Carnival and Other Christian Festivals: Folk Theology and Folk Performance

2. Flowers for Saint Tony (Aragon)

. Flowers for Saint Tony () W   on the music for his ballet suite The Three-Cornered Hat, the Spanish composer Manuel de Falla visited the small Aragonese town of Fuendetodos (Zaragoza), where he was treated to a midday banquet in the town hall. Intending to honor both Falla and the musical traditions of the region, a diva in his party stepped outside onto the balcony and sang, with a skill honed on the concert stage, the Aragonese jota from Falla’s Seven Spanish Songs. The members of the packed crowd in the square below greeted her highbrow rendition of their popular music with puzzled silence.They didn’t recognize it as a jota. That night, in the narrow streets of Fuendetodos, Falla heard the young men of the town sing traditional jotas with a passion that evoked fervent applause. He understood the earlier silence of the crowd and was deeply moved. The final dance of The Three-Cornered Hat, which Diaghilev ’s Ballets Russes opened in London in July , is set to a sparkling jota that owes much to Falla’s time in Fuendetodos.1 Many years later, not far from Fuendetodos, I had a similar awakening. I knew that folk theater was as capable as any professional theater of embodying profound human emotions and addressing complex social issues, but I was not yet fully aware of folk theater’s rich theological dimension. My appreciation of folk theology, like Falla’s admiration of his country’s folk music, first took conscious form in Aragon. It happened in September , during a fiesta mass in honor of San Antolín in Sariñena (Huesca), some eighty-five miles by road from Fuendetodos and about twice as many from Vilafranca del Penedès. I had left Vilafranca before the third procession of Saint Felix to be in Sariñena for the start of its own more tranquil saint’s day festival. The first night of the fiesta was full of romance. Six musicians playing guitars, mandolins, and a ukelele joined two master singers of the traditional jota in a tour of the narrow, cobbled streets of the old town.2 Under spar-  +      kling stars, they serenaded old women in doorways and young girls on balconies , weaving personal names into traditional love lyrics and singing to all— of whatever age or beauty—with splendid passion. Some responded in kind. A wrinkled widow, her eyes shining, sang an ardent love song. A younger woman stepped into the street and sang a powerful jota. Householders provided food and drink for the performers and the crowd. We ate bread, ham, and cheese and drank wine from a common skin, throwing our heads back, raising the wineskin high, and pouring a thin stream of airborne liquid into our mouths. Once, turning a corner, we were met by a group of boys who blocked the street and hefted one of their number, no more than twelve years old, onto their shoulders. Solo, he sang a jota that impressed even the masters . Long after midnight, while the joteros were still making their romantic rounds, I wandered back to my hotel and fell happily asleep. The next morning, I followed the fiesta parade from the eastern edge of town to the central Plaza de España. The baton-twirling majorettes, the town’s marching band, and the six young queens of the fiesta (mairalesas), waving at the crowd from their tractor-drawn float, were recent innovations .3 An older tradition was represented by the sixteen men and eight boys who performed an intricate stick dance (Fig. .). The men wore checked bandannas, red and green sashes crossed over white shirts, black knickers, white lace stockings, bells strapped onto their right calves, and lightweight dancing sandals.4 The boys substituted blue sashes and white cotton skirts trimmed with lace.To an outsider, the skirts appear to feminize the boys, but Jaime Martín Coto, the maestro of the dance team, assured me that the boys were initiates into a religious rite and were dressed in the manner of candidates for the priesthood. Similar white dresses, with ‘‘liturgical antecedents ,’’ were the common costume of sixteenth-century ritual dancers.5 They are still worn by adult male dancers in both Graus (Huesca) and Peñíscola (Castellón). Music for the dance was supplied by a single bagpiper.6 The dancers were followed by a comic devil and his seven-year-old apprentice diablito (little devil). In the past, the devil used to lift young women ’s...