Fire in the Placa. Dorothy Noyes
time we have verifiable evidence of what would become the Patum—the first unambiguous document in the municipal archives dates from 1632—this separation has largely taken place. The entremesos consist only of the turcs i cavallets, the devils and angel, the drum, and the mule—still today the noisiest elements of the Patum—and they constitute a separate entertainment paid for by the city, known as les bolisies and later La Bulla—nouns deriving from the verb “to boil” and referring to a noisy, mobile assembly. The elements of the Bulla marched at the head of the procession and then performed separately in the main square of the town, the Plaça Sant Pere.
It seems clear that the Bulla and parallel celebrations of the period represent a popular response to the procession’s inadequate representation of the social body: they were born of a desire for inclusion—if necessary, through violent irruption. Both women and the lower classes were excluded from the procession, and its symbolic language was so ethereal, with its gold and silver and solar symbolism, so insistent on transcendence (and on wealth as the means to it), as to provide a very dubious account of humble corporeality—the liturgical point of the festival.5 The Bulla, with its firecrackers, bells, drum, and reputed provocations to immorality, restored sensuality to the social body.
In the seventeenth century, such festivals were still prestigious means of civic self-assertion in all the cities of Spain. Berguedan records show repeated municipal decisions, despite persistent poverty, “if other communities are dancing, to dance also in the present town” (quoted in Farràs i Farràs 1982, 73). In the eighteenth century, both ecclesiastical pressures and emerging rival forms of display induced festival decay—but not in poor, out-of-the-way Berga, where the bishop had been staved off with a good allegory, where no rival entertainments were available, and where the festival brought the peasants of the surrounding comarca to spend their money at the accompanying fair. La Bulla, indeed, expanded with Berga’s increasing importance in textile manufacture, acquiring a giant and an eagle during the course of the century. By 1790, the local notary’s response to a royal questionnaire identified the festival as distinguishing Berga from other towns and its entremesos as notable “antiquities” (Pedrals 1989, 9).
This status as antiquity is the next major construction of the festival for outsiders. In the letter of a soldier quartered in Berga in 1820 we see it as the “patum patena, a dance so called that from festivals immemorial is a custom in this town” (quoted in Sales 1962, 212). But contemporary meanings were clearly more important within the town. The word patum is onomatopoeic, related phonetically to other words illustrating the sound of a sudden impact: feet striking the ground, a blow struck, projectiles striking their target, and so forth.6 Notably, the morpheme pat-is associated, particularly in this region in the early nineteenth century, with popular disorder and local bands of bandits and irregular troops—the latter not always readily distinguished (Noyes 1992, 347–51).
The nineteenth century completed the partial domestication of the Patum’s disorder. New entremesos asserting authority and submission—giants, eagle, and dwarfs—were gradually incorporated in order to balance the rebellious performances of mule, Turks, and devils (the Christians and angels being, as they are today, merely nominal victors over the latter two). The town band—such as it was—not only enhanced the appeal of the festival but also set music against the noise of the drum: every entremes except for the mule and the devils now had a melody and a choreography to control it. The order of performances was gradually reshaped to highlight the contrasts of order and disorder and, to a certain extent, to contain the latter. The containment was never fully successful, and we may suspect that the Patum’s eventual symmetries result rather from the polarizing tensions between public, performers, and city.
In the 1890s, the final entremesos of the present Patum were incorporated as part of an attempt to dress up both the festival and the town for potential investors, tourists, and political patrons. The Patum had stabilized the Berguedan social body in representation at least, balancing an orderly upper body with an unruly lower one in an ongoing conflict that, rather than leading to the victory of one side, held the members together—in contrapposto, as it were. The dichotomy was reproduced at several levels of the festival: between procession and Patum, between entremesos, and between the elite spectators in the balcony and the working-class participants in the plaça. Then as today, the Patum’s syntax drew both connections and contrasts:
| Turks and Cavallets. A battle turned into a dance, where order triumphs in the choreography as well as in the mimesis. | Maces. A battle where the nominal victory of order is belied by the protagonism of the devils, who burn themselves out before St. Michael and the angel dare attack them. |
| Àliga. The dance of a hardsurfaced and crowned heraldic bird, which commands attention at the same time it holds the public at a distance. | Guites. The improvisatory movement of two cloth-covered farmyard monsters, which scatter the public as they engage with them. |
| Old Dwarfs, Giants, and New Dwarfs. A sequence where the climax is framed in miniatures of itself; the claims of the higher social status are supported by the emulations of the lower. | Plens and tirabol. Infernal figures without angels to conquer them, whose music is undermined by the separate rhythms of tabal and fuets, followed by a dance “without order or concert” (Armengou 1994, 91) within which symbols of high and low are intermingled. Everyone is still alive at the end. |
The Comparses and Their Performances
The individual numbers of the Patum comprise effigies or masked figures and a prescribed dance or set of movements. The historical term for these numbers was entremesos: in contempory Catalan they are usually called comparses, from comparèixer, to appear. Each comparsa is controlled by a small group of people—overwhelmingly male—and a cap de colla (head of the gang), who distribute the salts (here, the turns as performer) among themselves and those upon whom they choose to confer the privilege. There are nine comparses plus the final tirabol, appearing always in the following order even in acts in which not all elements appear:
1. Tabal
2. Turcs i Cavallets
3. Maces
4. Guites
5. Àliga
6. Nans Veils
7. Gegants
8. Nans Nous
9. Plens
10. Tirabol
Apart from the Tabal, which has a framing role, and the final tirabol, a hybrid, the comparses can be divided into balls and salts. A ball (dance) is choreographed and accompanied by music, hence fixed in time and space. These include the Turcs i Cavallets, the Àliga, the two sets of dwarfs, and the giants. The salts or coses de foc (things of fire) are the Guites, the Maces, and the Plens: comparses accompanied by the Tabal, with music later incorporated in the Plens and the midday Maces. All feature the use of fuets, slow-burning firecrackers about one and a half feet long, which trail sparks until the flame hits the charge at the bottom. The effigies, masks, and costumes of these comparses are much less well made than those of the dances: they suffer fire damage and require constant repair. Their motion, although it consists of prescribed gestures and movements, is less fixed than that of the balls. It is timed not to the music (if there is any), but to the burning of the fuet, which takes about three minutes, depending on humidity. The verb used for the motion is saltar, which means “to jump” or “to leap” in modern Catalan, but in the Patum retains something of its old Latin sense of disorderly, unholy dancing.7
TABAL
The Tabal is a big red bass drum with the shield of Berga emblazoned on its sides, carried by a man in seventeenth-century dress: red velvet slitsleeved coat over a yellow blouse and red velvet knee breeches, white lace cuffs and collar, yellow sash, white stockings, buckled black shoes, and a broad-brimmed red velvet hat with a white plume.