Get it for me!
Posted by tiltiblog on September 16, 2008
Over the last few days, I’ve been Internetting professionally pretty much exclusively. Wha? Swear. So, I haven’t been lovin’ the Internet much. In fact, I would say it would have been a stretch to express my sentiments towards It with any real warmth. There’s been a cooling.
But today I experienced one of my favorite Internet interactions: I told it to get me something I didn’t even know the name of, and it complied. Utterly!
For there is a centuries old form of Catalan dance that I stumbled across whilst in the small village of Begur, in Catalunya, España. My party went to dinner one night and when we emerged into the town square, rings of people were everywhere, hopping in dainty and ever-increasing-in-speed steps. A band was assembled on a small stage in front of The Church. It was delightful, mysterious, ancient-seeming and new. And really fun to watch.
Well this was a couple of weeks ago. Yesterday I was showing a friend a photo of this dance from my trip but couldn’t remember its name. But lo and behold “dance+catalan” was really all it took to get me started. Behold, the Sardana!
Begur Saturday Night Fever
Even better than spitting out dance facts, the Internet will show you the Sardana. Can you imagine? El Internet will show you people doing a dance that probably was created in the 1600s. Don’t imagine: click it.
If I may quote from wikipedia for the fun, “There is a pattern of tirades danced, which may be curts, curts, llargs, llargs, curts, curts, llargs, llargs; a two-measure break called contrapunt; llargs; contrapunt; llargs.”
LLARG! That sounds hard.
And for your information, Curt LLarg is not your local Supervisor, but simply Catalan: ‘curt’ = ‘short’ and ‘llarg’ = ‘long.’
More Sardana action after the dainty hop.
Dansa, dansa!
The Cobla
