Night of the Non-Silent Drums

The highlight of my whole Recife/Olinda stay was my very last night. My little group of San Francisco Bay Area friends, plus Derek of the Lions from Portland (we had two Dereks - Bay Area Derek, and Lions Derek) had been in Recife rehearsing with Jorge Martins' group. We came home past 10pm. It had already been a really fun evening and I thought that was the end of my lovely Recife trip, and was planning to go home and pack up my two beautiful alfaias, but we ran smack into the Olinda's festival of the Night of the Silent Drums.

Recife and Olinda are always competing for who has the best Carnaval. There's a traditional night-of-the-silent-drums event in Recife, involving a parade of several maracatu groups to a church, and then a silent ceremony, and then all the drums playing at midnight. Well, little Olinda decided to start a night-of-the-silent-drums parade of its own, and to have it a week earlier, the Monday before Carnaval. They've only been doing it for three years. A Recife native told us dismissively "Oh, the Olinda thing is just for tourists; it's not worth seeing." Well, It IS worth seeing, we discovered, because it turns out whenever you get 12 genuine maracatu groups together for a parade, free on the street and open to everybody, it immediately turns into something real! Never mind if it is only three years old; it was huge fun. Olinda had scheduled a ton of different maracatu groups for this parade, even hired a separate plush charter bus for each group. The groups varied from the classic, well-rehearsed and magnificent (Leao Coroado, Nacao Pernambuco, and several others) to the little local blocos. The whole range of the community.

They all paraded right through town, and each one stopped and did a show at the Four Corners (right outside the window of my pousada!!!):


and then one at a time they all marched up to the Olinda's famous church. Each group did a full classic maracatu parade - meaning, a royal procession, with soldiers and torch-bearers in front, the great flag of the group, priestesses with magical little doll deities, king and queen, a parasol-bearer protecting the king and queen, a bevy of dancers, and then the band. Each group then did a short show (their one or two best songs) at the church, then the flag was lovingly propped at the church doors, and each king and queen ceremonially positioned themselves on the church steps. Then the next group would come up.

By the end of the procession the whole front of the church was completely hidden behind flags and parasols, and there were a whole herd of glittering kings and queens clustered by the doors.






Priestess dancing with the magical little doll:


View of the little church. There is a maracatu group (Nacao Pernambuco) waiting in the foreground.


A king and queen, with swords:


I squeezed up to the front of the church. Oh, it was SO fun watching each little group come up the hill, flag flying, giant parasols bouncing, the king and queen strutting along, and doing their best show! You know how it is - a little local event might SEEM little, but then each group realizes the other groups are there, and realizes there is an audience watching, and starts feeling competitive, and wants to do its best, and the whole thing starts heating up.





Leao Coroado was its usual powerful, impressive self. But the big surprise for me was Nacao Pernambuco. They had powerful drummers, a radiant king and queen, the best abe dancers, and they took absolute top prize for the most hypnotic dancing parasols. They had two enormous parasols that seemed like giant dancing space-alien jellyfish. I was mesmerized. I could not take my eyes off those giant dancing space jellyfish. It suddenly became clear to me that my life will not be complete until I have a giant dancing parasol of my own, preferably following me around full-time, with ostrich plumes bobbing, and a complete maracatu band in its wake. (I am posting a movie) It was like a revelation. How have I never noticed before that my life has been ENTIRELY lacking a giant dancing parasol?




Nacao Pernambuco also had some amazing shekere girls. I'll try to post a movie of that too.

The "silent drums" were not silent at all for most of this event, but eventually, once all 12 groups were there, the drummers all stopped playing and some sort of little ceremony took place, which I couldn't see or hear at all. But, the drums didn't stay silent for long. As soon as the ceremony was over, every group immediately started playing again.

The post-parade part was almost as fun. The ceremony was abruptly over and the groups started parading in all different directions, back toward the buses that had brought them, or toward their home neighborhood, or who knows where - there were parasols and flags bouncing in all directions and groups playing completely different things, funk and maracatu and rural-maracatu, at all different tempos, marching in all different directions. Kings and queens and giant jellyfish everywhere. Each group was more or less together, but they were each careering around in each others' paths, like big sailing ships tacking this way and that in a tiny harbor, nearly colliding now and then, then veering slowly away from each other. Twelve separate parties full of glittering royalty and half-drunken drummers. "This is complete fucking chaos!" yelled Lions Derek to me, beaming happily. We were trapped in a slow stampede of TWELVE MARACATU GROUPS! It was like the running of the bulls (second night in a row!), but in slow motion, and much noisier. Heaven!

The crowd slowly dissipated as the groups slowly spread further and further apart. We ended up following Nininho's group down one street to a sort of open cobblestoned plaza. Every now and then a huge charter bus, packed full of one of the maracatu groups, would nose into the plaze and carefully inch its way around the tight corner. Nininho's drummers would just keep on playing, grudgingly stepping over one inch at a time for the enormous bus, which was practically nudging them out of the way like an incredibly patient elephant trying to get through a herd of puppies. A couple buses went by and then, as I listened to Nininho's group, a sensation of peculiar sonic discomfort began to develop. Something funny was happening to the beat. I couldn't pinpoint what it was till one of the other maracatu groups suddenly came tromping around the corner - they were playing at top volume at a totally different tempo than Nininho's group, and it was causing such immense sonic dissonance for me (I was standing equidistant between both groups) that I felt like I was going to tip over from dizziness. Lions Derek, several yards away and also caught between both groups, wheeled around with a wide-eyed look of disbelief on his face and mouthed "Complete CHAOS!"

Night of the Non-Silent Drums. This was my best night in weeks.