We spend a certain amount of time on the Hatajos de Negritos in the documentary, A Zest for Life. You should even expect to see some video clips from this celebration on the DVD, including some of the fancy zapateo footwork. It's a 300 year old set of dances accompanied by music intended to celebrate the birth of baby Jesus. It starts on Dec. 24 and ends on Christmas day, but then there's another celebration on 12th Night (Jan. 6) to commemorate the arrival of the wise men at Bethlehem. We'll talk about it more in another blog.
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| Watercolor by the 19th century Peruvian artist, Pancho Fierro |
The Dance of the Devils (Son de los Diablos) is something we only have time to mention briefly in our documentary. It also uses the fancy footwork that Afro-Peruvians developed called zapateo. It's a dance done in a group, with a head devil and his devil underlings. It seems to be performed mostly by men and is accompanied by musicians (or music on CD if you don't have enough musicians). It's done as part of the Catholic religious celebration called Corpus Cristi, which comes in the early spring. And it dates back to the time of slavery.
The dancers wear masks of devils. The chief devil carries a large book in which are written the names of all the people he will carry down to hell in the coming year (or that he carried down the past year-I'm not sure which). Traditionally, the devils would dance through the streets, showing off the book and at least in the old days, spreading a desire to be good--at least, good enough not to have your name in that book.
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| A modern performance. Photo: America Baila Dance Company (Austria) |
Currently, the dance is mostly done as a performance presentation, although in 2004 it was performed on the streets of Lima, Peru, to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the ending of slavery. (Note that sources give two different years as the year that slavery ended: 1854 and 1856. Again, I'm not too sure why,.)
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