If Queen had asked me this question (will you do the fandango?) I would have said ‘gladly – but you’ll have to teach me the steps first’. And thus my first ever fandango was a seated affair for me – a lot of watching and learning.
Fandango: a fiesta involving dancing, jaranas (small Mexican guitars) and the early hours of the morning. The steps to the fandango dance revolve around the rhythm ‘café con pan’, one step, one step, two steps. But all this at a rate faster than light and in a whirl of colour, skirts, heels and percussion instruments. It’s what simpler people would most likely call ‘Mexican tap dancing’. As much as I was shuffling around in my seat and resisting the cry of my itchy, tappet feet, I couldn’t bring myself to get up and dance. You see, you have to get up on the stage, in the middle of a sea of musicians and other dancers and wait your turn to tap away. When it comes to your turn you get up on the stage, usually in mixed-sex pairs, and gently push the previous pair off. Small children, old women, beautiful young girls and pert-buttocked young men all joined in, as I watched on, increasingly eager to learn how to dance the dance and pluck the strings. The sound of the jarana has an incredible ability to fill the box, create a wall of sound which falls more abruptly than the iron curtain when it stops, and the music and the dancing together create a heady atmosphere of rhythmic psychedelia. Drinking and smoking was banned, as it was a family event, a celebration of Veracruz traditional revelries. I’ll leave it to you to ponder what’s next of my list of things to do before the next time a 70s rock group ask me a loaded question.
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