Oliana revives traditional bell dance for winter festival

Oliana’s winter festival will revive the local bell dance, a popular tradition until about three decades ago. The effort has been driven by community memory, with older residents, schoolchildren and volunteer seamstresses working together to bring the dance back.

The revival was coordinated by the Centre Olianès, led by president Marc Parganya, and Laia Codina, a music teacher at the town’s school. Research turned up fragmentary sources: an elderly resident, Teresa Esteve of Cal Giliserra, kept a cassette with a piece of the music, and the group also found historic photographs. Pau Vilaseca produced an arrangement of the melody and choreographer Yolanda Pérez helped devise an approximate dance from the available clues.

A decisive find came when neighbour Jordi Camardons produced a video showing the dance clearly. That recording showed the original version lasted about six minutes and included repetitive passages that might not suit young performers, so organisers chose to blend elements of the historical choreography with new material from Pérez. As Codina notes, the result is a reinterpretation rather than a strict, beat‑for‑beat reconstruction.

The dance is identified in Joan Amades’s Costumari as the ball de Déu and locally as the ball dels cascavells. Amades recorded that dancers once replaced jacket buttons with bells — sometimes silver — which jingled as they leapt and turned, providing a lively accompaniment to the melody. Amades also described the dance as unusual in Catalonia for being performed in pairs and not resembling a waltz or pasodoble.

Sixteen children aged eight to twelve have been rehearsing three times a week and will perform the dance at the Sant Andreu winter festival. The town council and the rural development body Idapa supported the project. Costumes, based on historical images and descriptions but with creative touches, were made by the Camardons family and seamstress Fina Malé: white tops with red gaiters, red skirts and red headscarves.

Organisers began work in 2022 and hope the recovered dance will not be a one‑off. Their aim is for the bell dance to return regularly to Oliana’s summer and winter festivals and other local celebrations, keeping the tradition alive through ongoing community involvement.