A Suça em Natividade: festa, batuque e ancestralidade

Abstract

This work is the result of a study of the performance of the Suça in the city of Natividade, in the state of Tocantins, Brazil. The Suça is a performance of the black population of the region and involves dancing, singing and playing drums and other instruments. The performance takes place in the mining settlement areas in the center and southeast regions of Tocantins and north of Goiás. In the scope of this study, the Suça was analyzed as a manifestation of “crossroads” created by the intersection between the batuque (traditional drumming) of the black Brazilian cultures and the Christian devotion. On one hand there is the Folia of the Holy Spirit, context in which the Suça often happens as a legacy of the parties of Brazilian Colonial times. On the other hand, there are the batuques, forged in the midst of the African-Brazilian culture, such as the Southeast Jongos and the Tambor de Crioula (Creole drums) in the state of Maranhão, which are cited in this work as means of building a strategy for the understanding of the Suça as batuque. The ethnographic experience with the Suça, the suceiros and the Folia of the Holy Spirit in Natividade is narrated with the poetic license of a fieldwork that, due to its centrality in the body, had a character of aesthetic experience.