Candomble Dance

Candomble took form in Bahia in the nineteenth century among enslaved West Africans and their descendants, chiefly from Yoruba, Fon and Bantu speaking backgrounds, and its houses preserve distinct nations of practice with their own languages of ritual, among them Ketu, Jeje and Angola. Because the religion was illegal or policed for most of its history, its liturgy was carried in the body rather than in books, and the dance is one of the principal things that was carried.

A public ceremony, a festa or toque, follows a fixed sequence. The initiated members enter and circle before the drums, and the drummers work through the orixas in an established order, playing the toque, the rhythm belonging to each, with the songs that go with it. The order is not decorative. It opens with Exu, who carries messages and opens the way, and no ceremony proceeds without him; it closes with Oxala, the oldest and calmest. What happens in between is the succession of the orixas, each greeted in their own rhythm and their own movements, and the whole ceremony is an unfolding of the pantheon in time. What visitors are admitted to see is the public portion; the initiations, the obligations and the knowledge held by the leaders of a house are not public, and the atlas does not attempt to describe them.

Each orixa has a movement vocabulary that identifies him or her without a word being spoken. Ogum, orixa of iron and of war, cuts with the arm as though clearing a path. Oxum, of fresh water and of beauty, gathers and pours, and passes a hand across the face as though at a mirror. Iansa, of wind and storm, sweeps with a horsetail whisk and moves quickly and high. Oxossi, the hunter, draws a bow. Omolu, associated with sickness and its cure, dances covered in a raffia veil. Oxala, the eldest, moves slowly and bent, as an old man does. A person watching who knows the tradition reads the orixa off the body immediately.

That is what makes recognition possible when an orixa arrives. An initiate who receives an orixa is not acting a part; the community identifies which orixa has come by the movement that begins, the posture the body takes, and the greeting cry. The person is then dressed in that orixa's colours and emblems by the house and continues in the ceremony. Nothing here is improvised for effect, and the dance is not a representation performed for onlookers: it is the form in which the orixa is called and then received. Candomble is a living religion under continuing pressure in Brazil, including physical attacks on terreiros, and its practitioners describe it as a religion rather than as folklore.