The shape of a work

The salão is rectangular or star-shaped, built around a central altar. The congregation is divided by gender — men to the left as you face the altar, women to the right — and the women's side is organised in three groups, with the puxadora at the front of the nearest one. Musicians sit toward the front. A bell beside the entrance opens the proceedings.

Fardados stand in lines ordered by height; paisanos and visitors take the places behind them or the benches. A fardado may leave for the space of three hymns, having told the companion to their right, and if the absence runs longer the line closes up from the left.

Every work opens with the defumação, the smudging — rosemary, benzoin, lavender, sage, cedar, rue, guiné — which the tradition reads as clearing the room and the people in it, and compares to washing the hands before a meal. It also says, plainly, that a good smudging is worth nothing if the conduct does not change with it.

Prayers open and close each work: the Our Father, the Hail Mary, the Salve Regina, the Creed. The sources never give a running order beyond that, and never say how many of each — so neither does this page.

Three steps, one per rhythm: marcha in two, valsa in one, mazurca in three. They are simple and they repeat, which is the point — the attention is meant to be on the hymn and on the group rather than on the feet. The tradition likens the motion to the swaying of the sea, and holds that the Queen of the Forest set the length of a bailado at twelve hours, by the cycle of the tides.

The dance was introduced in 1936, after six months of rehearsal, and it is not understood as an accompaniment to the singing. It is described as a collective work on energy: the lines generate a current that everyone present draws on, and the separation of men and women is given as part of the mechanism rather than as decorum.

Acclamations, given standing and preferably facing the cross, by the person leading the work or someone appointed to it. Eight are fixed and come in order.

Beyond those, vivas may be given to the owner of the hinário being sung, to the saint of the day, to visitors, to those with birthdays, to the newly fardado, to the newly married, to the children, to the individual churches, to love and to joy. They are withheld at healing works, at concentrations, before the Confession is sung in a hinário, and on Holy Thursday and All Souls — the three points in the year where the tradition wants silence rather than acclamation.

An official calendar sets which hinário is sung on which date, and the effect is that churches across the world are singing the same hymns on the same night. That, more than any institution, is what holds a tradition together that has no central authority and two lines that do not recognise one another's succession.