On the Scent of Festa Major
Nearly every Catalan city, town and neighborhood celebrates its own Festa Major, dedicated to its patron saint, and conveniently—suspiciously so—all the saints involved have their saints’ day during the height of summer. There is some kind of mass, ringing of church bells, etc. And although Vilanova i la Geltrú leaves this part out, most towns carry a representation of their patron saint as a key part of the street processions which form the most popular aspect of these festivals.
Over the centuries, many different ritual performances have become part of these processions and there are endless speculations about their Christian or pagan origins. And the festival has gone through many changes, particularly in the 20th century due to the civil war, the fascist/reactionary Catholic dictatorship, and the return of democracy with the legalization of the Catalan language and culture.
Characteristic elements of festa major are entremesos or the dances of beings from the Catalan bestiary such as dragons, giants and giantesses (always paired), big-headed dwarfs (capgrossos), giant unpredictable mules called mulasses and others, depending on local practice.
There are also the white dances, so called for the white shirt and pants that forms the basis of the otherwise widely varying outfits worn by human dancers. These dances include the bastons, moixiganga, gitanes, valencians, panderos, cercolets, cintes, and falcons.
In addition to these are swarms of devils and the gravity defying castells or human towers. Although many gangs are intergenerational, there are another ten gangs just for children whose dances enact local legends spanning medieval town origins to the coming of the railroad. Because children are often recruited through their schools, there are many immigrant children who take part in the various processions, which in turn involves their families as supporters and avid spectators. This is one of the ways that festival serves as a permeable gateway of entry for new arrivals to become a part of the local communitity.
Every single one of these gangs has its own group of musicians and traditional melodies specific to its performance. Some of them are “talking dances” that include satiric verses that change every year to provide social critique. And of course there are feasts and fireworks and concerts and kids’ activities and accessories and marching bands and dances and mementos and the mayor’s speech and media buzz and, above all, crowds and crowds of people thronging to be a part of the whole affair, which lasts more than a week and culminates in two days of nearly constant activity in which all the dancers and gangs make their frenzied way through as many as three or four processions throughout the town in a single day, beginning at dawn and culminating with a midnight frenzy of simultaneous dancing as fireworks rain down from above. In this, my last blog entry from Catalunya before returning to California, I will present a taste, or perhaps a whiff, of the Festa Major of Vilanova i la Geltrú.
Correfoc / Fire run
As with many of the town’s festivals, Festa Major begins with a purifying ritual of fire. Again, the chief of Vilanova’s oldest gang of devils invited me to accompany their infernal circuit as they lead a correfoc or fire run through the ramblas and plaçes. This would be the last time they wore their old hand-painted suits. Despite heavy construction, the suits were scorched and riddled with holes from the burning sparks of a decade’s use. In a few days they would unveil the new suits carefully designed and realized by a local artist who began the process over two years ago.
Many Vilanovans cower at the edges of the correfoc, drawn to the action but fearing burns and temporary deafness. A large contingent of teenagers takes the opposite approach, wearing thick shirts and broad-brim hats, they dance among the devils in glorious submission to the reign of fire.
Spiral galaxies of sparks and smoke bloom in the darkness, explosions and drums mimic creation’s big bang while the selfsame sparks spin infinitely inward tracing the microcosmic dance of electrons around nuclei: the inconceivable vastness of existence is made manifest only to be collapsed into the ungraspably miniature.
The old gang of devils is followed by newer gangs from other Vilanova neighborhoods, visitors from other towns, and the dragons, the beasts of fire. By the time they all reach the central plaça the smell of gunpowder and a pall of smoke hang over the town. Amidst the crowd all the beasts and demons ignite simultaneously and then the sky itself rained down fire, for lines of spark spewing pyrotechnics had been strung above the plaça earlier in the day. Festa Major had begun.
I join a gang: els Bordegassos de Vilanova
Under this subhead I will make a short temporal digression but will bring events back to festa major before it ends.
Most festival gangs (colles in Catalan) have a limited number of places and the waiting lists to get in stretch out for years. One of my informants danced as a member of the gitanes this year for the first time after waiting seven years to get in. I very much wanted to experience Vilanovin festival from within a gang but what was I to do? The ever helpful chief of the gang of devils suggested I join, els bordegassos, the gang of castellers, which has no limits to its membership and always needs more people. At least a hundred people are needed to carry out the basic repertoire and the largest constructions can involve up to 800 people.
I joined the gang in the spring which resumed practice after Carnaval in February and I donned the ochre yellow shirt that identifies its members. Castells have been described as a form of folk athleticism that reached its first peak of popularity in the nineteenth century (and is more popular than ever today). Gangs of day laborers traveled from town to town throughout the summer to perform for festes major and would be paid for their performance. A few gangs kept the practice alive throughout the 40 year dictatorship when many festival practices languished or were actually banned. And when Franco died in 1975, Catalunya exploded with a resurgence of every type of Catalan festival and folk activity which had been suppressed along with the Catalan language and any type of scholarship focused on Catalan geography, literature, philology, medieval art, etc.
Castells exist in three basic forms derived from vertical files of human beings: the pilar (single file), the tower (double file) and the castle (three to five files). Each one rests on a pinya (pinecone) or tightly packed scrum of people standing on the ground and builds from there. In the nineteenth century the gangs were all male laborers, now they are highly integrated social collectivies including women and men of widely different physical builds, ranging in age from 4 years old to past retirement, being a place of welcome for immigrants from around the world, and at least in Vilanova, including a number of people with developmental disabilities. Families of castellers are common. A valiant child as young as five scrambles to the seventh, eight or ninth level of the constructions that can loom 30 to 40 feet above the ground, while her mother might inhabit the fourth or fifth level, her father or grandfather bears the weight on their shoulders and her grandmother judiciously wedges herself into a gap in the pinya to keep it from moving. The castell is an organic form of architecture assembled with great care, technical and strategic sophistication and lots of practice. Every person is critical to the success and safety of the collective. A single person’s dropped knee can bring the whole structure down.
I started learning in practice to occupy various positions in the pinya such as the “buttress” who stands behind the “bottom” who directly bears the weight from above on his shoulders (these are usually stocky men). I learned a number of other positions with their functions of distributing weight and stabilizing the overall structure. On our first outing of the spring, during a morning procession through the town (where we were given wine and snacks for breakfast in each neighborhood we stopped to make a pilar in), I was asked without warning to be the bottom of the next pilar. I gulped and said yes. A young man faced me, breathing the scent of a recently downed shot of anís in my face while another held me from behind and a compact group pressed around me. I then felt a pair of feet standing on my shoulders and I was asked if it felt okay. It felt heavy but not painful or unbearable so I said yes. As another person climbed up the back of the one standing on my shoulders I suddenly remembered that I had dislocated my right knee cap a few years before and tried to stifle fear while willing the knee to remain rigid. Another person climbed up as I felt the combined force compact my body. I was breathing heavily, I feared a heart attack, that my bones would break, that my knee would collapse or that I would cry uncle and feel defeated. I felt a little off balance with too much weight on my right leg and croaked out that I was too far to the right. This was interpreted as a call for more pressure to the right and now I felt even more precarious. But something else was happening. There was cheering, and the song of the grallers (the strident reed instruments that accompany castells) had signaled the completion of the pilar meaning that the child on top had saluted the plaça and was now coming down. The weight began to lessen and finally I was unburdened. The next thing I knew I was being congratulated, hugged, slapped on the back and feeling not only the elation of a successful public performance but gratitude for survival without injury. I have now been a baix (bottom) various times and it gets easier with experience although my modest accomplishment extends only to castells as high as six stories. (The highest we made this year was 8 and the highest ever made are 10 stories high).
Castells do fall (the expression for collapse is fer llenya meaning “to make kindling”). Our own colla fell twice this season resulting in bruises and scared, crying children. The people fallen on generally take bigger lumps than the children, teens and slimmer adults from above whose fall is broken by those below. But it looks frightening and there is always an element of danger in each castell.
During the evening procession on the first of the two culminating days of festa major, I marched with the bordegassos at the end of all the dances and entremesos, stopping to make relatively small pilars, 4 or 5 tall, along the way. I was baix in the "Plaça of the Cabbages" and as we neared the central plaça I was asked to be “second” for the next pilar. The “second” is the person who stands on the shoulders of the “bottom” and on whose shoulders stand at least two more people. I had never done it even in practice and I was a little nervous but of course I agreed. I climbed up and stood on the shoulders of the “bottom” and awaited instructions. There were a lot of people in the streets and a lot of noise, at least four of my comrades were yelling instructions at me and I knew I was doing something wrong but had no idea what, being unable to hear and understand them. Finally I realized I needed to bend my knees, and then Belen, a teen-aged girl climbed up my back. As I had seen other people do, I put my left hand behind my back for her to use as a step and held my right hand up with my elbow bent at a right angle for her to grasp above. She placed her left hand on my head and pulled herself all the way to a standing position while I held her calves. A child then climbed both our backs to the top and stood and saluted the crowd. The grallers trilled, the crowd clapped and my comrades whooped and cheered. After coming down I was affectionately and extravagantly congratulated for passing another milestone (or test?) and handed a cold beer as soon as I had re-laced my espardenyes, (the footwear part of the casteller uniform).
So many people I had spoken to over the past months had described the euphoria of their participation in Vilanova’s festivals and their profound sense of local pride and belonging. I was filled with these feelings myself as we neared the central plaça but just before we turned the corner to gather in front of city hall where we were to make a series of large castells, the president of the gang called the adults together into a close huddle.
He had just received terrible news. During the festa major in the town of Mataró, their gang of castellers had attempted a castell of nine which had collapsed. The twelve year girl at the top fell directly on the pinya headfirst and received serious head trauma. She had been rushed to the hospital and received two operations but had died after the second operation. The association of gangs of castellers had communicated to all the gangs across Catalunya and called for a suspension of castells for the weekend. Instead of the larger, more complex castells we would have attempted, we made a silent pilar (without the music of the grallers) in homage to our young fallen sister, Mariona Galindo i Lora (1993-2006).
I joined the carpools of bordegassos to attend the funeral the next day in Mataró. On route, one of the old timers pointed out that, statistically, making castells is safer than many other athletic activities and this was only the third fatality in the history of castellers (there was one in 1871 another in 1983). He said that, even so, this death would generate pangs of doubt in casteller families, and that it may take a while for these understandable fears to be overcome.
Nine gangs came in their colors—reds, greens, ochres, pinks, lilacs—to condole the loss of the blue-clad capgrossos of Mataró. We stood outside the church next to the hearses loaded with wreathes from gangs all over Catalunya and watched as the child-sized coffin was borne into the dark church. The service was broadcast through loud speakers as we stood in the shade of two immense plane trees (many Catalans consider themselves Catholic but will not enter a church because of the church's support for the dictatorship’s persecution of their people). The officiant used the metaphor of the castell to describe the girl’s final climb, all the way to the stars. A song of farewell was sung and many of us were choking back tears: even though none of us had met the girl, she could just as easily have been one of the children in our gang, and in a larger sense I suppose she was.
The service ended, those inside the church came out into the light and stood with the capgrossos in their blue shirts. We others, arrayed before the church, made nine simultaneous silent pillars in a casteller’s memorial salute. We all left the plaça silently.
The end of the festa
The bordegassos made it back to Vilanova in time for the last great procession of festa major. The devils, the giants, the dragons, the big-heads, the fire-spewing fish, and all the many groups of dancers and musicians snaked their way through the darkening streets and throngs of townspeople. Finally, everyone converged on the plaça of the snows, named for the festival’s patron saint, Santa Maria de les Neus (Our Lady of the Snows). At midnight, everyone started dancing at once, the devils and dragons simultaneous showered sparks amidst the crowd, and from the top of the church, a fireworks display was launched, illuminating everything with colored strobes and raining hot cinders upon the ecstatic revelers below. By this time everyone was extremely hungry for dinner and soon the bars and restaurants were packed. I suspected that no one would be getting up very early in the morning and I, for one, did not.
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posted by Brad at 3:53 AM
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