Negrafia nagô-alagoana: a dança no xirê do terreiro de Pai Neto de Oxalá

Abstract

This research provides a sensitive and investigative look at Xirê and the dance of the Orixás of Candomblé Nagô with Umbanda, from Pai Neto de Oxalá’s terreiro, located in Village Campestre II, in the city of Maceió-AL, Brazil. This research aims at a bibliographical and documentary survey on the dance of the Orixás in Alagoas. A scarce bibliographic reference was found on terreiro dance in the historical process of Afro-religious worship in Alagoas, which is not a surprise, as academic research on black and Afro-religious issues is very recent. Carefully, a search was made from the “Quebra de Xangô” of 1912 and it was found, through the autoetnographic methodology, that after the Quebra new ways of worshiping the Orixás emerged. Challenging is also the fact that I am an observant and participating researcher, since I am a member of the terreiro. With field observations and selected references, I identified different ways of dancing present in all circumstances in Candomblé, from the simplest work inside the yard like how to clean the floor or in the dynamics of rituals more restricted to audiences. I describe two types of Nagô in this research, one of the first factors that motivated her internally. I highlight the importance of the concept of body-history to understand the ancestry of each member and describe a festivity of the terreiro for Orixá in which I report the impressions and sensations of being a turning medium and researcher. Interviewing Pai Neto, I noticed the relations of comings and goings within Candomblé which allowed new reflections on the difficulties experienced by the participants in this religion. Iconclude that the Candomblé from Maceió has been undergoing modifications for over a hundred years and there was no interest in describing these changes and modifications in the field of art, perhaps due to lack of opportunity or interest in researching cultures other than Afro-religious, specifically in dance language, because the few references that approach dance, secondarily, mention it with an insensitive and mechanized look, lifeless, without emotion and without the energetic power that we experience and feel in moments of contact with the sacred.