top of page
003-1704-2.TIF

I was looking at some pictures I had from when I was single. My wife starts to look, and starts to laugh. I don’t know how many years I’ve danced. Tinkuy, morenada, kullawada, everything. And laughing every time we dance. For example, the kullawada is a La Paz dance, isn’t it? It’s mestiza, isn’t it? [The dancer] wears a hat with pearls on it, some decorations like that. And with some wide pants; with [stiff] lapels – it looks like they’re made of cardboard, doesn’t it? Well-adorned like that. And the key to that dance is to move the shoulders, right? Dancing like that, flirting. Well, I’m not so… into that dance, let’s say. But I think it’s from the clothes of the llamerada dance, isn’t it? It seems that they are driving their little llamas, doesn’t it? That’s their clothes, but much more stylised, more exaggerated.

[For] the tobas, we had comrades who had the same long hair, just like me. We said the six of us would dance it. And on that day of descent [from the mountain], the six with our loose hair, well-painted like Apaches – all the people took our photos because they liked that we were original. I don’t think it’s our culture, is it? It seems like it’s another culture. At least I see it that way, but I don’t know. We didn’t know either. If you see someone dancing the morenada, he’s going to tell you what his story is. [The tobas] is not so clearly Bolivian. Perhaps [it] has a relationship with us, at the end of the day – because it is the same continent, isn’t it? And if you realise, our culture was also not so far from that. We look something like them, don’t we? There seems to be a dance of the Incas everywhere, doesn’t there? – Amilcar

bottom of page