CUENCA FOLKLORE

This cultural city has constant film, music and dance festivals and i was lucky enough to catch a local dance competition during our stay in Cuenca. The competing groups ranged from very slick professionals demonstrating their co-ordination to amateur groups from outlying villages showing scenes from daily life through costume and dance.

The professional group were highly entertaining and very energetic with the troupe dressed in beautiful costumes - some of the men wearing knitted masks and lama skins on their legs.

They finished their performance with an acrobatic human pyramid.

Personally i preferred the amateur village group, who wandered on to the performance area with sheep and a chicken. Their dance showed hunting scenes with some of the men dressed in deer skins whilst the women assembled a tripod and lit a fire underneath to prepare for 'cooking' the meat brought back by the hunters.

Rather worryingly, for me anyway, the chicken was placed on top of the tripod, and seemed unperturbed when the flames started climbing up the tripod, but the chicken was released before any major singing took place and ran for freedom.