Maracatu

Traditional nações perform by parading with a drumming group of 80–100, a singer and chorus, and a coterie of dancers and stock characters including a king and a queen.

The performance also enacts pre-colonial African traditions, like parading the calunga, a doll representing tribal deities that is kept throughout the year in a special place in the nação's headquarters.

The calunga is sacred, and carrying this spiritual figurehead of the group is a great responsibility for the female Dama de Paço (Lady-in-Waiting) of the cortège.

Brought to Fortaleza, Ceará, in 1936, maracatu cearense has since been cultivated as the city's most distinctive Carnival performance tradition, owing in part to its use of blackface makeup to enact Afro-Brazilian characters and male-to-female transvestitism of the important female personages, particularly the queen.

Its rhythms are described locally as cadenciado, "cadenced," which amounts to a less syncopated, steadier 2/4 meter and a slower tempo than is found in the maracatu nação of Pernambuco, sometimes as slow as 45 beats per minute.

Instead of the gonguê, large single-head bell, maracatu cearense uses the ferro, a heavy iron-slab triangle, to keep its steady duple rhythm.

Every year, different maracatu cearense nations parade in Fortaleza's traditional municipal Carnival competition, normally taking place at Domingos Olímpio Avenue.

Among these is Nação Iracema, founded in 2002 by Lúcia Simão and William Augusto Pereira, heads of the first black family in Fortaleza to direct a maracatu nation (current as of 2009[update]).

[2] This consciousness of racial equality operates through maracatu cearense performance in part as the continuation of Ceará's historical identity as the first region in Brazil to abolish slavery, in May 1884 (the rest of the nation followed suit in 1888).