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The Ball de Pastorets is a stick dance with each dancer using a log stick. The dance is very ancient and has an agricultural background with reference to the ancient shepherds, one of the older trades of the human race.
Nowadays it is danced by sixteen to eighteen years old lead by a foreman. The dancers beat the ground and the other dancers’ sticks with long sticks made of the branch of a strong tree (cork oak, evergreen oak or holm oak), symbolically fertilising the earth. The dance has several parts interspersed with verses about the life of shepherd, the city or the Festa Major. The dance continues with three figures, La Cadena (the chain), El Pont (the bridge) and El Cargol (the snail) where the dancers lift up the smallest shepherd on a platform of their sticks.
The costume is white shirt and trousers, a white waistcoat decorated with coloured flowers, a red “faixa” (a wide cotton cummerbund), a coloured headscarf and a haversack with a gourd hanging from it.
Their music is played on “flabiol” (a type of pipe) and “sac de gemecs” (Catalan bagpipes), and has three music pieces, as many as the parts the dance has.
In Vilanova the dance was first documented in 1950, but it is thought to be much older than that. The Agrupació de Balls Populars revived it in 1980, and the dance has appeared regularly since then.
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Ball de pastorets
