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me an e-mail (tobias.reu@gmx.net)From Corpus Christi to Folkloric Pageant
Dances of the Conquest and the Staging of Nation in Bolivia
by Tobias Reu, New York University, Dep. of Anthropology
In present day Bolivia, folkloric pageants ('entradas folklóricas') are not only an essential part of ubiquitous Carnivals and Patron Saint Fiestas, but also a performance genre within Bolivian public life which helps constitute and assert to Bolivians the essence of Bolivianness as very few others do. The two largest of these pageants, the Carnival in Oruro and the one held in Cochabamba in the context of the Fiesta de la Virgen de Urkupiña are officially elevated to the rank of events of national integration, and similar pageants and Fiestas proliferate in all the major cities of the country and are even held abroad, wherever Bolivians live in sufficient quantities to form one or a couple of dancing fraternities.
The pageants consist of a series of dances of diverse provenience. The newcomers within the repertoire mainly take up real or imagined dances or ritual performances of the indigenous peasant population of one or another part of Bolivia, in the classics, like Diablada ('The Devil's Dance') and Incas (the conquest of the Inca empire by the Spaniards), one can clearly discern vestiges of the colonial situation and the performance genre of Conquest Plays and Dances this engendered all over Latin America, mainly as part of Corpus Christi processions and other religious festivities.
My site tries to shed some light on the genealogy of folkloric dancing in Bolivia. It aims particularly at the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when the grand mises en scène of colonial power relations through religious processions had lost its vigor and the rise of folkloric pageants in the context of Bolivian nationalism was yet to come. There is a series of illustrations in the image section and an essay for the visitor with interests in the details and academic discussions surrounding this topic. Please enjoy!