Playful bodies, playful walking and other possible inventions at the São Marçal festivity in São Luís, MA

Abstract

The text intend to promote a dialogue about the playful, festive and walking body present at São Marçal Festival or “Encontro dos Bois”, as the party is also known, that takes place annually on June 30th, in the João Paulo neighborhood, in São Luís, Maranhão. The festival, which brings together the Matraca accent, takes place in the form of a procession or cortege, where the players move along the main avenue of the neighborhood. The discussion carried out concerns how walking reinvents modes of existence, especially how bodies experience the city’s public space, making the festive landscape a space for affective exchanges, nomadic creation and the generation of other possible worlds. To follow this proposal, Ethnocenology was called, an area of ethnosciences interested in the arts of the body and the spectacle, as a field of knowledge that respects the specificities existing in cultural phenomena.