Mallorquin Dance: Issues of Revival and Identity

This thesis argues that there is an interrelationship between the processes of revival of Mallorquin traditional dance and the influence of tourism that has contributed to the formation of Mallorcan identities. Its principal focus is an analysis of the Mallorquin folk dance repertoires including the bolero, jota, fandango, and bullanguera. The revival of dance that took place in Mallorca at the end of the 1970s was to restore improvised dances in social contexts, and was in part a defensive response to tourism. The revival has reinforced a cultural identification of difference between self and other in the face of tourism. It was also driven by the desire to recover traditional dances as part of their cultural heritage, as many of the dances were lost during Franco’s reign (1939-1975) while under the direction of the Sección Femenina (Women’s Division of the Falange Party). Fieldwork for this study began in January 2003 in short intervals, over a period of four years, on the Spanish Balearic Island of Mallorca. The fieldwork sites include two folk dance schools, the Escola de Música i Danses de Mallorca in the capital city of Palma, and Aires Sollerics in Soller. The third fieldwork site is the ballada, a social dance event held in towns and villages throughout the island. I explore Mallorquin dance practices in parallel to the relation of tourism and its effects on the dancers’ identities. The methodological approach of this thesis is dance ethnography. This thesis deals with the translation of texts of local authors and the kinetic tradition of embodied practice in dance ethnography. The texts are further mediated by present performers’ narratives of the origins of the Mallorquin dances in the local community. The dual cultural ethno-linguistic context of Castilian and Catalan since 1983 has created a distinction between the older and younger generations. The older generations are more affiliated with their Castilian cultural identity; they perceive the revival of dance as part of the emergent Catalan/Mallorqui culture. In contrast, the younger generations are more affiliated with the Catalan culture and would like independence from Spain. Mallorcan individuals negotiate nationalist politics, gender relations, and their cultural identities through improvised dance and music practices at the ballada. In this way “a singular becoming of a community” (Grossberg, 1996, p.102) is articulated in the politics of the spatial environment of the ballada.