‘Carimbó Hype’: movement rescues popular rhythm in Pará with suburbs protagonism

Traditional Pará dance is being rescued with the vigor of Amazonian female artists and attracting more and more attention from young people (Credit: Fierce)

Bruno Pacheco – Cenarium Magazine

MANAUS – One of the most traditional rhythms of the country and that originated during the 17th century, in Pará, the Carimbó is the result of the strength and union of farmers who, at nightfall, after an exhausting day of work, danced to the sound of the Iindigenous percussion instrument ‘Curimbó’. In a hype movement, the dance is being rescued with the vigor of the Amazonian female artists and attracting more and more attention from young people.

Priscila Duque, 34, is a militant of social movements and feminist causes, singer and performer from Pará, vocalist of the group Carimbó Cobra Venenosa. She has a degree in Journalism and a Master degree in Social Sciences, both from the Federal University of Pará (UFPA). Born in Belém, the artist portrays, through music and dance, the voices of black, caboclo, and suburb women who fight for powerful spaces in society.

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“I am a black, Amazonian woman. I live most of my life in the district of Icoaraci. I am a militant of social movements and of feminist causes and I have been active in the peripheral protagonism since I entered the university through the student movement. I am the daughter of people who came from the countryside of the state, from the Cametá region. My whole family (grandparents, grandparents, parents, aunts and uncles), practically, were collectors and extractors from the forest, with the extraction of latex, cupuaçu, cacao, and andiroba”, says Priscila Duque.

With neon paintings all over her body, which represent the contemporaneity and identity built in six years of career, Priscila dances Carimbó (Credit: Fierce)

To CENARIUM MAGAZINE, Priscila recalls that Carimbó entered her life in different ways, and it stuck in a defining and troubled moment of the personal and professional trajectory she was taking, where nothing made sense. “I cried a lot. I consumed a lot of alcohol. I had a very unruly life outside work, when I came to my mother and said I wanted to know what to do with my life, because nothing made me feel full and fulfilled”, she said.

See also: Belém completes 406 years exporting habits and customs of the Amazon

At the time, in 2016, the turnaround in Priscila’s life began when she started going more often to the place she met ten years ago: Espaço Cultural Coisas de Negro, a reference in Belém in the musical practice of Carimbó, where she began to participate in workshops for the introduction of instruments and singing circles. With a camera, drums, maracas, and a banjo, the artist decided to pursue a musical career and, at 28, started singing and performing in the corners of Belém.

Priscila Duque says that Carimbó is what gave her life meaning (Credit: Fierce)

“The Carimbó was warming my heart and I consider that it was the cure, what gave meaning to my life. I am still in the process of understanding and knowing how to read all this, but I consider that the Carimbó was the connector that was missing for me, because I am black, indigenous, I come from a suburb community, from the countryside of the state, I am from the Amazon, and popular culture is the genuine expression of these people. It is not for nothing that I am in it, and it was not for nothing that it made sense to me”, reinforces Priscila.

The dance

Carimbó is the result of influences from indigenous and black cultures and comes from the Tupi-Guarani Korimbó, where Kori means “hollow stick” and m’bó “furado”, i.e., a hollow stick or a stick that produces sound. The expression also means “drum”, an instrument made out of a hollow tree trunk and indispensable in the musical performance of the Paraense rhythm. In the execution of the dance, performed in pairs and in the formation of a dance circle, women and men intertwine in touchless movements filled with sensuality.

The Carimbó dance is characterized by long, colorful skirts (Gustavo Serrate/Ministry of Culture)

The dance begins with men and women facing each other in a sort of circle. The gentleman goes toward the ladies and invites them to dance by clapping their hands. The girls move charmingly in their long, colorful, flowing skirts, trying to distract their companions and throw the garment over their heads in an episode that generates laughter.

At a certain moment, a couple of dancers go to the center of the round and perform the famous “Carimbó do Peru”, or “Peru de Atalaia”. The choreography makes the woman leave a handkerchief on the floor. The man, in turn, is obliged to pick up the piece with only his mouth. If the gentleman succeeds, he is applauded and stays in the dance. If the opposite happens, the boy is booed and asked to leave.

The cultural manifestation has been recognized since 2014 as an intangible cultural heritage of Brazil, in a unanimous vote by the Cultural Heritage Advisory Council.

Carimbó in the suburb

Created six years ago, on May 2, 2016, the Carimbó Cobra Venenosa has been working to rescue the music and taking the rhythm to the peripheral areas of Belém, seeking to occupy the city with art and culture. Vocalist Priscila Duque recalls that when the group began to be recognized artistically, in 2017, Carimbó started to influence the creation of other initiatives formed by younger people.

From left to right, Heron Rodrigues (drums), Priscila Duque (vocals), Lis Ferreira (maracas) and Astrum Zion (maracas and performance) are the members of Cobra Venenosa, (Credit: João Souza)

“We started to move this young scene in the city. And when we emerged, this group of people that ranged from 20 to 35 years old, most of them, lived with me. At that time, other initiatives did not have as much visibility, but when Cobra started to grow artistically and be recognized in the city, we practically played everywhere, and from 2017 on, other groups formed by younger people and in this more urban aesthetic began to emerge”, he highlights.

Priscila Duque is the group’s vocalist (Credit: Fierce)

Priscila says she is part of an important protagonism that painted Belém of Carimbó with a contemporary personality and grounded in values of freedom and transformation that leads the rhythm to be recognized with more urban characteristics in the capital. For the artist, from the culture of Carimbó, the youth of Pará gains the right to memory, ancestry, representativeness, and to occupy more spaces in the city.

“What the youth gain about the Carimbó is the right to memory, to ancestry, to representativeness, and to occupy spaces in the city with a genuinely popular culture made, historically, by workers of professions that involve a people who fight and work a lot, but that find in the Carimbó the right to dream”, comments Priscila Duque.

With neon paintings all over her body, which represent the contemporaneity and identity built in six years of career, Priscila performs the Carimbó dance and questions the beauty standards of society’s clothing and make-up, using recyclable materials for the elaboration of costumes.

“The neon, like all our visuality, represents this search for demarcation of a territory, which is contemporary because it is being made today, contemporary in poetry, because it criticizes values, standards, and social injustice, and also puts a black woman in the center, out of standards, with indigenous and peripheral features”, she concluded.

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