Our Lady of Rosary, this band is yours

Abstract

This essay was produced during the ritual cycle that took place during the 129th Feast of Our Lady of the Rosary in Airões, Zona da Mata from Minas Gerais, during an ethnographic incursion based on Visual Anthropology references, that explored the manifestations of performance produced by the Congo José Lúcio Rocha, born of a quilombola community contiguous to the district where the party takes place. We chose as a theme of the images that follow, a ritual moment called the Court which, according to the natives, is "the heaviest hour of the Congo". The Court is the dramatization of the encounters between slave barons, when they met to negotiate their slaves. Here the body of the Congo man is exhibited, a sworn soldier of the army of the Virgin of the Rosary, who assembled in battalion, cuts the streets of the village by mixing Catholic Christian prayer with the corporality of tribal dance, always having as background voices the themes of memory of captivity and spiritual battle.