with the geganters taking turns and defying each other to resist vertigo the longest.
Most major cities in Catalonia kept their giants as the last remnant of the early modern entremesos, so festival giants are familiar sights and widely invoked in popular idiom to comment on both social inequality and state administration. “If everyone were equal, who would carry the giants?” asks one proverb, and a 1929 protest song from the textile factories near Berga repeats the theme:
Els burgesos ens volien fer la por
però els obrers del Llobregat no en tenim, no
Que no es pensin que encara és com abans
que pertot allà on passaven ens fèien bailar els gegants.
The bourgeois wanted to frighten us
but the workers of the Llobregat aren’t afraid, no
They’d better not think that it’s still like before
when everywhere they passed they made us dance the giants.
(Ramon Vilardaga, personal communication)
In fact, up through the 1950s the heavy entremesos of the Patum were danced by lower-class men given both a cash payment and a new pair of espardenyes by the Ajuntament.
The Ajuntamen’s expenditures also feature in giant idiom. When city officials are observed to be conspicuously consuming resources it’s not clear they possess, then the giantess pays: paga la geganta. Those people fortunate enough to have bureaucratic sinecures or merely secure, well-paid government positions, such as a schoolteacher or a firefighter, cobren de la geganta (are paid by the giantess) or, more pointedly, mamen de la geganta, suckle her.
The geganters are a large comparsa of perhaps twenty men: unlike the more fluid turcs i cavallets or nans, in which only those doing the immediate salt are costumed, all the geganters are marked by their red shirts, white trousers; and a faixa for support. Those not dancing the giants are supporting and guiding them from outside. Except within the single dances of the Patum in the plaça, the geganters have to take frequent turns because the effigies are so heavy.
NANS NOUS
Introduced in 1890, when the Patum was being dressed up for summer visitors, the New Dwarfs represent two couples, an old one and a young one. The old man scowls slightly and wears a brimless black hat with gold braid. Because of the ambiguous hat, he is sometimes called “the priest;” he is also known as “the notary” or “the ugly one.” The old woman wears a cloth bonnet; the young one has a sculpted pink hat with an upturned brim. The young male is the most difficult to dance because of his heavy broadbrimmed light blue hat, for which he is known as el barret blau. Their general effect was best characterized by Xavier Fàbregas: “sundayed up … like the commercial petty bourgeosie who want to show off to their neighbors, and distinguish themselves in every possible detail from the country people” (1976, 140).
These dwarfs have the most complex dance steps of the Patum, involving hand clappings, skips in place, and spins between couples. The two comparses of nans are fairly open to female participation. The caps de colla of both Old and New Dwarfs are in their thirties, and the dancers tend to be in their teens or twenties because it is quickness and agility rather than strength that are required. They are often recruited directly from the Children’s Patum.
Figure 7. The crowds of the 1980s dance with the Nans Nous. Photo by Luigi, Berga.
In Catalonia as elsewhere in Spain, dwarfs always appear in relation to giants, and each takes meaning from the other: often as parents and children, or as graceful upper class and clumsy lower class (Amades 1934, no; Brandes 1980, 27–32). Entering the festival in the nineteenth century, the dwarfs are always seen by Catalan scholars as an indicator of democratic tendencies: “the common people incorporating themselves into the traditional mythology” (Armengou [1968, 1971]1994, 109). But in truth the configuration is more complex, and especially in the Patum: the common people were already there, in devils and guita. Unlike these, the dwarfs are controlled; they do not salt upwards, but dance in place; they emulate the giants in dress and motion, flattering them by the very clumsiness of the imitation. The dwarfs are the orderly lower class that trusts to the hegemonic promise. They do not make their own meanings or direct their own action.
PLENS
The “full ones” or full devils wear the same heavy felt costume as the Maces, red with green trim or vice versa, and the same masks with horns. Three fuets are affixed to each horn, and two more are tied to the tail; the head is protected with a leather hood, and a wreath of Clematis vidalba, a green vine that grows along the streams above town, prevents sparks from falling down the neck of the costume; more vidalba at head and tail reduces the impact of the fuets. About seventy come out in a given salt.11
Each ple dances with an acompanyant, an uncostumed friend whose job it is to light the ple and lead him or her safely through the plaça. The salt de plens is the climax of the Patum in the plaça, done only at night. For it, the lights are turned off and the plens come out slowly and distribute themselves in the crowd. When an acompanyant stationed at the lamppost lights his bengala, a thick sparkler, all the plens are lighted up and the music, fast and repetitious, begins, the Tabal also playing to a rhythm of its own. The plens and the entire crowd salt counterclockwise around the plaça, hopping from foot to foot. The crowd is a rolling black mass with thick flames dancing above it. The fuets begin to burst, a few scattered, and then all at once: a long complex ferocious explosion like multiple orgasm (as the Berguedans explain in their cups—a salt de plens has a double meaning in Berga). The smoke pushes up from the plaça as from a chimney, and the spectators on the balcony are blackened with it. The music repeats itself until the last fuets have exploded and the tension subsides.
Figure 8. The Plens wait for their masks below city hall. Photo by Luigi, Berga.
The Plens are nominally the same comparsa as the Maces, and in the early Bulla this connection was more obvious: “the devils go full” in their second sortie. Although today they are considered the most primitive element of the festival, widely supposed to be pre-Christian and tied to vegetative spirits, it is not clear that the present profusion of vines and green is more than a century old, and the “infernal orgy” of fire is an effect of the great increase in the number of plens since 1960, when there were still only sixteen of them. Nonetheless, devils are chthonic figures in the Catalan mountains, associated with caves and water—as are the black Madonnas and the mules—and, like the Moors, credited with responsibility for otherwise inexplicable constructions in the landscape.
TIRABOL
The tirabol is not a comparsa, but the final dance or salt—it is both—of each night of the Patum. The meaning of the name is uncertain: sometimes in older texts it appears as tirabou (pull the ox) and seems to have been a kind of crack-the-whip dance when the numbers were smaller. Today the usage is most often plural, as the tirabols have burgeoned in number. They are in effect a continuation of the Plens, who lift their masks and keep dancing, with the entire crowd salt-ing counterclockwise in the plaça, in small arm-in-arm groups,
