Participation and coordination

In an aside to Catalan nationalism, every guidebook will send you to the Plaça Sant Jaume in Barcelona on Sunday morning to see the sardana, the national dance. You are instructed to observe the opening of the ring to admit all comers, young and old, known and unknown. The newcomers take up the nearest hands on either side and join the dance, an energetic ‘pointing’ of feet to the rhythms of a cobla, a dark-voiced but strident wind band. The best primers add that the dance was persecuted under the Franco regime, that the sober footwork bespeaks a classical spirit of order and seny (levelheadedness) derived from the first Greek settlers, that the expansive ring indicates commitment to equality and openness and that the intricacy of its timekeeping marks the national aptitude for business: ‘Catalans count even when they’re dancing.’

No tradition has been as thoroughly mythologized as the sardana. Nationalist youth today are likely to wince at the mention of it and direct the outsider's attention rather to the castells, human towers erected with dizzying speed and structural complexity. Both traditions were invoked in the opening ceremonies of the 1992 Olympic Games. If the sardana was made an emblem of Catalan tenacity from the Renaixença through the post-Franco Transition, the castell, drawn historically not from Old Catalonia but from the southern towns of New Catalonia, became from the 1980s a sign of the nation's power to renew itself.

Both forms had less idealistic beginnings in the dances held during festes majors (municipal patronal festivals) as a diversion and occasion of courtship. Each split off in the late eighteenth century from a dance of which it was the final, fastest, and most aggressive figure, becoming a vehicle for male display. The young men of Valls (Tarragona) became known for their increasingly daring reworkings of the athletic conclusion to the ‘dance of the Valencians’. They created ‘pillars’ of single men stacked up on one another's shoulders, becoming ‘towers’ of two, and ‘castles’ of three or four inter locked. As they rose skywards they diminished to a single small boy standing at the top, supported from below by an intricately ordered pinya (pinecone) of men, hands to backs, dissolving ultimately into the surrounding crowd.