Tonight was the final night of the Festa Major de Sant Barthomeu, which involved a lot of people in large circles doing the Catalan national dance... which is actually quite peculiar. It’s sort of ametrical (are there about nine, or twelve, steps in irregular groupings?) and extremely restrained, to say the least – frankly it’s about as fiery as soy milk. Susan and I were watching it for some time; she thinks it looks like the Hokey-Pokey (which, in Catalan, must be spelled Xocquit-pocquit). Certainly, you put your left foot in, then you undoubtedly put your left foot out, and there appears to even be a point where you shake it all about.
It’s sort of dignified, in an odd way – not grand, not stately, nor in any way even faintly sexy (an Iberian dance that is not sexy? just imagine). It must drive flamenco dancers mad: imagine all those flamenco types doing their best to make every move, every line, every growl, as elaborately, overbearingly sexy as they can while keeping their clothing on, yet next to them the Catalans are ignoring all their pornographic gyrations, instead endlessly and unflappably doing this rather odd jiggery-pokery – step-step, step-step-step, step....
More interesting, but just as peculiar, are the local bands, which feature shrill double-reeds; basically they’re ensembles of sopranino and (metal) tenor oboes backed by alto and tenor brass (with a pennywhistle and miniature drum to, uh, punctuate). The oboes (they’re apparently a saxophone-like variety of the ancient Greek aulos) are actually quite wonderful – it would be great fun to play one.
Ultimately, I suppose my favorite thing about Catalan culture is still the language, which seems so peculiarly like (and I know that this is linguistically impossible) a Flemish version of a Romance language. Admittedly, it’s nowhere near as weird as Basque, but still....
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