a teacher, I taught English, French, and Portuguese to foreigners, history and language arts to children (actually all ages, teenagers, young adults, every kind of people from all different socioeconomic backgrounds), but I’ve always been a performing artist.
The first time I stepped on stage, I was 4 years old as an actor. And at 13, I had my first rock and roll band. At 23 I produced my first musical, then at 25 I released my first original music record, and I’ve been performing ever since. I always like to partner up with different artists, and I’ve learned a lot from them; they’re great people from different backgrounds, like the popular music background and now the arts administration program. I have found myself trying to make these two careers converge; the educational and the artistic.
K: How did your partnership with the Italian Brazilian Opera Company come to be?
H: I attended an event at the United Nations that was focused on the socioeconomic impact of Latin American organizations throughout the American continents, and there was a networking cocktail hour. I met a board member of the International Brazilian Opera Company and he introduced me to the other board members and the executive director.
They said that they were looking for an intern, and I said, “Okay, well, I’m required to do an internship for my program at Columbia, etc.” And they said, “Oh, wow, great! But, before we start your official internship, we have a few projects to wrap up before then if you’re available.” I was looking for opportunities to engage in projects, meet people, and expand my network in New York because I’m from Brazil. `So I helped them produce this beautiful fundraising cocktail party at a luxurious penthouse on Bryant Park, and it was a huge success. It was super cool. That was in December of last year and I’ve been in close contact with them since then.
You know, there’s always a very personal component in everything I do, so I really connected with the people there. I’m very happy to participate because this has given me the opportunity to put my plans into practice and review them. Because as you work your plans through, you’re constantly reviewing them; is this what I want? Is this really where I’m going? And it’s been fantastic. This, for my career, has been making a huge difference.
K: On the note of personal connection, you mentioned that you’re passionate about cultural heritage and preserving endangered languages. Can you talk about how those passions have evolved for you and how you see them connecting to the Kimera Festival specifically?
Lera Boroditsky’s research is based on a simple premise: language shapes the way we think. So, because language shapes the way we think, linguistic diversity is a fundamental requirement for cultural diversity (and I have always believed that diversity is wealth). This has become an issue for me because everybody is very much concerned with climate change and preserving the environment, which is obviously very important, but it can’t be just that. It’s all interconnected. Many endangered languages are endangered because they are spoken by vulnerable communities who are threatened by climate change, natural disasters, or are forced to leave their territory to seek asylum elsewhere, where their language will be useless.
Ultimately, international organizations like UNESCO develop very robust programs for safeguarding the intangible assets of culture, like language. But that’s on a very high end. If you think of grassroots community events like the Kimera Festival, we can think of how important it is to allow the underrepresented to speak up: to just come on stage and have an opportunity to express themselves through their art, which is obviously a very important exercise of empowerment, especially if we’re talking about underrepresented communities.
What is a Kimera? A Kimera by definition is a hybrid creature. It’s made up of different and incongruent parts. We are all cultural Kimeras. We’re all made up of different bits of cultures, especially in New York; this city has been a melting pot for a couple of centuries now, so anything located here is a perfect platform for letting these different cultural expressions and different peoples have a say, to have their voices heard.
K: If you were going to pitch the Kimera Festival to people in terms of events or experience, is there anything that you want to highlight?
H: For attendees, the festival is amazing because it is so accessible to the street and anybody can can attend. The setting is beautiful! It’s in front of St. John’s Cathedral, and we close up Amsterdam Avenue between 111th and 110th streets. Local businesses set up their tables in the streets, and there’s a stage where the musicians perform, where storytellers come and tell stories or share anecdotes or legends. I usually say that as moths are attracted to light, so are people to music. If you want to attract people, just play music.
For pitching this to sponsors, I would say that this is an opportunity for local businesses to expand their outreach and especially to remind local residents what lives in their own neighborhood in Morningside Heights. We also have this social media marketing ad campaign, so we can offer advertising opportunities; and we also do business shout outs throughout the festival. It’s a branding opportunity that connects a business (large or small) to a cultural initiative that’s concerned with cultural diversity. When you associate your business with an issue that is pressing, that is urgent, and that’s relevant, you automatically increase your brand’s and your company’s added social value. It’s a very strategic move to associate your business with something that matters, which is cultural diversity.
K: Is there anything that you wish was more common knowledge about Brazilian music or culture?
H: Brazil is internationally known for samba and bossa nova, which are incredible forms of music that come from different social strata. Bossa nova is more like the bourgeois, mid-20th century kind of music. And samba is a more popular and a more ancient form of music, but they do not really represent Brazil as a whole. They come from a specific part of Brazil, the Southeast. We have many more kinds of music being made in Brazil. So if I could change something about the way people perceive Brazilian music, I would say it would be incredible if they had an idea of how diverse it is: the Caipira music in the central part of Brazil; the Baião, Frevo and Maracatu music in the Northeast; or different kinds of Amazonian music in the North.
This sends us back to what I was saying, it’s all about diversity. Brazil’s not just bossa nova. That’s a monotonous understanding of a culture. It’s very diverse.
K: As you know, the ARAD program emphasizes internships and incoming students spend a lot of time ruminating on them. Can you elaborate on how you think your time working with this particular organization on the Kimera Festival is going to factor into your long term goals?
My internship is a bit unusual because I have just intensified a partnership that I had already established with IBOC. Now I’ve had the chance to go deeper into the organization to learn more about it and to do more for it. In the process, so many things have become clear in my mind because I’ve always been involved in music/dance festivals and music-making. When you do something that’s so right and so natural, you reinforce your conviction and this reassurance gives you strength to keep on going. This feeling of, “I’m doing the right thing,” makes us more resilient.
Getting hands on producing the event has given me the chance to practice things that I already knew and to learn to do the same thing by using different tools. Collaborating is all about learning how to do the same thing by different means.
Before starting this internship, I was kind of unsure if I really wanted to pursue event producing, because I had been doing that for a long time in Brazil and I was kind of tired of it. This internship has helped me rekindle this flame.
During this time, I have come up with this art business model that I want to implement in the coming year, and I could only think of it after doing what I’ve been doing for the Kimera Festival. I want to create a mixed visual and performing arts event called the Kimera Challenge. The Kimera Challenge is a creative performance ritual conducted by a master of ceremonies that challenges a band and visual artists to come up with improvised songs and illustrations on the spot.
I have done this in Brazil four times now and it was a huge success. I, with my band and with the team of artists, have utilized this app that I customized. Imagine a casino roulette and around the roulette are featured the names of different chimera creatures. Imagine there is a band, and there are a bunch of artists sitting at a table. The master of ceremonies conducts the ritual by inviting each artist to spin the wheel and assign a hybrid creature to the round; the band will have to come up with a song on the spot to inspire the artist to illustrate the creature.
For example, one of the options is the mouszebra (the hybrid of a mouse and a zebra). The band will have to make a song for that. What are you going to say, what are you going to talk about? How are you going to sing about the mouszebra? How are you going to make the instrumental accompaniment to just give the idea of how this creature moves or sounds? That will inspire the artist to draw the mouszebra, and then a second artist will spin, and then a third one and so on until all the artists have taken their turn and the band has improvised a song for each artist/chimera. When all the artists have taken their turn they sit back at their tables to start to start working on their challenge, then the band performs their concert like their regular repertoire, which provides that’s the time that the artists will have to complete. I hope to continue hosting these challenges for a long part of my career.
There are still two more opportunities to check out the 2023 Kimera Festival on September 23 and October 28:
Arts Administration 
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