Poemas del río Wang: dance

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Noruz in the Kotti • Nouruz en la Kotti

Noruz, 21 March, New Year’s Eve in Persia and in the neighboring countries:
• Happy New Year, Persia
• Noruz in the old town of Baku
• A rich Noruz table
• Equinox
• Children’s paintings for Noruz
• The return of Noruz

The Kottbusser Tor is the center of the almost one hundred thousand Kurds living in Berlin. Here is the Kurdish cultural center and mutual aid society as well as the Kurdish library, and the surreal-shaped high-rise buildings around the square are inhabited by a significant number of Kurds, whose activists protest against the high rents in the wooden cabin set up in the square. It is clear therefore, that they organize here the Noruz-day festivities, with dancing and a stake tamed to the conditions of Berlin.

According to the bill posted in the Kurdish restaurant Şehr-i Simit, that is Pretzel City, the festivities begin at five o’clock, but already at four there are many people in the square. They warm themselves in the drizzling rain with the tea offered by the activists, and they live social life. Then around half past four someone goes to the laptop on the top of the speaker knocked together from an oil-drum, and starts the previously compiled tracklist. Booming Kurdish music fills the square. The groups are dissolved in no time, people stand up in a circle. The dance begins, and it will go on until late night.

La Kottbusser Tor es el punto de encuentro de los casi cien mil kurdos que viven en Berlín. Aquí está el centro cultural kurdo y la sociedad de ayuda mutua, así como la biblioteca kurda; y los edificios altos y forma algo surrealista que rodean de la plaza están habitados por un número notable de kurdos cuyos activistas protestan contra los elevados alquileres en el kiosko de madera de la plaza. Está claro, por tanto, que será aquí donde se organicen los festejos del día del Nouruz, con los bailes y una hoguera algo amortiguada por las condiciones de Berlín.

Según la nota que cuelga en el restaurante kurdo Sehr-i Simit, es decir Ciudad de Pretzel, los festejos dan comienzo a las cinco de la tarde, pero ya hacia las cuatro hay bastante gente en la plaza. Se calientan en la llovizna con un té ofrecido por los activistas y aprovechan para reforzar relaciones. Luego, alrededor de las cuatro y media, alguien se dirige a un portátil colocado sobre un altavoz formado con un bidón de petróleo y conecta la lista de canciones que previamente ha seleccionado. La machacona música kurda inunda la plaza. Los grupos se reorganizan enseguida, la gente se dispone en círculo. El baile durará hasta entrada la noche.

Sedigh Tarif & Kamkars Ensemble: Golah golah. From the CD Kordaneh (2011).

Dance

Budapest, this dirty old swindler always surprises you when you would not expect it. In this gloomy and deserted Wednesday afternoon, when whoever does not go about his work is surely sitting somewhere and watching the Danish-Portuguese from Lwów, at the Vörösmarty Square suddenly shine on the colorful dancers like a beautiful bouquet of flowers. Turks, Azerbaijanis, Gypsies from Anatolia, Romanians from the Ukrainian Bukovina.

The surprise can be increased. In the last picture you can see the same couple performing Aşuk Maşuk, the “dance of the dwarfs” in Budapest who also feature in the fantastic film The lost songs of Anatolia. Soon I write about it, and then I will add their two minutes from the film. And now I add the video I myself made of them in this afternoon.

Dance

The previous post also evokes an older series by one-way, selected from American public photo collections, with the same attention to the details of the pictures and to the span of their succession. A totally different world and social milieu, but the same sensitivity and the same power of the dance lifting one above her/himself. Most pictures really live only in a large format: click on them.

Ghymes: Tánc a hóban (Dance in the snow) (7'40"). From the CD Rege (Legend), 1998

Singing is forbidden,

prohibido el cante, this was written in several suburban pubs in the Franco era. And this is the title of the exhibition which the Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo of Seville dedicated in 2009 to the forbidden song, the flamenco.

The exhibition presented in more than two hundred pictures how the anonymous photographers and the big names saw the flamenco from the 19th century, the discovery of the exotic South, through the great masters of the 20th century to today’s sophisticated fashion photographers. I have not seen the catalog, only those seventeen images which have just been published from it by one-way. By searching on the Spanish web I have found quite a few more pictures of it, but these only showed how brilliantly one-way picked out those seventeen which, by leaving out every exotism and anecdotism, convey the power of the dance, the humanity of the artists, and how unimaginably this dance increases them. This selection is a work of art in itself. I also publish it without any change or addition.

Pedro and Inés Bacán: Nana. From the CD De viva voz, 1995