Courteous and folkloric dance

This weekend we had an amazing dance course. Carles Mas, great dance and music teacher, brings us closer to the 15th century dance models. In the context of this rich visit, at the seminar we have held in Igartza (Beasain), a spark to write this post has been provoked by a note by Carles Mas. The workshop has focused on the relationship between the types of courtier dance collected and the choreographic traditions we identified in folklore. In order to better understand the old dance system of Gipuzkoa, Mikel Sarriegi enters the dance systems of the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance era opened by Juan Antonio Urbeltz and Ikerfolk.

By connecting these two worlds through dance, Carles Mas warned us that the cult system of dance developed at the humanistic summit in the courts of European cities and the undervalued and shadowed folklore expressions in the small and humble villages on the shores of Europe are linked, one to the other, with the risk of valuing them from fragility. "Courtier worship is no more complex, more technical, richer, more developed and higher than what can be found in folklore," he told us. "They share many elements and foundations, and they have the criteria and characteristics that distinguish them, but in what is in folklore you can find all the richness and complexity of what is collected."

Complex disability

But it's hard to get rid of that complexity. It is also a complex that has intensified in recent years in Basque dance and traditional Basque culture. Without knowing the details of the capabilities, resources and system of traditional Basque dance, some creators, groups and institutions are committed to the need to "mix", "combine", "complement" other choreographic languages with international guarantee. Joann Kealiinohomoku once struck the complex dependency and scarcity of the traditional dances of each place with respect to classical dance, analyzing academic ballet as a local ethnic dance, and making a destructive critique of having accepted ballet as an absolute meter to value or belittle the rest of the dances.

The perverse superiority attributed to classical dance as the main language of dance and its complex dependence on dance have turned the idealized standard of ballet into an absolute meter for valuing Basque dance that has nothing to do with it. Basque dance is recognized as it approaches the aesthetic and bodily model of ballet and as it moves away from it it becomes invalidated. Next to classical dance the paradigm of contemporary dance has come, so now the Basque dance has two mirrors that must be looked at to give its measure, which must be imitated over and over again: one more aesthetic-formal, another more conceptual. We used to have one slavery, now two.

This humility is us

In most sections of Artedram's body expression, both visual and auditory, in dance, theatre, music, etc., one can see the enslavement of academicism and the complex shortage of traditional Basque expressions. From the complex scarcity of what is called "high culture", the masks and distractions do not become a Theater written in capital letters; they are not the flow of a professional and approved sector accredited by Scene National or DFeria, but the stupid game of ordinary amateurs and unlearned citizens.

Txistularis, albokaris or trikitilaris, and the music they make, is ethnic music, folkloric, unpretentious, and of course without guarantees académicas.En search for that recognition and accreditation, several musicians have fallen into a race of tests and demands that never ends. And at the same time, rejecting their past, they despise and insult musicians who have not been implicated in that path, who are not concerned with meeting academic standards.

Cultural dependence

"Defy," "traps," "you have no technique," "you don't know music,"...The violence of complex superiority has humiliated musicians and singers of Basque tradition, wonderful and brilliant. Newborns and raised in the same nest of those who now despise them, but reddened by the origin they want to hide, deny their own culture and become the most aggressive destroyers of it.

In the face of these attacks, it must be pointed out that traditional cultural manifestations do not comply with the rules of academicism, which have its own system. Yes, in theatre, in dance, in music... it has been and is a traditional system differentiated outside the approved international standards and academicistas.Los Basque we have had a system of own cultural expression: rich, complex, technical, artistic, communicative, symbolic, social, cultural. It was equipped with its own magnitudes and scales and did not need the criterion and meter of another system to value its flow.

As for the song, Agustin Mendizabal has unveiled one of the peculiarities of this system in his talk "Euskal kantuaren intonazio berezazioa." The very feature that academicism has condemned and managed to almost challenge, analyzes in the lecture the feature of the traditional Basque song that Mendizabal calls "neutral or mediocre intonation."

I would like to denounce that the new converts attacking the expressions of the traditional system since academicism are working as executioners at the service of cultural colonialism which is destroying the traditional Basque cultural system.

This article has been posted by Dantzan.eus and we brought it with the Creative Commons license.