Leticia Baselgas, tambourine participant: “The folklore of Franco’s regime was a political construction” | Culture | EUROtoday

Leticia Baselgas has a caldin. That’s what she calls that perennial curiosity—a effervescent broth, simmering, filled with components—to grasp one thing that attracted her since she was a toddler: conventional tradition, what had been referred to as “regional” dances, the id related to all of this. Her life journey, which features a doctorate in Art History, has been a dialectic with these cultural expressions, on which she has modified her place, from dance teams, ethnographic teams or the Muyeres affiliation (which claims the tambourine and the feminine position in conventional music) to a remaining section with the creation, collectively along with her companion Rubén Bada, of the group submit individuals LR, now on pause. There they combined different music, particularly blues, rock, border sounds or jazz, with Asturias. Tambourine and electrical guitar. “There are more tambourines now than ever!” he says.

Baselgas (Gijón, 41 years outdated) gave the matter a number of thought: he had been writing a diary in his cardboard notebooks “all his life” about his relationship with music and dance. Reformulating what he had compiled “since the Previous Pleistocene” he constructed a brand new textual content, Diaries of a tambourine participant (La Fabriquina), an autobiographical essay (though they’re referred to as diaries, they don’t seem to be diaries) the place he mixes life occasions with erudite quotes (sure, you may discuss tambourine and conventional Asturian music, citing a number of Michel Foucault, additionally Deleuze and Guattari or Paul Ricoeur), to attempt to perceive what folklore is and the way id is constructed in relation to the territory (on this case the Asturian one, though it might be one other).

Baselgas is a stage identify (Rodríguez is the true surname) in reference to his city, within the council of Grado, the place the granaries flourish and there are solely about eight inhabitants, together with this musician and her household, in a home the place in addition they have a recording studio. “Some generations, like my parents’, associate rural life with the drama of the post-war: hunger, cold, poverty,” he says, though that notion is now altering and there may be even a sure have to return to the countryside (though underneath totally different situations: fiber optics have arrived in Baselgas). But this tambourine participant grew up in a metropolis like Gijón and in a household that was not notably fascinated by these issues.

Even so, there was a “childhood encounter” with the normal and he joined a regional dance group: there arose the caldin“that unnameable force to know, that liquid thing, which nourishes and gives us life.” But there comes a second when Baselgas realizes how synthetic what is known as folkloric is, a development carried out largely by some “bearded gentlemen” of the late nineteenth century, who sought Spanish essences within the face of the decline of the imperial thought, and by the Choirs and Dances of the Women’s Section of Francoism. “It was a political construction: what was done, roughlywas to standardize different aspects, for example, clothing models: each region had its own, but very uniform. “Everything is unitary, but with its particularities,” explains Baselgas. And drawing on what is considered typical: in Asturias, the hórreos, the madreñas, the panoyas of corn. “Many power dynamics and political identity issues occur there,” provides the artist.

Baselgas at all times related girls with tambourines with energy. “Women were relegated from the political space, but in the symbolic space they were predominant: they were the ones who worked on that idea of ​​the ‘regional’,” says the creator. In that group of regional dances, inflexible and “militarized”, the place you needed to dance along with your palms very excessive, Baselgas got here to see a Foucauldian disciplinary establishment, like people who the French thinker noticed in colleges, hospitals and prisons, the place individuals are indoctrinated about how issues ought to be, about how energy transfers to us.

One day, in an Asturian market, the younger Baselgas discovers a extra pure method of approaching the normal: a dance group during which not everyone seems to be dressed the identical, has a extra relaxed, much less inflexible perspective, and even appears to have enjoyable. “That was recognizable to me, but not completely: I didn’t recognize the performance nor the attitude, less serious, static and ritualized,” recalls the tambourine player. The arms here did not have to dance as raised as in her regional group, but rather looser, proof of a certain freedom.

Thus he discovers that what was his was falsewhile those ethnographic militants, who had searched the primary sources, visited the towns, compiled an archive, had achieved a greater knowledge of what authentic Asturian, beyond the previous construction. “That fascinated me: I was an adolescent mind that sought the truth of things and wanted to know what Asturians really were.” There the investigation begins by itself, creating its personal story.

In the nineties came the Celtic folk music fever that transcended Asturias and came to unite the so-called Celtic nations, Galicia, Ireland, Brittany, etc., also Asturias. Bands like Llan de Cubel or Felpeyu, among many others, triumph. But Celticism does not have much to do with tradition (similar music was probably not heard in the Asturian towns) and a split arises between the folkis Celts and the you deliveramong which Baselgas is then included, determined to maintain the essences of tradition and not other useful fictions.

“The Celtic factor had, in fact, a brutal influence, making a story primarily based on the bagpipe, which was in Asturias, but additionally in Galicia, Brittany or Scotland. Although not on the tambourine… And though the orthodox thought of ​​the Asturian custom didn’t matter a lot, they knew find out how to put Asturian music on this planet,” says Baselgas. Furthermore, his caldin did not prevent him from frequenting other music, such as hardcore and the punk (in fact, the interview takes place in La Raposa, a bar the punk of Oviedo). “The friends with whom I made pogo They didn’t understand me much either,” he jokes.

Tired of the road, she prefers to escape. “I decide to get the tambourine out of there, to start playing with people who have nothing to do with folklore,” he says. The thing about post people arrives when his path crosses that of Rubén Bada (a people!): There is a founding anecdote of the LR group which is when, at home, after a dinner with wine, Bada begins to theorize about how traditional is the same heartbeat that beats throughout the planet, something that unites all of humanity, whether a shepherd from the Himalayas or one from the Cantabrian mountain range. Thus, he begins to play Delta blues on his guitar (from the Mississippi Delta, of course) and suggests that Baselgas play on top of it with the tambourine.

“There I saw a vein, I thought I should continue experimenting along that path, and a dialogue was created between Rubén and me,” says Baselgas who, for this reason, and recently graduated with a doctorate (her thesis deals with how cultural practices can re-signify public spaces, with a lot of French theory: desire, impulse, resignification), she stops her individual diaries. The year was 2015. “This is the caldin!”, he said to himself.

Today there is a notable return to musical tradition from a contemporary perspective: from Rodrigo Cuevas or Baiuca to Los Hermanos Cubero or Maestro Espada; Baselgas places Tanxugueiras as great current promoters of the tambourine: “I feel that moments of disaster make us look again, typically in a reactionary method, as we see in so many younger individuals, but additionally different instances with cultural curiosity. People need to cling to an origin. And what’s extra primary than the tambourine.”