Folklore - Dancing in circle

The dance of the type wheel is certainly choreographic more widespread in Europe and worldwide. Its simplicity certainly contributed to this: the dancers form a wheel, merge the male with the female. More widespread in the formula, give their hands to each other, facing the center of the circle, moving the wheel in the opposite direction-clockwise. From time to time, the occasions on which the music suggests, stop fighting and palms, and then return to the circular motion.

Besides simplicity, there are authors who attribute its disclosure to the value of the magic circle and developments in a circle, which perhaps represent the apparent motion of the sun, or that would impair fertility. Anyway, the wheel is the most primitive form of dance collective, Maurice Louis ensuring its existence from the Palaeolithic times. The type is the best known medieval "carole", which was certainly sung by dancers, first by a soloist, which responded after all.

Large parts of the dances of pilgrims to the sanctuary of Our Lady of Montserrat transcribed in llibre Vermell (centuries XIV and XV) are circular, with the dancers giving up their hands. Note that both were interpreted as the entrance to the sanctuary inside the temple.

Dance wheel, France, XV century. (Manuscript of the Bibliothèque Nationale de Paris).

The dance of wheel appears to have been the matrix of many other changes since it was from their choreography, their variations, the side steps of the hands in pairs, the lifting of hands, which were generated the other gender Choreographic since the Middle Ages through the Renaissance, until the waltz, polka and mazurka of Eight hundred.

In Portugal, as elsewhere in Europe, the dance of large wheel known for. It understands that the songs of peaceful friend accompanied the dance; many authors agree that the parallel structure shows that there is a soloist with a chorus response. Teófilo Braga says that the lyrics of songs that a friend was just a pretext to accompany the dance. António José Saraiva considers the parallel arrangement of songs "were sung suggests that the two voices alternate, except the chorus, sing in chorus.

E Tomaz Ribas says that "the songs parallel let us assume a scheme based on a choreographic dance move with assistance coryphaeus and alternate between a group dance that fits into the large group dances of the wheel of the most famous and popular throughout the Medieval Europe was Carol. Moreover, Aubrey Bell has established a link between obsessive simplicity and speed of songs and dances of friend wheel, which also shares Rodney Gallop.

Dance wheel in the sixteenth century. Drawing in ink the Dutch School. Metropolitan Museum, New York.

The songs come from a friend and certainly the most authentic background substrate popular northwestern peninsular and parallelism must come from indigenous, the soul, the lyricism, the sensitivity Galician-Portuguese, or even a wider lyricism Romanesque, as suggested by Rodrigues Lapa. The characteristic of the medieval songs of friend are placed in the mouth of the woman seems to have relation with the fact that, even today in our oral tradition of music, especially in the North, women are the most important bearers of traditional song and its best interpreters. Rodney Gallop states that "since the time of D. Dinis noted that foreign travelers in the Northwest Peninsula, unlike they did in other countries, women more than men chanted.

It is a ground that, among the rural people, women sing more and better than men, both in farm work, as in religious services, as well as terraces, dance. While it is true that the first reason can be found in more and more natural propensity for singing by women, another reason to just walk on particular songs and dance tunes of the wheel, which are interpreted by women. Indeed, if the whole of the songs that accompany dances majority are women (except for those in that contest, in which case men and women usually balance), the wheel of dancing then, the song is delivered only to the voices female.

In more than twenty years of fieldwork across the country, seldom found men singing songs of wheel. Instead, the recordings that made the information we collect and contexts are: the songs of the wheels, then in most cases, without any accompanying instruments, were in charge of the girls, who both sing and dance. Was only the mouth of women, now fifty, who recorded throughout the country and in Extremadura, the wheel with songs that, in times of his youth, ensured the dances of his village where no player appeared.(...)

Three generations of women in honor of batalhenses Afonso Lopes Vieira, in 1938. Photo courtesy of José dos Santos Travaços

However, Maurice Louis ensures that even very late in the Middle Ages was a fun to dance almost exclusively female, explaining it as the first dance songs to have been made by women. Perhaps here lies a reason for the female character of our early songs to friends, which would thus sing and dance for women. Rodney Gallop rightly establishes relationship between the tradition of the medieval carole, dance of wheel running with the corner of dancers own, and songs of our friend, who always devoted to the chorus as one of the most important characteristics of English folk song (in "carole", "Master sang the" Copla "and the other dancers the chorus). If we apply this kind of choreographic medieval northwestern peninsular and considering that the local tradition had women as singers and dancers, we can find an explanation for the aforementioned female character of the poetry of our songs friend.