Opening a Ceremony in Sequins

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

The salute performed with the drapo Vodou at the start of a ceremony is a piece of choreographed ritual grammar in its own right, not a decorative preliminary: the flag-bearers, called la place and often accompanied by a sword-bearer, present the flags in sequence to the peristyle's center post, to the presiding priest or priestess, and to the assembled congregation, tracing out in movement the same hierarchy of respect (the sacred space, the ritual authority, the community) that the ceremony as a whole will go on to observe. Choosing which flag opens which ceremony is not arbitrary either, since the veve or emblem sewn into the fabric identifies a specific lwa, and a house's collection of flags functions as a kind of visual roster of the spirits that congregation regularly serves, brought out according to which spirit the day's ceremony is meant to honor. The dense, light-catching sequin work, achieved by a technique requiring thousands of individually placed sequins, has made accomplished flag-makers recognized artists whose work commands attention from museums and collectors well beyond Vodou's own religious community, one of the clearer instances of a devotional object in this atlas crossing fully into the category of fine art without ceasing to do its original ceremonial job.