Sao Paulo
The sociologist, philosopher and former seminarian Danilo Santos de Miranda died this Sunday at the age of 80. During the four decades in which he led Sesc’s São Paulo branch, he became the most enduring and significant figure in São Paulo culture. As a mixture of patron and minister of culture, he was respected and revered as such.
Miranda had been in the Albert Einstein Hospital in São Paulo since the beginning of the month. The cause of death has not yet been revealed by the medical team.
He was responsible for turning the company associated with the commercial sector into the country’s largest cultural power. His entrepreneurial spirit and humanistic vision of culture, coupled with the institution’s billiondollar budget, made him Brazil’s most important cultural manager. Or, as friends and colleagues joked, “the essence within the essence.”
Sesc was founded with the mission to promote the social wellbeing of a specific group of beneficiaries entrepreneurs and their families. Under his leadership, Sesc more than expanded in size and opened up to Brazil and the world.
Miranda opened the vast majority of the institution’s facilities in the state, removing its turnstiles to provide free access to welcoming living spaces that combine sports, leisure, art and dining, amidst cities lacking quality public spaces.
A development model was created that became the benchmark for public action to promote culture in the country, promoting the professionalization of artists, curators and producers through the establishment of a transparent bureaucracy with notices and orders.
Not surprisingly, his name was occasionally mentioned as a potential candidate for the Ministry of Culture, but Miranda never received a formal invitation for the only position that could have caused him to leave Sesc.
Yes, in every election he received requests from across the politicalpartisan spectrum for help in developing cultural government projects, to which he tried to respond indiscriminately despite his personal alignment with the ideas of the progressive camp.
A passionate theater lover, Miranda did not hide his personal preferences in the field of culture, but at the helm of Sesc promoted the most diverse artistic expressions, from learned to popular, from more commercial to more experimental productions.
“What would art in Brazil be without Sesc?” asked actress Zezé Motta last September on stage at the event celebrating 60 years of Sesc’s social work for the elderly. Fernanda Montenegro from next door joined in. “That’s correct! We know firsthand what Sesc represents in the person of Professor Danilo Miranda.”
“Without Danilo Miranda there would be no theater in São Paulo. There would only be musicals,” said playwright José Celso Martinez, known as Zé Celso, in an interview in April this year.
Miranda was aware of the power of the institution he represented, but he loved being recognized personally. A perfectionist, he said he is committed to transformation and excellence, both in Sesc’s programming and infrastructure.
On his numerous travels, he enjoyed looking behind the scenes at cultural institutions around the world and was particularly impressed by a spontaneous visit at the end of a performance through the corridors of composer Richard Wagner’s legendary 1876 Bayreuth Opera House in southern Germany.
As head of Sesc, he pursued international production parameters while bringing worldrenowned artists to the stages of the institution in São Paulo.
The list is extensive and includes such diverse representatives as Serbian artist Marina Abramovic and Japanese Butoh master Kazuo Ohno, American trumpeter Wynton Marsalis and philosopher Edgar Morin, British theater director Peter Brook and French actress Isabelle Huppert.
Some became friends just like so many representatives of Brazilian culture and attended dinners at Pacaembu’s house in the western part of the capital São Paulo, where Miranda lived with the social worker Cleo Regina. The couple celebrated their golden wedding anniversary last year. He had two daughters, Camila and Talita, and four grandchildren.
Miranda was born in 1943 in Campos de Goytacazes, Rio de Janeiro, the third of four children in a middleclass family in Campos de Goytacazes, Rio de Janeiro. She was the third of four children of a pharmacist and a dentist who was also a journalist and enjoyed playing the guitar so the family sang together. The tradition led little Danilo to calibrate the alto voice, which he would later express in choirs and later in countless speeches and interviews throughout his career.
He lost his mother at the age of seven and fell victim to a kidney infection when he was just 31 years old. And the boys were raised by their grandmother Donana. At the age of 11, he entered the Escola Apostolica dos Jesuítas in Freiburg, Rio de Janeiro, a religious boarding school with intensive intellectual and sporting activity at the Colégio Anchieta, where the writer Euclides da Cunha and the poet Carlos Drummond de Andrade studied .
He was part of the school’s band, film club and symphony auditions. He founded an academy of school literature, founded a students’ union and took part in meetings of the student movement associated with the National Union of Students. But the idea of serving others in a life of renunciation appealed to him more strongly and led him to seminary.
“Religious life gave rise to my interest in the political side, namely not just being yourself, opening up a little and understanding your surroundings,” Miranda said in a 2014 interview with A Terceira Age magazine. “It is very easy for an orphan to understand others. When you have needs, you understand external needs.”
60 years ago he entered the Jesuit novitiate in Itaici, in the interior of São Paulo, where he delved into the study of Greek, Latin and philosophy. I followed news of the council on Vatican radio, broadcast in French, amid a routine of spiritual exercises and long periods of isolation.
During one of these exercises, the military coup of 1964 occurred. “The revolution broke out,” said a colleague during the meditation break. Miranda, already trained in the student movement and known by names such as José Serra and Frei Betto, responded to the movement to overthrow President João Goulart, to the astonishment of everyone. “This is not a revolution! It’s a counterrevolution! They prevent the real revolution.”
Some time later, at the age of 24, he gave up the cassock because he realized that he was in danger of being “an unhappy person.”
He moved to São Paulo and started working as an interviewer at an employment agency. As part of a selection process, he joined Sesc as a social advisor in 1968. 50 years ago he moved to the human resources administration of Senac, which, alongside Sesc, Senai, Sesi and other institutions, forms the socalled System S, managed by associations and confederations financed by money that the government receives from the payrolls of the companies of each sector collects.
In the early 1980s he became a regular and enthusiastic visitor to Sesc Pompeia and its innovative music program, which included Gafieiras by Paulo Moura and shows by Tim Maia and Jorge Ben Jor. In the open corridor of the old factory, I met businessman Abram Szajman, who was among people close to the Jewish community.
Shortly after assuming the presidency of the Trade Association of the State of São Paulo in 1984, Szajman invited Miranda to take up the position of regional director of Sesc.
It was a happy and lasting partnership. Szajman agreed with the Sesc network expansion project and supported Miranda’s decisions to replace funding for resident artists and groups with the broad and diverse funding model that has established the institution’s recent history.
The exception was the suspicious Antunes Filho, who saw his theater research center, the CPT, threatened, but whom Miranda welcomed because he believed that the creative work of the theater director and the training of actors would not survive outside the institution.
The architect Lina Bo Bardi, responsible for the project of the Pompeia unit, Sesc’s landmark, had to move her office there in 1986. Miranda came under the architect’s ire because of the open spaces in the sports towers of the famous architectural project.
“If you don’t put something there, I’m going to fill this trunk with bricks,” Miranda warned, worried about the usual onslaught of children falling through the more than 50foothigh cracks. Bo Bardi accused of interference and threatened to go to the press, but eventually gave in and created iron sculptures in the shape of mandakars that serve as guardrails.
According to Miranda, culture was a continuous educational activity, a condition of citizenship, and therefore could not be subject to market logic, political pressures, or the whims of others.
He deftly evaded the questions of a conservative council made up of the average business community of São Paulo, faced with controversies sparked by events and works that were transgressive in nature or sensitive and complex social issues such as racism, LGBTQIA+ rights etc. touched on religion.
In 2017, it approved a special security system for queer philosopher Judith Butler, a reference in gender studies and the target of angry protests that sought to prevent her speaking at Sesc Pompeia. He explained to the council that there was no such thing as a gender ideology like a conversion project, as the demonstrators put it, he suggested that they familiarize themselves with the work of the distinguished American intellectual, and that settled the matter .
In recent years he has defended vigorously but also diplomatically the financing model that guaranteed the freedom and success of his government.
First, it was Fernando Haddad, then education minister in Lula’s second government, who proposed a renegotiation of System S resources to encourage government action. The move was later repeated by Jair Bolsonaro’s Economy Minister, Paulo Guedes.
This year the fight took place with the president of Embratur, Marcelo Freixo. He wanted 5% of the system’s resources to be transferred to the government agency which brought in more than R$27 billion in 2022, the year in which the Sesc’s budget was R$2.4 billion. “It’s hard to fight with people we like,” Freixo said during the meeting with Miranda sponsored by Culture Minister Margareth Menezes.
During the coronavirus pandemic, Miranda received a positive diagnosis twice despite maintaining isolation. Diabetic, his health was poor after his illness. He lost a lot of weight and some of his goodnatured good looks, annoyed by his new physical limitations in the face of a demanding schedule and the difficulty of staying away from Sesc activities.
A few days before his hospitalization, the regional director gathered members of his team to discuss the facility’s new projects.
The striking signature of a stubborn centralizer and the longstanding leadership of the Sesc São Paulo made Miranda the personification of the institution he led, in a connection between life and work that he had long known. “I stay here like it’s a lifetime,” he said. And that’s how it was.