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Bolivia

Bolivia is a country located near the center of South America. Bolivia has two capitals. The Supreme Court meets in the city of Sucre, but most other government offices are located in La Paz, Bolivia’s largest city.

Most Bolivians are of Indian or of mixed Spanish and Indian ancestry. Many still live in rural areas and work as farmers.

Bolivia’s geography includes dry plateaus, rain forests, hills, grasslands, and plains. The Andes Mountains, the world’s longest chain of mountains above sea level, are located, in part, in western Bolivia. The mountain range continues along the west coast of South America, a distance of 4,500 miles. The Andes are about 400 miles across at its widest parts. Many peaks rise to above 20,000 feet.

Andean Dance
[ Huayno | Suri Siquris ]

The Aymara and the Quechua cultures are among the indigenous civilizations that still dwell in the Andes Mountains of South America, which cover parts of Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador and Chile. These cultures have continued to carry on traditions of dance and music that date back to earlier than 15,000 BC.

The Aymara culture has a wealthy repertoire of folk dance and music known as Native (pre-Colombian) and Mestizo dance, which originated after the Spanish conquest and incorporated European influences. In urban centers, Mestizo dances have found much popularity, especially during local festivities and celebrations of patron saints, while Native dance has only found minimal acceptance. However, Native dance is still performed in rural areas during religious or secular community celebrations, examples of this dance being: Sikuris, Pinkillus, Chaqallus, Lawa k'umus, Chuqilas, K'usillos.

The events during which music and dance are traditionally performed in this region are considered expressions of communitás: an expression of community structure and solidarity through ceremonial events, which interpret and reaffirm common values and identity. Whether the event is religious or secular, private or communal, music and dance are important mechanisms of communication and underline the communitas.

Andean music is known as that music performed by the four basic instruments: siqu (siku) (also called panpipes or zampoñas), charango (stringed instrument), bombo (drum), and quena (flute). The siqu is of Aymara origin, while the charango was created after the Spanish conquest, as string instruments were originally unknown in the Andes. In ancient times the charango was made with the carapace of the armadillo, which historians believe first originated in Aymara territory (Potosi) in the 17th century.

Until the 1960s these instruments were played only by indigenous people in remote and rural areas. From the second half of the 1960s onwards, a sector of young people in Chile started up a political and cultural protest movement. This social current adopted as its symbol the musical trend known as nueva cancion or cancion protesta, which is performed with the four indigenous instruments. Victor Jara, Inti Illimani, Kollawara, and Quilapayun were the first exponents of nueva cancion. Later this music spread to the rest of the Andean countries and became popular among students there, especially in Bolivia and Peru, countries that were, at the time, under military regimes. At the beginning of the 1980s however, the political message of the nueva cancion was abandoned, and this music then became commercially acceptable, as it transformed into what we now know as Andean Music.

A recent development in the Andes, as in many areas of the world, is that of "folkloric" music and dance groups that perform on stage rather than as part of a religious or secular communal event. Beginning in 1978, around the time that tourism to the area started to increase, local musicians and dancers began to perform in tourist restaurants in urban centers, and folkloristic groups in touristic taverns. Latin American folk music, played live by groups of young middle class Mestizos alternated with recorded Western disco music.