Notes to the Program 

Postcolonial Fandango is a project created and developed by myself, Colombian violinist Camilo Arias. It can be considered a sort of “musical auto-ethnography” and it deals with several subjects from different disciplines (Cultural Studies, Historical Performance Practice and Ethnomusicology). The project consist on the study of the performance of Fandango-dances, both in the artistic and the cultural sense. On the level of musical performance, I compare techniques from different instruments, drawing parallelisms and writing the vocabulary of a big common musical language, to which European baroque music belongs tightly. On a “cultural-studies” level, I want to inquire about representation and performance of Hispanic cultural identities in the Fandango-Dances. You can read more about it in our Research-Page.

In past programs there has been some storytelling through self-written verses, but The Tempest is my first fully theatrical program. It goes into the ritual side of the Fandango by superposing the Caribbean spring Christian rites known as Velorios de la Cruz de Mayo - “Wakes of the May-Cross” - on to the model of the baroque passion. 

In this program, I also show for the first time the “Jota” to the public, a Hispanic Song-type that does not strictly belong to the Fandango Family, but contributed to its binarization. A Jota Aragonesa shines at the beginning of the program as an example of the pure ”classical” Iberian Jota del Ebro. On the other side of the program, the Jota Cumanesa stands as a rare example of its afro-Hispanic hybridization. The sung couplet of this Jota is binary and has an irrational poly-subdivision, while the interludes are just normal ternary Fandango-ritornellos (!?). This branch of late Fandangos led to the development of the Dominican merengue by the end of the 19th century (the same merenge we hear at any Latin-party nowadays), and is explained by the influence of the triangular slave trade in the Caribbean. The big migrations of Africans across the Caribbean produced a kaleidoscope of groups from different African kingdoms. It was mostly the west African slaves who helped shape the merengue and in the big binary rhythms that would become popular during the 20th century, like the Habanera and the Danzón.

I have also tried to include the west-African voice in the Plot of this program, by using the image of “La Virgen de la Caridad del Cobre” (Our lady of Charity) for the creation of the Character of the devouring Virgin. The Lady of Charity was in reality the counter-face of a camouflaged Yoruba-God (Oshun), and the church once affirmed, to dissipate uncomfortable questions, that this virgin was not black, but only appeared to be so because her skin was “burn by the sun”.

My Tempest is conceived as an “Anti-passion”. It tries to subvert the narrative of the Christian baroque passion like the ones composed by J.S. Bach, traditionally performed in the Netherlands almost as a sign of national culture. My postcolonial reading of the bible-tragedy proposes for the sacrifice, instead of the Lamb of God, the body of the villain. Because there is no moral equivalence in such a subversion, the presentation of the sacrifice of a villain appears to be some kind of medieval execution. It is simply presented in the plot as the blunt payback of the subaltern groups.

The program is made in the form of a baroque Pasticcio (the technique of appropriating other composers pieces and arranging them into a whole new piece with original libretto and plot). The inspiration for the plot is taken from different texts. The title “The Seas of Desire” refers to the masterwork of Garcia de León “El Mar de los Deseos”, which motivated my research. The motive of the Tempest is a popular baroque trope, but the music for this one is taken from Matthew Locke’s musicalisation of Shakespeare's Play (1667).