NPR : Get Out Your Handkerchiefs for Chile's 'Cueca'

NPR : Get Out Your Handkerchiefs for Chile's 'Cueca'

Bafochi
Originally uploaded by Alejandro - Pérez

If there is one thing I might call a regret from my wedding, is that I didn't get to dance a cueca. Maybe I'm getting to be a sentimental as I get older, and maybe it's inevitable for the patiperro to get nostalgic, but this year's Dieciocho had me longing for empanadas, pan amasado with chancho en piedra, some manjar, and a good cueca round. Not that I could dance in my current state, but irrational longings don't seem to care about these things.

As it turns out, "cueca" apparently also means something to do with being in your underwear (in Portuguese maybe?) so in my trolling for dance pictures, I got a number of not-quite-safe-for-work pictures of people in their undies, and a lot of pictures of kids with underpants on their head.

Once I made my way through that, I found a lot of pictures on Flickr, and a decent number of videos on YouTube, too.

Bailando cueca en el desfile militar
Originally uploaded by Gabriel Ortega Berger

Cueca is the national dance of Chile. What's cool about it, is that everyone dances it. Looking through YouTube or Flickr you'll find lots of pictures of people in traditional costume, but also just people in everyday jeans. And, it's a fairly complex dance: there's a set order of moves--figure eights, turns, and demilunes, plus you're supposed to hold your handkerchief a certain way, etc. Of course, it's not rocket science, either, and not everyone does it just so, but still, September arrives, and the whole country must dance.

Bafochi
Originally uploaded by Alejandro - Pérez

There's several styles of different traditional costumes you might wear for this--varying by region, wealth, and so on, but the most common is a huaso (cowboy) with manta (poncho), chupalla (straw hat), and spurs, and the woman in china garb--a simple flowered dress (pictured right). I never much cared for the flowered dress style; partly because it'd make my butt look like a giant cabbage, and partly because people keep starching their skirts and adding layers upon layers of cloth, which doesn't look right to me. A traditional china dress is simply a humble flowered dress (like the one in this video). I preferred the solid-colored, straight skirt and boots (with spurs--no idea if that's traditional or not, but dammit, if I'm gonna put on boots for dancing, I'm putting on spurs) style (pictured left) all black, or black skirt and red jacket.

This afternoon, NPR ran a piece on the dance. MrSporks and I were in the car, and every time a Chilean spoke, he giggled.

"Your people can't pronounce the letter S," he told me when I poked him.

"S is for Commies. La ese es para comunistas," I repeated. Of course, in a Chilean accent, this comes out "la ese eh pa' comunihtah." He wasn't just picking on Chilean speech for no reason: we're notorious for dropping letters, speaking machine-gun fast, and aspirating our S sounds.

At any rate, the piece mentions the breadth of subject (protest, raunchy, traditional), cueca brava (a style influenced by brothels and the criminal underworld), and La Yein Fonda (a play on "Jane Fonda"). Unfortunately they don't touch on the cueca revival of recent years, and there are no web extras (video, sound, or pictures), but being that more often than not the country is altogether forgotten (current issue of Gourmet, which is dedicated to all things Latin American, mentions it in passing once, I think), it was a pleasant surprise.

Edit: blergh, for some reason, Blogger is eating the captions on the pictures crediting the photographers on Flickr. Click on the picture to visit the original.