A Simple Story: Dancing for His Life

THIS IS THE STORY

of a man who took part in a dance contest.

LABORDE, A TOWN

three hundred miles north-west of Buenos Aires in Argentina’s Córdoba province, was founded in 1903, originally under the name Las Liebres. Populated at the time by Italian immigrants, it now has six thousand inhabitants and is situated in an oasis of wheat and corn dotted with mills. The wheat and corn brought a reasonable level of prosperity to the area, nowadays maintained by soya cultivation, that manifests in towns that seem straight out of the mind of a very orderly, or perhaps psychotic, child: each of the compact town centres features a church, a main square, a town hall, and houses each with their own front garden and the latest gleaming Toyota 4 × 4, sometimes two, parked outside. Route 11 passes through a large number of such towns, places like Monte Maíz, Escalante, Pascanas. Laborde lies between Escalante and Pascanas – church, town square, town hall, houses with front gardens, 4 × 4, et cetera; a town like many others, in an agricultural area like many others; one of thousands of places in the country’s vast interior whose name would ring no bells for most Argentinians. But, for certain people with a very specific interest, Laborde is an important place. In fact, for these people – with this specific interest – there is no place in the world more important than Laborde.

ON MONDAY

, 5th January 2009, the Argentinian daily La Nación ran an article in its arts supplement, written by the journalist Gabriel Plaza, with the headline: ‘The folk athletes line up’. Comprising two small columns on the front page and two medium-sized columns a couple of pages in, it included the following lines: Considered an elite corps within the world of traditional folk dance, past champions, on the streets of Laborde at least, are treated with all the respect of ancient Greek sporting legends. I hung on to the article – weeks, months, and it was still in my thoughts – and then I found that years had elapsed, and still I was thinking about it. I’d never heard of Laborde before, but once I’d read this piece of red-hot information, the joining together of elite corps and sporting legends with traditional dance and a town in the middle of nowhere… I couldn’t stop thinking. What about? About going and seeing, I suppose.

GAUCHO, according to the Dictionary of Argentinian Folklore (edited by Félix Coluccio and Susana Coluccio), is the word used in the Río Plata region – Argentina and Uruguay – to designate the cowboys of these prairie- or pampas-lands… Cowboys and hired hands, by and large, they stood out for their physical prowess, as well as their haughty, reserved and melancholic manner. Almost all their tasks were carried out from the back of a horse, making the animal their best companion, and crucial to the wealth of the gaucho. The general, perhaps prejudiced view of the gaucho confers very particular characteristics: brave, loyal, strong, indomitable and austere, he is also reserved and arrogant, as well as being prone to the solitary, nomadic life.

As for malambo, in the words of the nineteenth-century folklorist Ventura Lynch, it consists of a joust between men who take turns to dance to music. A dance the gauchos would challenge one another with, trying to best their opponents in feats of stamina and skill, to the accompaniment of a guitar and a drum. This is the dance Gabriel Plaza’s article was alluding to: malambo, the dance of the gauchos.

MALAMBO’S ORIGINS

are unclear, though people agree it probably arrived in Argentina from Peru. Sets of tap dance-like movements, each associated with a certain musical metre, combine to form the figures. Composed of taps of the toes, soles and heels, pauses on the balls of the feet, and lifts and twists – unimaginable contortions – of the ankles, a malambo performance at the highest level will include more than twenty such figures, divided up by repiqueteos – toe taps at a pace of no fewer than eight per second – requiring enormous responsiveness in the muscles. Each side has to be mirrored, a right-foot figure immediately repeated, identically, with the left foot, so that a dancer of malambo needs equal precision, strength, speed and elegance on both sides. There are two styles: sureño – hailing from Argentina’s southern and central provinces – and norteño – from the north. Sureño is the gentler style, and is accompanied by just the guitar; norteño is more explosive, and calls for both a guitar and a drum. Dancers of each also dress differently: the southern-and central-province dancers wearing a wide-brimmed hat, a white shirt, neckerchief, waistcoat, short jacket, and the cribo – white, flared trousers with tassels and embroidery – over the top of which comes a kneelength section of fabric, somewhat like a skirt, known as the chiripá; a linen cord holds the chiripá up, but a wide, silver-decked belt (known as a rastra) is also worn; on the feet, the so-called foal shoes, thin leather bindings covering only the heels and middle section of the foot, are tied on with rawhide straps that go over the ankles and around the calves – leaving the front part of the foot and toes bare as they strike the boards. The norteño style includes shirt, a cloth at the neck, jacket, bombachas – flowing, pleated trousers – and knee-high leather boots.

This strictly masculine dance, which began life as a crude kind of gauntlet-throwing, had by the twentieth century been strictly choreographed into performances lasting between two and five minutes. Though best known for the versions seen in for export spectacles – including hopscotch between candles and the juggling of knives – some traditional festivals in the country do still cleave close to malambo’s essence. But it is in Laborde, this town out in the middle of pampas flatlands, where malambo in its purest form is preserved: since 1966 a prestigious and formidable six-day competition has been held here, one that places fierce physical demands on the participants and concludes with a winner who, not unlike bulls or other thoroughbred animals, is given the title of Champion.

IN

1966, on the initiative of an association calling itself Amigos de Arte, the Laborde National Malambo Competition was first held, in the grounds of a local sports club. In 1973 the organizing committee – locals who, as they do to this day, counted among their number manicurists and speech therapists, schoolteachers and small business owners, bakers and housewives – bought a thousand square metre plot of land from the local Spanish Association, and constructed a stage there. A crowd of two thousand people came that year. Nowadays over six thousand regularly attend, and, though the emphasis remains firmly on the malambo, the competition categories now include song, such as the Best Solo Recital category; music, such as Best Instrumental Ensemble; and other traditional dances, including Twosomes and Most Authentic Regional Presentation. Some of the best-attended slots feature non-competitive presentations from renowned musicians and folksinging groups like Chango Spasiuk, Peteco Carabajal and La Callejera. Each year, dancers come in from across Argentina, but also farther afield – Bolivia, Chile and Paraguay in particular – swelling the town’s numbers by an extra two thousand. Many locals rent out their homes, and the municipal schools become overflowing temporary hostels. Months of planning go into deciding who will participate, with delegations from each of Argentina’s provinces pre-selecting the best dancers from their respective federations.

The organizing committee is self-financing, and refuses to have anything to do with the country’s large traditional dance festivals (those held in Cosquín and Jesús María), veritable tsunamis of tradition that get broadcast nationwide. That would mean making the festival gaudy, trashy, and neither the running time (7 p.m. to 6 a.m.), nor the content itself, are what one could call easily digestible; you won’t find pomaded gauchos wearing nice suits or tap-dancing between candles, and you won’t find any rhinestone boots. If Laborde calls itself the most Argentine festival it’s because it offers up tradición pura y dura – tradition, pure and hard. The regulations prohibit anything cutting-edge, and the jury, comprising former champions and folk dance specialists, wants to see folkloric tradition, as the regulations say, without the remix: costumes and footwear that show respect for the modesty, or indeed the opulence, associated with the gauchos and their womenfolk in times past; acoustic instruments; and dance steps that correspond with the region the dancer represents. No piercings are to be seen on stage, let alone tattoos, rings, watches or plunging necklines. As the regulations state: "The dancers’ boots ought to have reinforced sections on the front part of the soles, spur shanks at the back, must not have metal tips, and must be finished in traditional colours. The ‘foal shoes’ ought to be authentic in design, though they needn’t be made from the same materials as originally (horse or puma hide). The use of daggers is not permitted, and neither is the presence of boleadoras [a lariat with stones instead of a noose], spears, spurs, or any other element not connected with the dance… The musical accompaniment must also be respectful of tradition in every regard, and must comprise no more than two instruments, one of which must be the guitar… The presentation