Xirê Odara: a festa do corpo negro em movimento na dança dos Orixás

Abstract

This work is the result of research developed in the area of Performing Arts, with profound interference from the religiosity of Afro-diasporic “drivers” (Ligiéro, 2011), carried out at the Candomblé terreiro Ilê Olorum – a space of Afro-indigenous culture and religiosity – between 2022 and 2024. The research is structured based on the researcher’s dimension of belonging, as a son of this house of Axé, and seeks to understand, through the technique of “participant observation” (Minayo, 2001; Demo, 2014; Severino, 2017) the emerging meanings and perceptions of the orixá dance in the ritual and celebratory context of the Candomblé xirê of that terreiro. From this analysis, we sought to construct a body experimentation that would result in a choreographic composition. The poetic proposal is entitled “The Path Trilogy” and is inspired by the notion of free artistic creation, however, it is developed from research, following an idea that the “Xirê Odara” is a metaphor used to value black bodies that take refuge in Candomblé, in manifestations of rite, dance, quilombola, resistance, beauty, art, culture, pedagogy and politics. The cult of the Candomblé xirê, as an ancestral power of the black people, thus became the first achievement of this research, which, by proposing an artistic production in dance, needed to “recognize” and “celebrate” black bodies (Sodré, 1999; 2019), and also needed to “rewrite” (resignify) narratives and myths (Medeiros, 2021), as well as “reconstruct” spectacular and imagistic meanings of Africanness (Moreira, 2022) and “affirm” the body as power (Silva, 2022). What was built on this journey was power. A black body, when it finds itself and recognizes itself as a quilombo, is nothing other than power. Thus, describing the dance in the xirê, recreating it in poetic composition and making it signify the affirmation of an African ancestry implies going beyond the notion of heritage from enslaved peoples who fought for liberation; It is about taking on the fight against colonization, from the past to the present. With this research (and its poetic derivation), we propose to discuss the meanings that can emerge from a contemporary choreographic composition based on the motives of the dance of the Candomblé orishas or, rather, to rediscover our social affirmation through the construction of belonging and representation of black bodies in movement. To do so, it was necessary to deeply reflect on who we are and on how Brazilian society constructed, in its imagination and in its institutions, the image of Afro-descendants through racism: colonialist, religious and structural. For the researcher involved in this work, creating a choreographic composition based on the observation of the dances of the orishas, in a Candomblé terreiro, meant assuming oneself as black, embracing ancestral symbolic legacies and celebrating the quilombola movement of black bodies in the Xirê Odara, which springs from the dance of the orishas and in their own “black” bodies, which insist on continuing to be alive, dignified and happy.