A Dance To The Music Of Time

There was a "ball de bot" the other evening in Playa de Muro. Well, there was meant to have been, but Thursday's wild weather may have forced its abandonment. Whatever. The ball de bot, a staple of fiestas, is also dragged onto the municipal building forecourt or onto other places, like the Paseo Marítimo in Alcúdia, to act as a piece of Mallorcan authenticity to be enjoyed by local and tourist alike.

The ball de bot is at the heart of Mallorca's folkloric traditions. It can be compared to Morris dancing, but only in the sense that it is a form of folk dance; it doesn't have the weirdness of the Morris dance. And generally it is not performed by men with beards. There is, however, a potential link - the Morris name is widely assumed to be connected with the Moors; the Morris dance is a kind of distant cousin perhaps to the ball de bot.

The survival and omnipresence of the ball de bot at the fiestas are testimony to the strength of the local folk tradition, and, unlike Morris dancing, it doesn't attract piss-taking; it's all quite serious. A while ago, one of the strange attempts at defining Englishness included Morris dancing as an indication thereof. It was wrong-headed as it is not a tradition taken seriously by most people. Only its very oddness and eccentricity could be said to be typical of a strand of Englishness; the dance is almost beside the point when set against the sight of men in peculiar outfits waving hankies. The ball de bot is neither odd nor eccentric; it is typically Mallorcan for the dance alone.

Attend a fiesta or fair locally, and at some point there will be a ball de bot, often performed by the same troupe - Sarau Alcudienc - which gets its fair share of bot gigs throughout the fiesta season and as part of the promenade entertainment for the masses in summer. But it is not the only ever-present. Others are the local bag-pipe players ("xeremiers") and the giants ("gegants"). Each town or village seems to have its own giants. Pop in, for example, to Muro town hall and they are standing there, huge and surreal in the reception area. One time when they were hauled down to Playa de Muro to put in a guest appearance, they were then left lying on their backs in the reception of the municipal building; sleeping it off following the revelries of the local fiesta while tourists, town hall staff and members of the Guardia Civil navigated courses around their prone bodies.

And there is more surrealism in the form of the "caparrot", another type of giant but one with head masks that has come to embrace satire. Typically, local politicians might find the rip being taken out of them by a caparrot, and, let's face it, there is plenty to take the rip out of, though how a head mask can quite convey the sense of money being buried in a garden is open to some wild imagination.

It is a fair question to ask quite why these traditions have held sway. I read the other day about a Mallorca of a childhood perhaps some 40 or 50 years ago. While the fiestas formed a part of that time, the reminiscing was not a million miles away from an English childhood, certainly one in less urban or rural areas. While there weren't the fiestas as in Mallorca, there were the fetes, the fairs, the traditions of Pancake Day, Guy Fawkes and May Day. These survive, but have been corporatised in the case of Bonfire Night, while others are probably regarded as being rather quaint or absurd in a more cynical culture. The obvious difference lies with the religious basis of the fiesta, and yet devout Catholicism holds far less influence than was once the case.

I have suggested previously that perhaps the survival of Mallorcan traditions is a reaction to change; a mass psychology of introspection that seeks reassurance in a past when the present suggests the loss of that past. Or maybe it is simply a case of relativeness in terms of time. Mallorca has only been "industrialised" for some 50 years; an essentially agrarian society half a century ago still maintains the links to the traditions of the small villages and towns. Mallorca became a consumerist society later as well, not just because of the backwardness and isolation of the island until relatively recently but also because of the inhibition of much of the Franco era. And in the fiestas one might even divine a certain post-Franco reaction. Anything regional, especially if it was couched in a Catalan tongue, was something the Generalissimo was ill-disposed towards, and accordingly some of the traditions were repressed.

There is no sense that these traditions are about to be lost. The still closeness of the communities, despite the wealth that has been accrued since the tourist industrialisation, reinforces the traditions. There is also no sense in which the traditions are forced, as in we must at all costs not allow our traditions to die out. They happen because they always happen. The fiestas may be repetitious - year after year they have a distinct sameyness - but there are always the giants and the pipers and the ball de bot. Same every year. And not about to change.

Here is a youtube link for a ball de bot - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H0XEXSekpd4


QUIZ
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