In the domestic context, Tropicalism benefited from contacts with other artistic areas that had been in the vanguard ever since the fifties. Works with the most obvious connections are the movie Terra em Transe (Enchanted earth), by Glauber Rocha, and the play O Rei da Vela (The Candle King), produced by José Celso Martinez Corrêa. Both film and play were seen by Caetano Veloso and incorporated into his repertoire of references. Others, just as important as these two, although less talked about, were the art installation Tropicália, by Hélio Oiticica, and the book Panamérica, by writer and filmmaker José Agripino de Paula. While the first gave its name to the movement and brought an anthropophagic proposition to the conception of its works, the second launched a poetry in which the use of the elements of American pop culture was innovative and instigating.

In the songwriters’ circle, some people, such as the designer and philosopher Rogério Duarte, had a fundamental influence on the Tropicalist propositions, with their ideas and sometime participation. The same happened in the field of criticism, with the Concrete Poetry of the Campos brothers and of Décio Pignatari. It was the Concretists who backed the movement right from the beginning. Through them, the songwriters discovered the anthropophagic poetry and philosophy of modernist Oswald de Andrade, author of the Manifesto Antropófago (Anthropophagic Manifesto) and the play O Rei da Vela (The Candle King).

All this “general jam” was acclaimed by the Tropicalists as favoring freedom and risk.  Their actions were, in the words of Décio Pignatari, the “flesh and bone” of Brazil’s cultural renewal.