and the two men who dance on either side of him—wear blouses and loose flowered knee-breeches with kerchiefs of the same material, and the standard espardenyes. Tight around each waist is the faixa, a broad wool sash once worn by peasants, which supports the back under the great weight of the eagle.
The Àliga dances only for the Patum in the plaça. Its dance begins with the Àliga in the middle and the two aligots on either side mimicking its steps. It bows to the parish church and to City Hall, and the music begins in a slow 2/4. The dancers do a punteig (pointing, or lacing), each marking a square around himself on the stones of the plaça with the tips of his toes. When the music changes to a faster 6/8, the eagle starts to sway and then skip from side to side, each time increasing the breadth of the movement. The two aligots are now assisting the eagle from without, helping the carrier to keep his balance. With another accelerando in the music, the eagle breaks out of position and skips in a larger circle, the crowd following the tail, and the aligots helping it to turn. At the end of the dance the Àliga spins quickly on itself, aligots and crowd dropping to the ground to avoid a blow from the hard tail, which is reputed to have killed a soldier once. The aligots help the dizzy dancer to stop, and the eagle bows once more to the church and the Ajuntament before retiring.
The Àliga is the most jealously guarded comparsa: to dance the eagle requires great strength and balance, and there has never been any question of letting a woman do it. There are only three aligots at a given time, who take turns at dancing the eagle itself.
Unique to the Països Catalans, the àliga is historically an entremes with special privileges, dancing alone inside the church or in front of the Sacrament in the Corpus Christi procession. Though its original processional role may have been as the emblem of Saint John, its heraldic associations soon added another resonance, and its primary significance in Catalan processions has been as a civic symbol, the predominant interpretation in Berga. In any case, if not a two-headed eagle, it is on excellent terms with both Church and State. It was a prestige entremes, expensive to make and maintain, belonging only to important populations, and the balance of the evidence suggests that it was not a stable part of the Patum until the late eighteenth century, when the city’s increasing importance as a textile center both enhanced its prosperity and encouraged its ambitions.
Figure 5. The Àliga bowing. Photo by Luigi, Berga.
Like mules, eagles have proverbial status in the Catalan Pyrenees, embodying not humility but the opposite extreme. The local varieties of eagle are the “royal” and the “imperial,” and the eagle is familiar as the king of birds (as in the internationally known “Cant dels Ocells,” the Carol of the Birds). The eagle is conscious of its station and dignity: “the eagle does not chase flies” (Gomis 1910). Like royalty and like the Host before which it walked in the procession, the eagle is associated with light and sun and the gaze. “To see more than an eagle” is to have superlative sight; the eagle is said to be the only animal able to look directly into the sun (Gomis 1910). Flying higher than any other bird, the eagle has the omniscient gaze of power, seeing the world as God sees it, and in turn is visible to the admiring gaze of the earthbound, like the elite in the festival balcony. Not that those below will always admire: to take down a pretentious person is “to throw the eagle to the ground” (Gomis 1910). But eagles must be treated with care, as their anger is redoubtable: to abandon oneself to rage is “to give oneself up to the eagles”—sometimes “to give oneself up to the devils.” The Berguedan eagle shares the gesture of the threatening spin with its antithesis, the Guita, and the tender live dove it once carried in its curved beak is a nice emblem of the ambiguities of power.
NANS VELLS
The Old Dwarfs belong to the common Iberian genre known as nans or capgrossos (bigheads) in Catalonia and cabezudos (bigheads) in Spain. A nan is a papier-mâché and plaster head worn over the head of the dancer, who sees through the open mouth. Very well-made, the dwarfs are caricatures rather than idealized figures. The four Nans Veils are all male, with long noses, melancholy eyes, black tricorn hats, and yellow wigs with eighteenth- century pigtails. The dancers wear red tunics trimmed with gold, reminiscent of the gramalla worn by municipal councillors in Catalonia before 1714. They first appear in municipal records in 1855 (Farràs i Farràs 1979, 215), probably in imitation of other mountain cities such as Olot or Vic. They were easily damaged and repaired as the city could afford it, and were not considered essential to the Patum until the early twentieth century (Armengou [1968, 1971]1994, 108).
The dance of the Nans Veils imitates that of the giants and shares their tunes: it is a simple waltz with some changing of partners and exchange of positions, and the dancers play castanets in the first section. The second section is a faster 4/4 time with the same movements. The inner circle of the crowd helps to guide the dancers, who can see very little and, imbalanced by the heavy heads, are prone to vertigo. At the end, each nan spins in place.
GEGANTS
There are two pairs of giants, tall effigies on wooden armatures with a carrier hidden in the skirts.10 Head and hands are beautifully sculpted out of fortified papier-mâché, and they wear natural wigs which must be coiffed every year by hairdressers. The clothes are rich and expensive, in varying tones of red and green with gold trim; the giantesses wear jewelry. In late nineteenth-century Barcelona, the costume of the giantess announced the summer fashions; Berga was too poor to dress its giantesses anew every year, but their coiffures served the same purpose.
The Gegants Vells (Old Giants) are tan in complexion, and the male is dressed as a Moor, with a turbaned helmet and a scimitar in his belt. He wears a moustache, and brown hair curled below his ears, and a red jacket with a paler tunic beneath. He carries a mace in his right hand, resting on his shoulder. The geganta, slightly fairer, is dressed as a queen with a tiara and a green veil over her brown hair; she carries a bouquet in her lifted right hand. The Moorish dress does not make the giant alien in popular eyes: in the first known drawing of the Patum, from 1838 in the middle of the first Carlist War, he is shown wearing the emblematic beret of Carlist Berga.
The Gegants Nous (New Giants), from 1891, are usually known as the Gegants Negres or Black Giants because of their complexions. They are, however, dressed as Christians, and their blackness dates from the turn of the century, when the black Madonna of Montserrat was being promoted as the national patron: it is associated with the chthonic rather than the foreign. They are among the tallest giants in Catalonia and require exceptional strength to dance. The giantess is very handsome; like her sister, she wears a tiara, back veil, and earrings. Her ample skirts are green with yellow trim, and her left hand holds a bouquet. The Black Giant, with his black beard, silver helmet, huge mace, and imposing figure, is the cynosure of all eyes when his crimson velvet cloak spins in the plaça; he is the object of numerous erotic fantasies on the part of both sexes, and it is the cap de colla and his intimates who have the privilege of dancing him.
Figure 6. The Gegants begin their spin. Photo by Luigi, Berga.
The giants process, waltz, and spin. In the Wednesday noon passada through the streets and the Wednesday and Saturday night passacarrers (in which only the two Old Giants participate), the giants are walked by the geganters, who take turns; according to the energy of the carriers and the visibility of the place, they dance instead of processing; at the stops in the route they do a full dance. In the Patum of the plaça they dance to the same waltz tunes used for the nans vells. Their movements are limited by their size, and in the night Patums the crossovers between pairs are eliminated. The faster section and especially the final spin are tests of prowess among the geganters and the high point of the middle section of the Patum for the public. In the tirabols
