INTRODUCTION
I. SOCIOCULTURAL REALITY AND
PRESENT-DAY BERTSOLARITZA
II. ACHIEVING A BALANCE AMONGST THE CHALLENGES FACING BERTSOLARITZA: KEYS
TO THE CREATIVITY OF THE TRADITION
1.1 Total absence of mass production
1.2. Public participation and the vital importance of feedback
1.3. The nature of live performance in a public area and group participation
1.4. Integrated nature of the audience
1.5. Accessibility of the bertsolari: economic self-sufficiency and modesty
2. What does the bertsolari sing?
3. Achieving a balance amongst the challenges. What are roots for?
III. THE PROCESS OF CREATING
IMPROVISED BERTSOS
IV. PROPOSALS FOR A THEORETICAL
FRAMEWORK
1.4 Integrated
nature of the audience
The bertsolaritza
audience is not made up of a well-defined age-group or a particular type
of Euskaldun. It could be said that bertsolaritza embraces a cross-section
of the Basque cultural community and that at a typical performance a public
can be found which reflects quite a wide range as regards ages, cultural
sophistication, occupation and so on.
This contrasts, to a certain degree, with the tendency which exists in cultural consumption towards the sectionalisation of the population where those who listen to a certain type of teenage music, the followers of a particular rock group and those who attend the opera are quite well-defined and generally far removed from each other. In general, every cultural expression, indeed every individual group or artist has, to a large extent, a definite audience profile. This does not mean that in each of them there isn’t room for a wide range of types but, normally, not within the main body of the audience. There are some cultural expressions, such as the cinema, where the cross-generational and cross-class nature of the audience is self-evident.
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| Photo: N. Moreno y A. Unamuno / Source: XDZ |
In the case of bertsolaritza, it has gone from being an almost exclusively rural expression to being a cultural offering which has developed in an industrial or post-industrial society. Curiously, it would seem singing for the community in response to some type of popular or community need, still makes some sense within the Basque-speaking community. There isn’t so great a division by age, class or social status as exist in other types of performance or cultural consumption. In many bertsolaritza performances the audience make-up suggests a certain sense of community or sense of fiesta as a symbolic encounter where people of all types participate. This is something which varies place from place and which it would be necessary to qualify, given that we live in a society in transition and in tension between many tendencies, but it is an element which is still, to a certain degree, valid in bertsolaritza.