Twelfth International Conference on Religion & Spirituality in Society

Abstract

In the Brazilian ayahuasca religion, Santa Daime, a collective dance practice called the bailado is performed at least eighteen times throughout the liturgical calendar year. The bailado, which can last up to twelve hours, distinguishes Santo Daime from other approaches to work with psychedelics that emphasize stillness and physical passivity. The choreography of the bailado evokes healing currents associated spatially, spiritually, and epistemologically with the Forest as a living being. Founded in the southern Amazon in the 1930s, the bailado is now present in more than forty countries on all inhabited continents. Originating from Indigenous knowledge systems as part of a psychedelic religion from the global South now traveling throughout the global North, this spiritual dance practice represents the people, culture, and histories of the Amazon Forest as it travels. In this paper I propose that the subjectivities performed and produced through the bailado encourage resistance against hegemonic norms of neoliberal capitalist subjectivities by orienting the self to the spiritual and the ecological. Situating my project in the field of dance studies, I analyze the bailado through the lens of choreography as presenting and producing deep, enduring cultural values of people, spaces, and temporalities of the early twentieth century Amazon Forest as a living, subjective, spiritual being.