What Makes Catalunya Tick: The Dance

There’s a popular show on TV3 called Ca?adors de paraules - word hunters -  presented by the inimitable chat show guy Roger de Gr?cia (yes - I wondered too - but this is his real name, not a stage name, as his bio at the TV3 website assures us). It looked fun from the trailers but I never got round to seeing it until I got hooked on the drama series Zoo. Programmes on TV3 never start on time, so I got to see Ca?adors while waiting for Zoo to start.  Basically Roger de G goes wandering around the terres catalanes chatting to people and doing activities with them and eliciting local and dialect words. And yes, it’s great fun,  but breathless MTV style editing means you can barely take anything in. At least the words Roger has hunted down are flashed on the screen for a nanosecond or two.

Last night, as I rushed in and out of my living room doing stuff before Zoo came on, I caught bits of our Roger amongst flowering almond trees and weatherbeaten men wielding rakes... and the next time I rushed in he was in La Cerdanya and mentioned, I think, that the sardana may have originated up there: the old alternative spelling was cerdana. This caught my attention because the sardana is one of those key make-Catalunya-tick things that I promised I would blog about, and I'd often wondered where the word came from. Nothing to do with pigs - cerdos in Castilian - Roger hastened to add as a close-up of a piglet filled the screen. Quite. Cerdanya appears to come from the Latin name for the region, Cerretana. Sardana. The Catalan national dance and one of the great symbols of Catalan culture, famously banned by Franco and danced at clandestine meetings in private houses. We know we'll probably get shot for saying this, but we find it hard to see what the fuss is about. The sardana is terribly sedate, and, given the intricate footwork, the dancers' faces are set in oh-so-serious, this-is-our-national-treasure concentration. The music, played by a cobla (a woodwind and brass band of 11 players) is, to our ears, repetitive and borderline irritating. But, as the Catalans point out, the sardana is totally democratic. Just throw your coat and bag on the heap in the centre and join the circle. You don't need to wear espadrilles, but it helps. That's what we wrote about the sardana in our book In The Garlic. See what we mean? Anyway, since then, I've been told that the dance wasn't officially banned under Franco, although as the whole idea was to crush Catalunya by crushing its language and, thus, culture, the myth certainly does poetic justice, and the dance became loaded with connotations of courageous resistance and clandestine meetings (the Institut d'Estudis Catalans, Catalunya's equivalent of the stuffy Real Academia de la Lengua Espa?ola, for example, went underground). I've also discovered that there are several theories about the origins of both the dance and the word, none of them proven. Anyway, there's a Wikipedia article in English on the sardana. I couldn't help myself - I just had to tidy up the English a bit - you know, correcting spelling mistakes and so on. The article started off pretty well, but the later paragraphs about the instruments that make up the cobla - the band that plays the sardana music - seemed to have been written or translated by someone with a less firm grasp of English. I continued with my nitpicking. When I got to the ?one-keys trombone' I decided I needed a break. And when I got to the bit about the double bass I saved the page and staggered from my desk, head reeling. The double bass, we are told, is normally a three-goat-stringed one. Valerie Collins is co-author, with Theresa O?Shea, of In The Garlic: Your Informative, Fun Guide to Spain.