23 Aug 2025
(18 Aug 2025)
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Rio de Janeiro, Brazil – 16 August 2025

1. Various high angle shots of Jongo Festival at Praça Tiradentes
2. Various of women singing and clapping hands
3. Large group of drummers playing
4. Man and woman doing the Jongo dance
5. Women watching and clapping
6. Various of couples dancing Jongo
7. Raquel Cunha, Jongo dancer, demonstrating USOUND (Portuguese)
“Before entering the circle we do a bow to the drums and salute the primeval tree. And then we dance.”
8. SOUNDBITE (Portuguese) Raquel Cunha, Jongo dancer:
“It’s like a waltz and a hunt. Always trying to be above and behind.”

9. Man and woman playing drums
10. Mestre (teacher) Cosme, drummer from Barra do Piraí, demonstrating drums UPSOUND (Portuguese) “We use two drums. This here is the Caxambú, the big one, and there’s the Candongueiro. I’m going to play the Caxambú beat.” (he plays).
11. Mestre Cosme, drummer from Barra do Piraí, demonstrating drums UPSOUND
“Now I’m doing the Candongueiro beat. It’s a more treble instrument”. (He plays again)

12. Drums on stage at Theatre Carlos Gomes
13. Jongo participants at congress in Theatre Carlos Gomes
14. Jongo masters on stage at Teatro Carlos Gomes
15. Drummers playing
16. People dancing onstage

ASSOCIATED PRESS
Rio de Janeiro, Brazil – 15 August 2025

17. Drummers playing at Jongo drumming class seminar
18. Seminar participants playing their drums Jongo style

ASSOCIATED PRESS
Rio de Janeiro, Brazil – 16 August 2025

19. Jongo players and dancers out in the street on their way from theatre to Tiradentes Square
20. Spontaneous Jongo gathering before the main event begins. Pedro Antonio Francisco dancing
21. SOUNDBITE (Portuguese) Pedro Antonio Francisco, festival goer:
“I love to dance Jongo. There are no words in the Portuguese language to say how much I like it.”

22. Drummers drumming
23. People dancing
24. SOUNDBITE (Portuguese) Mestre (teacher) Fatinha, festival goer from Pinheiral:
“Jongo was created in Brazil in the slave quarters, but the origins of the Black people, at least in this region, is Angola. When they reached Brazil, enslaved, they had to reinvent themselves. So Jongo was also a form of struggle for freedom.”

25. Various of drummers playing, and women dancing and singing
26. SOUNDBITE (Portuguese) Paulo Cesar dos Santos, Jongo Mestre (teacher)
from Barra Mansa:
“Jongo is an Afro Brazilian dance born at the time of slavery from the enslaved Black people who after an intense day of work met at the slave quarters to dance Jongo and exchange information, because in the Jongo gatherings there was dialogue among them which their enslavers could not understand.”

27. Drummers playing
28. SOUNDBITE (Portuguese) Paulo Cesar dos Santos, Jongo Mestre (teacher) from Barra Mansa:
“By singing they conversed with each other, sent messages without the plantation owners understanding what they were saying. They were songs sung in metaphoric language.”

29. People dancing Jongo, including festival organizer Marcos André Carvalho
30. SOUNDBITE (Portuguese) Marcos André Carvalho, Jongo Festival organizer:
“Here in Rio de Janeiro, the state’s capital it’s even more important because these quilombos (settlements) are very well hidden at the Coffee Valley and in the state’s Northwest, so coming to the cultural state capital is also showing their faces. There’s a deep interior in Rio and in Brazil which should be better known by tourists, by the whole world and even by the Rio locals. Many here don’t know what Jongo is.”

31. Leandro Estevão Nascimento showing the interior of a drum

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