ARTS AND ENTERTAINMENT CULTURE-URUGUAY: Early Start to Montevideo Carnival

By Dario Montero Reprint | | Print |

Dario Montero

MONTEVIDEO, Feb 2 1999 (IPS) - The annual Montevideo carnival – billed as the longest running in the world – is off to its usual early start this year, well ahead of the better known festivals in Rio de Janeiro in Brazil and other countries in the Caribbean.

Alhough not as famous as the others, the Montevideo carnival mobilizes the most artists and onlookers in relation to the population. Heir to a popular Spanish tradition, the festival began last week and will lasts until March 15, with daily performances all over Montevideo by some 20,000 artists from diverse backgrounds.

They perform in the tradition of “traveling comedians” and will make anywhere from 5 to 10 appearances on stage each evening.

Although this tradition spans the entire territory of Uruguay, where most of the cities hold similar festivals, Montevideo – with almost 46 percent of the country’s 3.3 million inhabitants – has developed a carnival very different from the rest of Latin America.

It preserves much of the festivity and popular participation that these festivals have enjoyed since the 1930s , the passage of time has transformed the carnival into a succession of neighborhood performances, closer to theatre than to the “pagan festivals” that “turned the world upside down”.

The Montevideo festival, which features 20 outdoor stages set up in different parts of the city – in addition to the main Summer Theater – with strict rules of competition that compare aesthetics and lyrics performed with time limits, differs completely from the famous Rio de Janeiro carnival.

“There is nothing like the carnival of Uruguay”, trumpeted a slogan formed in the middle of this century which has transcended borders.

Even the publicity back then was not exaggerated as 250 stages existed in a city that was half the size of what it is now and attracted thousands of visitors from neighboring countries. Historians agree the Montevideo carnival was the foundation of the country’s tourism industry.

Some 250,000 now flock to the capital for the 45 days of activities in this city of slightly more than 1.3 million inhabitants, making it the country’s main cultural activity. The beginning and end of the “Uruguayan carnival” are the same every year: the last Friday in January until the middle of March.

The groups that present their wide variety of artistic forms also have distinctive characteristics. Among these are the “murgas”, “musical reviews”, comparsas lubolas” (an expression from the Afro-Uruguayan culture), “impersonators” and “humorists”.

All the performances have a message that includes social and political criticism with local characteristics, but also preserve the original essence of the festival.

The ancient ritual for the Momo king, born some 2,000 years before Christ, is historically celebrated with acts that are at the same time religious, esoteric and above political partisanship.

According to research, the earliest forms of carnival began in the Babylonic culture which developed between Tigris and Euphrates rivers in what today is Iraq. It was a five-day festival for spring was celebrated at the temple for the god Marduk.

During that time, all the social and political structures of the kingdom switched roles, and even the slaves served the lords, in a kind of reversal that was publicly accepted and which ended tragically on the afternoon of the last day.

The substitute king (Momo), who for five days ate the best foods and enjoyed all the pleasures of life, only to be executed at the end of the festival, was chosen from among the worst elements of society.

Historian Carlos Gerard notes that, with the death of the substitute king, the legitimate monarch was redeemed and by extension, his people were liberated from all evil, impurity and arrogance.

That kind of fictitious transformation of reality for a short period of time came to the Americas with the Spaniards during the conquest, although Christian culture had already adapted the pagan festivity to a kind of liberation that took place before the beginning of the 40 days of Lent before Easter.

In the Andean region, the Hispanic custom blended with the indigenous traditions, producing a kind of synchretism. In the Rio de la Plata, however, it took on a form that was different from the rest of the continent.

In Montevideo, the so-called “barbarian carnival” predominated until the end the mid-19th century. It was anarchic, spontaneous and included dangerous games, which served as brutal forms of escape in the only days of truce during the civil wars that swept the country.

The festivities back then lasted longer than today, starting at Christmas and continuing until the beginning of Lent, with masquerade dances in which the Black community mixed in with the white. The “candombe”, a rhythm that emerged in the times of slavery as way of maintaining the African tradition alive, was the central element.

The acceptance of this music, distinctive to the Black culture of the Rio de la Plata, was also a liberating element in the mid- 19th century, and today the so-called “Llamadas” (“calls”) which are a feature of the parade of “comparsas lubolas” at the Uruguayan carnival.

The “barbarian carnival” ended in 1870, when president Lorenzo Batlle prohibited it, in response to the demands of the dominant social class. Batlle’s decree, however, did authorize the substitution “artistic expressions”, which became the basis of the “performance carnival”, marking a drastic change in the customs of a country that was slowly entering into an era of internal peace.

The end of that century marked the first appearance of the early “comparsas” and “troupes” in the style of the Spanish students, according to Uruguayan historian Milita Alfaro, in her study “Carnival and Modernization. Impulse and Control of Discipline (1873-1904)”.

Alfaro points out that it was in those days that the classic version of the Montevideo carnival was forged, with its costumes, parades of floats, artistic groups, dance lines and especially the “murgas”.

The murga emerged from a parody of the presentation in Montevideo of the Spanish zarzuela theater company “La Gaditana”, by a group of friends in 1909 and became a renowned feature of Montevideo’s carnival.

Soon, these groups of 15 singers at the most, with a drum set that includes one small drum, a large drum and one set of cymbals, began to represent different neighborhoods, generating a true competition that lasted until contemporary times.

The theme of the lyrics, which include strong criticism of the government, social leader and citizens’ attitudes, transformed the murgas into a kind 20th century minstrel group, according to historians, reflecting the country’s transformation in the the past 80 years.

This critical form of expression provoked censure, persecution and even jail sentences during the dictatorship of the 1970s.

The Uruguayan military government of 1973-1985 unsuccessfully attempted to ban the festivities – unlike the military regime in Argentina who, through a 1976 decree, prohibited carnival celebrations.

The murgas have the particularity that the majority of their members devote themselves to artistic activities only 45 days a year, while the rest of year they do other things. A “murgista” could be a public employee, an industrial worker or an executive at a transnational corporation.