Clapping songs are a school genre that has been practiced in the playground, at recess, since time immemorial. They are sung in pairs, like someone playing rock, paper or scissors. The singers, planted one in front of the other, coordinate the movements to shake hands according to a learned choreography while they syllable a repetitive letter with variations to move the story forward. It is a sonorous auca from the time of Maricastaña with lyrics as edifying as “Don Federico killed his wife, made mincemeat of her and put her to stir”, which resound in the Catalan patios in plain Castilian intoned eagerly by voices as white as those of the Choir of Montserrat.
Next to him, the reggaeton music banned from the Penedès carnivals seems like child’s play. In addition, the entire repertoire is articulated in the only monolingualism that is practiced with constitutionalist obstinacy in Catalonia: On 24th Street, A Sailor, Chocolate, A loco, A dove semicolon, Colorín, colorado… The transmission is implacable. . The Catalan songs that Espriu puts in the mouths of children in his novel Laia, written in 1932, are replaced by donfedericos from 39, and come to clap.
Now, the singer of the group Xiula Rikki Arjuna and the choreographer Marta Tomasa have conspired to create three in Catalan. They have tested them in the public school where Arjuna takes his children, The 30 Passos del Clot, and make them freely available to everyone. They have posted letters and videos on the networks. Just look for “cançons de picar mans” and their numbers or titles: La pirate Renata, I have a potion or Dance! All three are fun, but the first one is spectacular: “The pirate Renata jumped off the ship, fucked herself and sprained her wrist. Because he fell into the water the sharks of the ocean that were very hungry (one eye) ate him”. In each round, the voracious sharks claw another piece of the pirate (one hand, one foot, the teeth) and the young performers must repeat the choreo by winking an eye, making a hook with the hand, shrinking a foot and hiding the teeth. Worthy of Monty Python in The Knights of the Square Table. What do you prefer, Renata or Don Federico?
