Page 61 - Aesthetic Formations Media, religion, and the Sense

46 Mattijs van de Port

that we offer in terms of education, culture, science, all of which can of
course also contribute to a person’s understanding of things. (Mãe Stella, in
Pretto and Serpa 2002, 46)
Yet when I asked the manager of the terreiro’s Web site to explain the
choices underlying its content, I received a very brief response

We opted for this kind of information on our website. All other knowledge
can only be acquired through initiation. References to the orixás, their col-
ors, the days of the week consecrated to them, etc., that is a kind of knowl-
edge that is already widely available. We initiated this webpage to participate
on the Web, the importance is to be there. The question of the audience we
address, the number of people we reach, our aims, all of that is secondary. I
don’t know whom you could contact for further information.
When Mãe Stella orders visitors to her terreiro not to ask questions, but
simply observe the activities unfolding before their eyes, she voices a con-
cern over a shift in mediation: with ever more people knocking on her
terreiro’s doors wanting to hear her out—shoot pictures, make documen-
taries, write books and dissertations, hold interviews, be informed—dis-
cursive, rational forms of understanding threaten to outclass the bodily,
experiential forms of knowledge that Candomblé valorizes. What is at
issue is an attempt to safeguard a passive, time-bound, bodily order of
knowledge acquisition geared toward immersion in a world where learning
is understood as a fast, active, and efficient process of knowledge exchange
geared toward “getting the picture.”
The one example I will explore in greater depth so as to better grasp the
troubling aspects of Candomblé having become a simulacrum concerns
the Balé Folclórico da Bahia, the state folklore ensemble that puts on stage
a spectacularized version of the dances of the orixás. I can’t think of a
clearer case of the working of the simulacrum as the sheer effervescence
that is produced by this dance group, and unsurprisingly—there is no
group subject to more venomous critiques from Mãe Stella and her ideo-
logical company than the Balé.

The Controversy around the
Balé Folclórico da Bahia

The Balé Folclórico da Bahia exists since 1988. The company recruits its
dancers “from the street,” as Zebrinha, the company’s choreographer and
instructor, told me in one of our interviews. If they prove to be talented