CURRALEIRA: uma performance afro-goiana

Abstract

The Curraleira is a traditional knowledge expression present in the Northeast of Goiás. She is of African origin and black protagonism. The form of this expression involves singing, dancing and playing the batuque with drums (caixa de folia), pandeiros and viola caipira. People have been practicing the Curraleira for over a hundred years in the folias and festivities of popular Catholicism in many quilombola communities, cities and regions of the countryside of the northeast of Goiás. With this in mind, this dissertation is the result of research on Curraleira from the field experience in the cities of Alto Paraíso de Goiás, Colinas do Sul and quilombola communities called Engenho II, Cavalcante District, in order to evidence the influence and permanence of African matrices in the popular culture of the Chapada dos Veadeiros. To this end, the fieldwork was carried out based on the methodological approach of the “campo vivido'' and “poetnography”, while the lens of performance studies collaborates to understand the contexts that involve the Curraleira with regard to the Central African cultures that arrived in Goiás, their sertaneja identities, and the presence of the Catholic faith linked to elements of African religiosities in its manifestation. Under the gaze of the performing arts, we choose investigate the Curraleira as an afro-goiana performance, which constitutes the crossroads of the Central African presence with the hinterlands of the northeast of Goiás, acknowledging the encounter between the “batuque” and the “viola caipira”, as an expression of Brazilian Africanity. With this, Curraleira is pointed out as an expressive manifestation consisting of gestural and sound poetics that can collaborate with the creative and pedagogical processes of the field of Performing Arts and also expand our aesthetic references from a afro-goiana poetic.