At 40 years old, she has managed to deconstruct herself and live Asturian folklore and tradition in a very different way from how she began doing so when at four her mother enrolled her in regional dance. Singer, tambourine player, visual artist, PhD in Art and fifty percent of the duo of postfolk Asturian LR, Leticia Baselgas bares her soul to the public with Diaries of a tambourine playerher first non-academic publication, composed from the stories she wrote in her diaries since she was little.
Diaries of a tambourine player It speaks of tradition, identity and authenticity, but above all, it speaks of understanding and self-knowledge, that of a girl, who is no longer one, who reflects on her first experiences in a dance group marked by discipline and the post-Franco imaginary. , going through his disenchantment with traditional music and excessive ethnographic rigor, to end up finding a space in which to develop his true creative freedom, in Asturian post folk.
Tradition is something alive, like a nameless voice that passes over time, changing as those who interpret it
The first stop in the conversation with Leticia Baselgas comes from the hand of a question: “what is the Asturian identity?” – silence – “ufff”, she responds, “I was a teenager in a folkloric group and I had no idea about “Nothing,” he begins, and continues explaining how his journey ends when he understands that tradition is something alive, with a meaning, it is like a voice without a name, which passes over time and undergoes modifications depending on who interprets it. .
Leticia González (Baselgas is her stage name and comes from the town where she lives) was born in Xixón, in 1984, but lives in Baselgas, Grao, where, as she says, “everything happened to me.” She began dancing at the age of four, and from that moment on she noticed a strength within her that would eventually lead her to base her own identity on dance. Even so, until he was well into his twenties he danced “according to the rules”, but after managing to rebuild himself, now at 40 he dances because he feels them, because it makes him happy. And so the dance became part of his body and his gesture.
They gave her her first instrument in 1994, a tambourine, which she recognized that she had “as an accessory for Nancy” because it was the decoration when she dressed, but everything changed when at 17 she discovered the group’s album. Women and her true encounter with the tambourine occurred, when she realized that it was a drive that completed what had been brewing in her head for years, what as a woman she was also looking for because “it brought together the full power of the woman’s voice.” And Leticia decided to be a tambourine player.
Diaries of a tambourine talk, therefore, about a percussion instrument, the tambourine, which despite always having been an element of power, as the author recognizes, was not recognized as such until recently, when It has already left the ethnographic sphere and is played by dozens of people, who have ensured that, in its own right, the tambourine is also experiencing its own revitalization process.
This process of revitalization makes the essay also speak a lot from a gender perspective, explains Baselgas, because historically the tambourine was always closely related to women, therefore, it was seen as a minor instrument and linked to the private space, which domestic. In the Asturian folk tradition, the dominant narrative said that the bagpipe was for the man, like the tambourine was for the woman, and despite spending many years claiming its place and claiming the space of the female tambourine player, Leticia says, a push was needed. final to achieve it, and that push was that of Tanxugueiras, Rodrigo Cuevas or LR himself.
“Once you understand that music is alive, and that the tambourine is simply a percussion instrument with which you can play what you want and how you want, that is when you discover that you can understand heritage and tradition however you choose, and externalize it freely and creatively,” claims the author.
The gender and music expert, Laura Viñuela, also present at the premiere of this essay, highlights that Leticia’s book provides an unusual vision of identity and tradition. She points out as “key” the autobiographical narrative in which the author has a “very interesting and characteristic” starting point, speaking from the body, where she inscribes her memory and which, paradoxically, is what women have always been considered to be. throughout history.
Leticia Baselgas’s essay is a personal learning in which, finally, a woman gives voice to a story about women
Thus, Viñuela talks about a book of personal learning in which, above all, the body and the genealogy of women stand out. And Leticia Baselgas has given voice to a story much less heard than those to which we are accustomed, explains Laura, which are the stories told by men. That is why this essay is so important so that “our stories, those of women, go to the public as told by ourselves.”
In this first work, the author presents a very personal journey in which, guided by her doubts about concepts such as collective identity, tradition or popular knowledge, she needs a compass that functions as a theoretical framework with which to differentiate what is true from what is false. , in its deep process of evolution.
The writer David Guardado highlights in his prologue how Baselgas makes us complicit in his reflections, throughout the entire reading, in a work that hooks from the first moment a reader who witnesses a classic narrative with an approach, middle and end, and that you need to know the result of the “subplots” that, in the form of conflict, develop throughout the book.
But this book does not only talk about Leticia or Asturias, explains Guardado, it talks about all those people who search and search, reinterpret and invent identities related to the so-called tradition. Thus, in Diaries of a Tambourine PlayerLeticia Baselgas says that for those whose search is as methodical as hers, they will end up returning to the starting point to discover that absolute truth does not exist, since it is irremediably ideologically conditioned. And that is precisely where the breeding ground of Asturian identity is, in the new projects that are born from the illusions of those communities that are a product of the imaginary that we invent and make exist. Guarantee that this breeding ground never dies.
And so the author herself recommends reading this book in a “critical and open-minded” way, because everything she raises in her diary can cause other people to think about how they lived their own stories and, perhaps, question themselves.
Tradition, identity and authenticity are concepts that one of the most important tambourine players on the scene in Asturias has been reflecting on since she was little and now addresses in this diary that it is one, but there are many.
In this way, the publisher The Factoryor Alicia Álvarez (Pauline on the Beach) and David Guardado, inaugurate their new collection this December, which is called MANIFIESTU and is inspired by the legendary Asturian Popular Collection by Ayalga Ediciones. With this initiative they seek to collect, through varied themes, current Asturian thought—that which thinks about Asturias and that which is thought from Asturias—in a brief and accessible format.
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