"Mulungu in the Saint Party: corporeity and performance in the production of the sacred space (Bahia - Brazil)".

Between the fragments of the official Catholicism and the experiences lived by the devotees, the ways of "being Catholic" in Brazilian's rural environment can vary a lot. Far away from the priests' presence, the community's Protective Saint accompanies the daily social interactions. The glance of the Saint has an active participation in the process of construction of the corporeity of the devotees, whose cultural formation / information maintain a dynamic relationship with the Saint. In the religious party the sacred space emerges of the relationship of the devotees amongst themselves and with Saint. The glance of the Saint is present in the daily interactions and it is also present in the party, in other words, in the extra-quotidian interaction of the devotees, when the Saint acquires body in the devotee's body.
This extra-quotidian interaction between the people and the Saint happens in a singular way during the Reis ' Party: it happens as a transformation of the private space. The name Reis refers to the Magician Kings that, according to the Bible, visited Jesus on January 6. The Reis' party is very popular in many Brazilian rural areas. The Reis' group celebrates Jesus' birth visiting the neighbour rural communities' houses. The objective of this visit is to ask for money and/or food to contribute for the party. Inside of each house there might be an armed stable, before which the group of Reis sings in praise to Jesus-boy.
The stables to receive the Reis are armed inside of the houses, they are called Lapinha, the small grotto where Jesus was born. The composition of these Lapinhas is a personal creation of the owner of the house, many personal objects constitute this representation of Jesus' birth. As in the composition of Lapinha as in the devotees' performance inside of the houses, the home's intimacy gets a cosmic dimension. The transformation of the intimate space into sacred space, through the body of the devotee as a vehicle of Saint, takes us to the intimate immensity as the intensity of being. This intensity crosses the limits of the quotidian body in two different moments: during the pilgrimage's sacrifice, when the group walks for several days, visiting the neighbour communities; and during the feeling of happiness of meeting the owner of the house. The sacred space opens up through the sacrifice and through the party.
The cultural diversity among the variuos areas of Brazil is not reductable to an identity struturer. The transformations of the Catholicism in the rural environment are interpreted according to the corporeity of the devotees. Many times the beginning of the devotion is marked by the grace granted by the Saint, due to a promise made by the devotees. This direct relationship between devotees and Saints is part of a type of polytheism that escapes from to the priests' control, representatives of the Official Catholic Church. In the displacements of Reis' Party inside the Mulungu, we can notice the way that the Saint presence is witness and also means of interpretation of social transformations.

The black family of Mulungu
In Mulungu everybody is black and Catholic. Until the end of the XIX century, the end of slavery in Brazil, many quilombos were formed: communities of fugitive slaves; when they didn't die in the escape, they lived in a parallel society. The region of the Chapada Diamantina was populated starting from the XVIII century, the slaves worked in function of the mining, since there was no much agriculture, they were barely supported by the white lords. In that way, the black communities' existence that lived outside their lands was not always a menace to the slavery system, many of them existed under the control of the white lords. The Idea of the Quilombo doesn't mean communities of runaway slaves that lived isolated, without contact with other people in a practice of negotiation in which the slaves remained slaves away from the lords. It would be difficult to affirm or to deny that Mulungu is a quilombola community, officially it is not classified as such, and what is more important: the people of Mulungu don't see each other as former-slaves, the quilombo idea is them pejorative. It is above all in the family idea that the community identifies. One of the first things that I heard when I arrived in the Mulungu was: here we are one single family.
Differently from the first impression, the Mulungu's people is always in contact with people from outside of the community, and this contact is fundamental to the community's life. The Party of Reis' importance, as a devotion form, is that it includes the visit to other communities, being significant of this intense sociability of the Mulungu's people.

The performance of the sacred visit
The performance of the Reis' group's visit is based on the traditional songs that delimit three specific moments: Entrance: when the people sing outside the house and the owner answers from inside; Praise: when the people sing for the image of the stable or for the image of the Saint that stays in the house; and Farewell: when the people ask the owner of the house for money, and they thank his good will by blessing the house. Before the final song the group improvises dances in the rhythm of samba. These stages, common to many groups of Reis, are part of the performance's open structure, because the way as the owner of the house hosts the Reis' group is part of the performance.
The owner of the house's corporal memory is activated by the Reis' traditional songs. The way he feels the Reis, his memories of the group's passage in the same house, along his life, are part of the transformation of the intimate space into sacred space. The past is part of the itinerary of the pilgrimage as the Reis enters inside the houses: we have a lot to walk and even more to remember. That verse, taken from Mulungu's entrance's song shows the Saint's presence as way of displacement of the devotees in the space, when the group leaves its original position to visit other neighbour communities; and as way of displacement of the devotees in time, when, in the intimacy of each house, the ancestors' memory overflows from the traditional songs. In this process of transformation of the energy of the body through the traditional songs, and of the space of the house through the presence of Reis' group, the horizontality of the relationship among the people in the space is inseparable of the verticality the people's relationship with the memory of old times.
The search for verticality marks Grotowski's final researches (Art as a vehicule), when he started to investigate the potentialities of the doer out of the meeting with the spectator situation. Through the songs of afro-Caribbean tradition he turned his research to the processes of transformation of the energy of the body, that is, how to pass from a vital, biological level, basic to life, how to arise towards some thing subtler, delicate, transparent, translucen t. The songs linked to actions and pulses of the body are an access road to organic processes, that has always interested Grotowski. But in the art as vehicle, this process is not formulated anymore but perceived by another person and becomes formulated by the laws of the flowing life. However those two processes happen almost at the same time in the performance of Reis of Mulungu.
Reis of Mulungu stands out for the vast repertoire of specific dances, that is not common in other groups of Reis. But it is in the dance of the bottle that this movement of the body in the passage from horizontality to the verticality is rendered in a clear way. When the owner of the house offers a bottle of cachaça, an extremely strong spirit made of sugar cane, the devotees dance equilibrating the bottle on their heads celebrating the pleasure of drinking and the owner of the house's good will in offering the drink. This fine and delicate balance is not opposed to the instinctive forces linked to the vital energy of those bodies that walk during about 30 hours without stopping, visiting all the houses and drinking sips of cachaça to wet their throats in order to sing Reis better. After the dance with the bottle on the head, a single glass of cachaça circulates for everybody, each one drinks fast from a single sip in order to pass the glass away as fast as possible.
Besides the spectacular dimension of this dance, that makes a lot of success in Reis of Mulungu's parade, we can say that there is a connection between verticality and configuration of the sacred space, besides the evident horizontality in the interaction with the owner of the house that hosts the Reis.