Fun with Tom and Anna: dancing the tinku

Here’s a little background on the Tinku, a traditional dance from Potosi, Bolivia, which I danced in at the Oki Festival.

Potosi, resting at 13, 350 ft is perhaps the highest city in the world (depends on who you ask) and was for centuries the economic capital of Bolivia. Its silver funded the Spanish Empire for a solid two centuries, but its profits never spread to the people of Bolivia. Once a town of 200,000, its silver stores have been depleted and now it’s a small town that makes little off of its tin and other metals. Mining, in horrific conditions, still takes place there, and the life expectancy of its workers is somewhere in the mid-thirties. We haven’t been to Potosi yet, but I hear it’s a pretty grim place, and its history is as harsh as its wind whipped, rocky landscape.

The Tinku is the traditional dance of the indigenous people of Potosi. Both men and women take part but they do not dance together nor touch one another. The men form one group of three rows and the women another, and they dance their twenty-four respective routines, following one another up and down the streets, across fields, through plazas, and to the houses of friends and family where they stop to eat and drink. And drink. And drink some more. The festivities and dancing go on for three days. It ends finally in a circle, in which the well liquored men antagonize one another and duke it out. Sometimes to the death. This violence is generally regarded as a needed release from the strain of an impoverished and oppressed life; the killers are rarely avenged.

It’s cold up there in Potosi, and so the Tinku dress is a thick burlap sack. A dance with a skimpier costume could’ve been comfier given the jungle heat and humidity of Okinawa, but I love the Tinku, and I’ve gotten used to sweating through my clothes anyhow. So dance the Tinku I did, with all its twenty-four routines, up and down the streets of Okinawa, across the soccer fields, in the plaza, and to the houses of friends. We ate and drank what was offered to us along the way and ended each day with a friendly wrestling match in tribute to the traditional fist fights, then offered a prayer to the Virgin of Urkupina (still not so clear on who she is), along with the dancers of the traditional dances from other parts of Bolivia. It was exhausting and awesome. Sadly, I had to return my burlap sack, but I won’t forget the bouncing music or my Tinku moves anytime soon.

some pics from the festival days