Jul 12
2007

The night of the witches

A country of parties and festivals, this is how i call the land of Romagna. Every day you have a choice between 3 or 4 beach parties or you can explore the hinterland to find out some country festival. Yesterday we read the advertising flyer of a local festival called “The Night of the witches”, in San Giovanni in Marignano, a little medieval town just 3 km. far from here.

So we took our inseparable hotel bikes and we payed a visit to this event. We arrived at 9 p.m and we noticed a holy crowd darkening all the visible horizon. What a terrible sensation to walk like a herring in the oil… Anyway we step ahead, diving bravely this sea of meat.

The streets around were barely illuminated by a few lamps and the atmosphere was dark and creepy. In every street was flying above us the dummy of a witch, illuminated in red or blue or green, really scaring stuff. I could hear from distance strings playing an obsessive melody. Suddenly i saw a sign with the history of this Festival and i think you may be interested in because is kind of a cool piece of history.

Legend says that there is a lifetime astral configuration of St John’s Night. This particular setting is perfect for enchantment, and in this magic night the witches foregather. The wise protect himself by wearing under his clothes one of the herbs associated with St John’s Night: Hypericum (better known as St John’s wort), Lavender, a clove of Garlic picked before dawn; Verbena, symbolising peace and prosperity, or Artemisia, those little red berries also called St John’s berries.

This legend has inspired an annual event which aims to keep alive a historic tissue of popular beliefs and traditions by turning them into entertainments of various kinds: popular street theatre with shows illustrating the major themes of magic, superstition, and mystery; street markets showing and selling objects, medicinal herbs, magic stones and natural products; the witches’ cavern, an atmospheric stage setting for fortune-tellers and palmists .

The witches

Exploring the narrow alleys we found several shows of many international artists playing live in the streets. At first we found a particular dramatization from Chile. The artists who make up “Teatro Glimt” come from Denmark and Chile.
“Imagine a dinner where the only guest is the master of the house, the only manservant is drunk, and the only musician who has turned up is the wrong one.
Imagine the mistress of the house: flirtatious, jealous, a prima donna, served by her manservant on a rope, while the musician plays steel pans.
Imagine a time before the invention of the micro-chip, a time of subtlety and decadence. Make a journey back to this time”.
Teatro Glimt uses circus technique, theatre, dance, and music to tell this story full of humour, folly, and poetry, which will make the audience literally mad.
The three performers use circus acts such as ropes, acrobatics (for one or two people), walking on the hands, and juggling. All this is accompanied by live music provided by a double bass, steel pans, three different saxophones, flamenco shoes, percussion instruments, and an old radio!
“We speak, but we don’t use language. The show can be understood by everybody, whichever country they come from”.

After this outstanding show, in a close street we met another artistic event called Circus Xiclo. Xiclo is a real circus, well-known and popular throughout South America; its speciality is combining the most refined circus techniques with theatre, live music, and comic turns, making this one of the most interesting and amazing circus-theatre groups of the moment. The work of these eclectic performers follows the evolution of the language of circus arts, free from sophism or intellectual mediation, keeping intact the carefree joyous spirit of popular entertainment. The painstaking characterisation of the figures leads the audience by way of irony through the various performances; even the simplest numbers have unexpected twists. The joyous rhythm is kept up at speed throughout the show, by means of gags and clowning.
This company, which began its artistic adventures early in the 1990s, now numbers twelve members and has received international prizes in circus competitions, performing in over fifty cities all round the world.

At this point of the night we were a little bit tired, not to mention our 3 km. biking return to home. We decided to escape, far from the madding crowd someone would say… Of course we didn’t find our bikes and we forgot the name of the street where we have parked them. Fantastic. Anyway we had a drink thinking about where the hell we could have left the bikes. After a consistent number of drinks we had a mystic sensation of drunk wisdom and we saw the place where we left the bikes in our mind clearly!

I don’t know how we reached the hotel, neither for how long we traveled, but finally we got it and i said goodnight to all witches and wizards and whatever weird stuff out of my hotel room door.

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