* The author is part of the community of readers of La Vanguardia
The municipality of Calella, a beautiful coastal town in the Maresme region and also known as the tourist capital of the Maresme coast, is characterized by being cosmopolitan, with a typical Mediterranean climate.
Here we find the monument to the Sardana de Calella, in a place perfectly integrated in the Passeig de Manuel Puigvert, who was the most popular mayor of this town.
As we can see in these photographs in Las Fotos de los Lectores de La Vanguardia, it is a sculpture formed by an octagonal pillar and on which there are six sardana dancers represented in a naturalistic way.
On four of the faces of the pillar there is the symbol of Catalonia, the four bars, and on the other four there are: on two of the sides instruments of the copla, on the other the Calella coat of arms and the inscription, and on the last , the coat of arms of the town’s Sardanista entity and a fragment of a poem by Joan Maragall, La Sardana.
The monument was inaugurated on June 16, 1983 at the Festival of Sant Quirze and Santa Julita. The sculptural ensemble, made up of an artificial stone pedestal on which three sardanista couples dance around a cauldron with a sculpted llama, was made by Albert Rosa i Ribas, and the figures are the work of Manel Traité i Figueres (both sculptors born in the municipality of Olot). Two other collaborators participated in the general realization.
To understand the symbology of the monument, one must know a little about the history and culture of Catalonia and of Calella itself. Four of the sides of the pillar are decorated with vertical bars that evoke the Catalan flag and on the other two sides you can see cobla instruments (it is a musical formation, mostly wind, native to Catalonia, with a sound that makes it unique), sculpted embossed.
Another of the sides contains a shield of the city of Calella and the last one, a shield of the Sardanista entity of this city, together with a fragment of a poem by Joan Maragall, entitled La Sardana (… “it is the entire dance of a people who loves and advances holding hands”).
The sardana is part of Catalan popular culture, reflected in the folk art of Catalonia, based on the corporal physical expression of the sardanistas, accompanied by music, being considered as the National dance. Probably the most beautiful sound and plastic illustration of a united people with more than a thousand years of history.
It is a collective dance, which is danced in “rotllanes” (forming a closed circle). The dancers holding hands, facing the center, dance men, women, young and old, alternating women and men, in an indeterminate number of participants. The distributor or head of the dancers, counts the bars of the music giving the necessary instructions to the sardanistas.
The melody of the sardana is structured in two types of steps or tirades, which would be the number of bars, the curts and the llargs (the short ones and the long ones). Short steps are done with arms down and long steps with arms up, accompanied by turns to the right/left, forwards or backwards, and sometimes jumping.
The distributor has to count the bars of the music and translate them into steps, so that, once the latter are distributed, the dance ends exactly in accordance with the traditional rules that govern it.
These measures are successively alternated between 7 and 10 times, accompanied by a generally two-four rhythm. A sardana to dance generally consists of ten runs.
