Danza rinascimento

When you think of music and dance in the Langhe area, you immediately associate them with a ballo liscio orchestra, or with its famous and very common Piedmontese variant bal a palchett or – going past the hills to the near valleys – with Occitan dances, accompanied by the rhythm of the hurdy-gurdies.

Indeed, music and dance are tightly knitted within rural contexts, a custom which could be related to that of the Ancient Greeks, who used to write songs especially for festivities. Dances and songs were also the instruments used by the choir during theatrical plays, a unified action – a chorus – through which the playwright allows the community to express itself.

But bal a palchett, liscio and Occitan dances are all recent phenomena in the hills of Langhe: they either date back to the 19th century or are the result of a cultural importation from the nearby hills of Cuneo, which really counted among the Pays d’Oc for millennia.

Casa Do Alba

One of the oldest documents about the music and dances in the hills of Langa is provided by a work that is there for all to see, but often ignored – the terracotta tiles decorating the Do building in the historical part of Alba’s city center. Forty-nine terracotta artworks that represent the solemn gait of a caravan of musicians and dancers, framed up by Erotes holding up floral garlands.

According to musicologist Cristina Santarelli, the tiles, which date back to the 15th century, are one of the oldest proofs we have about the festivities in the Langhe. “Each piece can be considered as a single frame of a sequence that is part of a whole dance”, according to the anthropologist Piercarlo Grimaldi, who is currently conducting a figurative study on the tiles: “Specifically, each image is part of the representation of a feast during the early medieval times”.

It is interesting to note that these tiles from Alba are an example of Danza dei folli, a particular moment during Carnival in which you can see jesters, tambourine and flute players, dancers, women wearing bells on their dresses and children on horses wielding swords and sticks, a detail you can only find in this type of performance. Iconography from Alba is indeed noteworthy because it refers to similar works found in Milan and kept in the Werner Abegg collection in Riggisberg (Bern) – a sign which associates Alba with customs and traditions of Italian Proto-Renaissance.

It is during the Renaissance that music, which used to be confined to religious music in Medieval times, forcefully comes back to the scene. The royal court and palace are the places where the authority of the lord can be witnessed during feasts and banquets, wherein dances and songs composed for the specific occasion are performed. From the courts to the squares, music turns (or returns) into a worldly and shared form of entertainment: it is easy to imagine that more popular compositions, made up of nonsensical rhymes and carnival practices – the highest expression of folklore music, intended as a common good, available through songs and dance – derive from the sophisticated madrigals of the 14th century, accompanied by hendecasyllables written by court poets.

In their simplicity, the tiles of Do palace reveal a deep connection between the Langhe area, a marginal territory, and the capitals promoting Renaissance culture in Northern Italy, which, in turn, were influenced in their songs and dances by Flemish colonization, at its peak at the end of the 14th century.

Therefore, when we think about the popular music and the traditional dances in the Langhe area, before considering the polka, the gavotte, the waltz and the mazurka, we should remember that it was the Flemish Renaissance that came to our hills and made our people dance with its lutes, harps and tambourines.

BEFORE THE DANZA DEI FOLLI, THERE WAS BAL DO SABRE

For the sake of providing complete information, it is best to remember that the Danza dei folli most probably originates from a type of dance that is very old and hard to get by – the moresca. The moresca is a superstitious and propitiatory dance, layering and catharsis of the battles that the coastal hinterland (all areas of the Mediterranean of Latin culture) had to fight to stop the Saracen invasion. Battles that were also symbolic: the Moors were not considered as mere enemies, but they were the incarnation of darkness, of the underworld and of evil – demons from which the control of the light and the fertility of the soil should be taken away. That is what still happens in Bagnasco, a town on the southern border of the Langhe. The locals have maintained the bal do sabre, a “sword dance”. Although the choreography shows the demise of a condannato (convicted) who refused to give his daughter’s hand to the head of the Saracens, its meaning points to the seasons: the death in winter and the rebirth in spring, together with all of the dramatic events, battles and hopes for a better future, and harvest.