Abstract
The main approaches in Candomblé possession helped to look away from the first anthropologists dance of possession as such: sometimes reduced to the expression of mental disorders, their supposed function or mythological dimension. By adopting a more focused on the performance of the possessed dance, this article seeks to capture the mechanism of the “put‐in‐presence” of the divine. It is argued that the presence of the gods is the result, always temporary, of a “virtuous circle” between the polarities imaginative, kinesthetic, and emotional performance. Then we propose an analysis of the technics body mobilized in dance for a particular orixá, from various theoretical proposals. To close, we outline a perceptual theory of dance of possession, taken as one form of social perception “derived”, centred on a use “extra‐ordinary” of body and emotions.