Fiesta fiesta fiesta

It’s about time I write about the various festivals I’ve witnessed so far in both Cuzco and Ollantaytambo. Yesterday was the grand finale of all the festivals, but I’m still a little incredulous that the partying is really all over. We’ll see.

The first big exciting festival was Señor de Choquekilka (I can’t believe I actually remembered that name) which was an ongoing festival from May 26th-29th. I went with Jenny and my French friend Yacine to catch the last day of it. This festival is held in honor of an appearance of an image of Jesus in a lake to a campesino, which allegedly saved the man from falling off a cliff. The festival started with a bunch of dancing groups dancing down to the “pampa,” a large open space where the majority of the festival would be held. This was followed by an interesting spectacle in which a couple of live chickens were hung by their feet from a rope, then lowered onto a large cross float. Then a cob of choclo (corn) was hung from the same rope, and a bunch of men on horses had to ride under it and try to grab the corn. Every time someone grabbed one another corn cob would be hung on the rope. It was explained to us that for each corn cob a chicken was awarded, but the catch is that the person who ends up with the most chickens also has to be mayordomo for the next year—which means organizing the entire 4-day festival.

After that spectacle there followed much merriment, music and dancing, and a few of the dances we saw were really incredible. My personal favorite (and I think Jenny and Yacine would back me up), which I have also seen at other festivals but far inferior in quality, was a dance involving what Rosita calls “narizones”, or men with masks with long noses which in this case were meant to represent dishonest judges and politicians (I’ve also seen a similar dance done with the narizones representing drunkards, but now that I think about it, maybe the two dances are one and the same). The dance we saw in Ollantaytambo was particularly entertaining—there was a brass band playing rowdy music, and the narizones were dressed ostentatiously, many carrying books with the title “law.” The dance they did was very blatantly raunchy in a comic way, with the narizones stopping every few seconds to do some pelvic thrusts. Adding to the comedy was one boy dancer whose pants kept falling down, to the point where they were literally around his ankles, but who admirably just kept on with the dance in his tighty-whities as if nothing had happened. Another dance of the narizones featured more slapstick humor involving a cartoonishly ugly woman as well as a bull and several bullfighters.

Another interesting dance was a dance of ukukus, a type of traditional character that I think I have mentioned before. Ukukus wear knit masks that cover their entire face and animal-like robes with long fringes. They also carry whips. And use them. I keep asking people about the symbolic meaning of ukukus but all I’ve been able to find is what wikipedia tells me, which is that they are meant to be kind of an intermediary between the human and animal world. Ukuku dances are many and varied but most of them involve two or more ukukus snapping whips at each other. This whipping can be semi-comic at times (for instance, if the person getting whipped is a drunkard character) but in any case usually gets gasps from the crowd. Sometimes there will be one or two ukukus present in another kind of dance, and in this case they seem to be there to—symbolically or more literally—keep the other dancers in line.

Another one of my favorite costumes is a really creepy-looking mask which is made of kind of a screen-like material, so that it is semi-transparent but you still can’t see the person’s actual face. These masks are the most human-like but pretty scary, perhaps for that reason. I’m not sure what these masks are supposed to represent, but a lot of times dancers with these masks also wear a headdress of large feathers, which would signify a character from the jungle. Other times they wear a black scarf covering the rest of their head (scary) and an ornate, regal-looking suit.

There were several more kinds of dances, but those were the highlights for me. After the dancing was over the mayordomo made a really, really long speech on a loudspeaker, and then finally a procession to the plaza began, led by a handful of men carrying the cross. By this time it was already dark. The procession took at least an hour, but I was having an interesting time because two of the dancers had grabbed my hands, obliging me to dance with them all the way up. Things also got interesting when I had the marching band right behind me, and kept colliding with the drum player. I looked over at Yacine and saw the long end of a trombone barely miss grazing his ear. When we finally got the the plaza there were too many people to move. There was some more dancing and speeches, until finally the cross was retired onto a wooden platform that had been built for it.

Then commenced the real partying: the night was kicked off with the most incredible fireworks I have ever seen in my life, which I don’t even know how to describe. Earlier in the day a big wire structure had been set up in the plaza for the fireworks. Other than regular fireworks, there were fireworks that interacted with this structure in some way I cannot explain scientifically, so that, for instance, at one point there were colored sparks flying off wire spirals and later there was a golden wall of fireworks which were being shot down from a bar of same structure (sorry for that really bad description). Then, on a huge stage that had been set up that morning, with a giant advertisement for Corona in the background, there were two different musical acts that played all through the night. They were both chicha bands, the first being a bit Bakstreet Boys-esque with matching yellow suits and goofy dance moves. The second was even more timeless: a woman named Larita Pacheco was the lead singer, and came out dressed in a huge ostentatious red dress and playing an electric harp. We bought food from vendors (at these festivals there are always women selling beef shishkabob-type things with a potato stuck on the end for good measure) and danced until two in the morning, when we finally crashed in our hostel.

The festivals I’ve seen in Cuzco have been larger in terms of the sheer number of people attending them, but nothing has really rivaled my experience in Ollantaytambo. Even so, there are a couple important festivals worth mentioning. The first one, and the most important religiously, was Corpus Christi on June 7th. On this day, all of the saints of different parts of the city are taken out of their churches and paraded around the city before all converging in the Plaza de Armas. Hoards of people gather around the plaza to hear an outdoor Catholic service followed by a very slow procession of all the saints around the Plaza and eventually into the Cathedral. I actually changed my flight to Buenos Aires to a day later so that I could witness this festival, and every Peruvian I asked told me it was well worth the penalty fees. When all is said and done, however, most of my marveling was at the amazing capacity that Peruvians have to sit for hours on end listening to the same repetitive music and watching a few saints be moved a couple inches a minute around the plaza. I was with my friends Erika, Rosita and Vanessa and after about 3 hours had to start tugging on their shirts to make them leave.

Despite the religious significance of the festival though, I think the thing people get most excited about is food. On Corpus Christi the Plaza San Francisco is full of vendors all selling the same traditional dish, called “chiriuchu.” In Quechua that means “cold aji”, aji being a special type of hot pepper they have here. The dish consists of slices of a variety of cold meats including sausage, chicken, and guinea pig, served with toasted corn kernels, cheese, and a corn cake they call “tortilla”, and garnished with seaweed, a string of fish eggs, and an aji pepper. It’s really delicious if you ask me, but takes a good long time to pick apart the meat, and my inexperience was evident. For dessert, my friends treated me to coconut milk (which I drank out of a cocunut with a straw) and for the other hand, a piece of sugar cane to chew on (delicious). Yes, ok, when it comes to food, Peruvians know how to celebrate.

The third big festival, which took place right after I got back from Buenos Aires, was Inti Raymi, which is a semi-contrived reenactment of an Incan sun ceremony meant to offset the Catholicism of Corpus Christi and encourage pride in Cuzco’s Incan heritage. Unfortunately I missed a few of the festivities leading up to the main day of the festival, which included a night of a bunch of Peruvian bands that sounded a little like a Battle of the Bands type thing. The first night I got back there were a couple of salsa bands playing in the plaza and some fireworks, but the plaza was so crowded that I ended up just being driven insane by the quantity of people and going home in a grumpy mood. On Saturday, which was the day before the main Inti Raymi festival, was a huge procession of dance groups through the plaza that started at 1:00 in the afternoon and supposedly lasted until 2 or 3 am. It was actually quite entertaining, and I stood there watching for a good two and a half hours, which I thought was sufficient although everyone I talked to seemed to be surprised that I hadn’t staid for the entire thing. There were dance groups coming from all over Peru, the ones from the jungle being by far the most interesting costumes: one group even had people dressed as condors and lions, and some gnome-looking creatures with big masks made out of paper-mache. My favorite dance that I saw (unfortunately not in person, but I was lucky enough to catch it on TV) was one which seemed to be a comic representation of domestic violence among rural people. In one part of this dance the women literally wrestled their husbands to the ground and started beating them. Then the men retaliated by picking up their wives, slinging them over their shoulders, and carrying them off kicking and screaming. The parade also included groups of immigrants from various countries, which usually didn’t do dances but were there more symbolically, representing that aspect of Cuzqueñan culture. To top it all off there was a gigantic float in the plaza that everyone called the “Inca”, which represented an indigenous man blowing on a kintu, or three coca leaves. And when I say he was blowing on the leaves I mean his arms actually moved and he actually blew smoke out of his mouth. It was quite a spectacle. This night was also the biggest night for partying, and though I wasn’t in the mood to get completely smashed, I came home at midnight to find that even my host mom was still out partying.

Sunday was the main day of the festival. I didn’t see the first part of it, but the day begins around 8:00 am when there is a symbolic salutation of the sun in Qoricancha, a park near the center of the city. From there, all the dance groups come dancing up to Sacsaywaman (ruins of a big temple right on the outskirts of Cuzco) from four different directions, representing the four “suyos”, or districts of the Incan Empire. Then hoards of people gather in Sacsaywaman to watch the main part of the show. It’s a long, complex theatrical production in which the four suyos come out dancing, all gather around the Inca (the political leader) and his religious counterpart (I forget what the name of this leader was), and the two leaders address the four suyos. Then a llama is sacrificed and everyone rejoices. The problem with this spectacle is that it’s pretty hard to really see or hear anything unless you buy preferential seating for somewhere around 70 American dollars. If you’re me and not Cameron Diaz (yes, Cameron Diaz was there, it was front page news in Peru), it isn’t really possible to get seats where you can both see and hear at the same time. Even so, on the ridiculously crowded bus on the way there I met a guy who actually lives in Sacsaywaman, only a few yards away from the archaeological site, and he took me to a good spot that his friends had saved for him, where I could at least see the whole thing from afar if not hear a word of it. It was worth it to be there just to have it all explained to me by this guy, Elias, and to drink chicha and chew coca with he and his hippie friends. I also got into a couple arguments with him about how to say certain things in Quechua—his mother is a Quechua speaker but I’m pretty sure he doesn’t actually speak the language even though he seems to think he does. There’s nothing funnier than getting into arguments about people about their supposed native language and winning. I guess that’s also a little sad though.