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Rancho Folclórico do Clube Português de Hartford Performance, 1999

PerformerPerformed by Rancho Folclórico do Clube Português de Hartford Portuguese, founded 1965

Date1999

Mediumreformatted digital file from VHS tape

DimensionsDuration: 46 Minutes, 50 Seconds

ClassificationsGraphics

Credit LineConnecticut Cultural Heritage Arts Program collections

DescriptionVHS tape recording of a performance by Rancho Folclórico do Clube Português de Hartford at the Portuguese Club in Hartford in 1999. The event was a fundraising dinner. João dos Santos and another member of the group are performing fandango.

Object number2015.196.854a-b

CopyrightIn Copyright

NotesSubject Note: Rancho Folclórico do Clube Português de Hartford was first formed in 1965 by Portuguese immigrants eager to preserve dances and music from their homeland. After a break when many dancers were serving in the armed forces during the Vietnam War, the Rancho re-formed in 1972, and is the oldest continuously performing Portuguese dance group in New England. Based at the Portuguese Club in Newington, over fifty members of the Rancho ranging in age from 5 to over 60 come from families of dancers and musicians who have been with the group for decades. The Rancho’s repertoire of Portuguese songs – and the hand-made costumes – come from all the cultural regions of Portugal including the Azores, reflecting the make-up of the Hartford community.

Large Portuguese communities settled in coastal towns such as Stonington, Connecticut to pursue fishing occupations; many of these immigrants came from the Azores. Factories in inland cities such as Waterbury and Hartford attracted immigrants from rural areas of Portugal who sought work wherever they could find it. The population of entire towns in the northern farming and seafaring provinces of Minho, Tras-os-Montes, Douro, and the Beiras came to settle here, so the Rancho's songs, dances, and costumes reflect these specific regional origins. More recently settlers have come from Ribatejo, bringing new songs and dances to the group's repertoire, which now includes the dynamic fandango from Ribetejo province near Lisbon and the fast-paced corridinho from the Algarve. In their home areas of northern and central Portugal, many of these farmers and laborers were singers and dancers in the regular festivals, church celebrations, and special events which were always marked with music and dance. In America too the connections to village and traditional practices remain fresh and solid despite the community's successful integration.

Rancho Folclórico is committed to authenticity in its performances, presenting the songs, dances, and costumes as they exist today in Portugal. The group has carefully researched and collected traditional costumes as well as dances. Over the years many instructors from the community knowledgeable in traditional music and dance have taught group members. Portugal has three main regions differing widely in geography, the occupations followed by people living there, and their traditions. Regional variations are reflected in the dances, which are very specific to each locality. The situation in America is more complex, as Portuguese communities are often comprised of immigrants from different regions. Northern dance formations start with male-female pairs dancing in circular rotation or in columns with the partners across from each other. Dancing with the arms raised, often holding castanets, is a distinguishing feature of Portuguese dance. The Rancho's repertoire includes the vira from the northern coastal province of Minho. Dance movements - vira means "to turn" - reflect the activities and occupations of the area. So the vira refers to movements arising from the fishing activities of Minho, while the chula and malhao from Tras-os-Montes suggest threshing, husking, and preparing grain in that farming province.

Accompanying the dancers, the Rancho's musicians play accordions, violao (guitar), cavaquinho (the early form of ukelele), mandolin, hand-held frame drum, triangle, and reco reco (a long piece of serrated wood scraped with a stick). In the music of Ribatejo, a split bamboo stick called caninha ("little cane") keeps the beat instead of drums. Male and female vocalists sing festive songs, often about wine, romance, and rural life. Malhao is a threshing song..." You'd be amazed how many people don't know what threshing is! The malhao is a dance done at the time of harvest in September. Watch for the movement of the men's feet - they show how people jump on the wheat to separate the grains in threshing!"

All costumes are handmade in Portugal. Some of the women wear the heavily beaded black velvet skirt, jacket, and gold filagree jewelry worn by brides (and later on other occasions throughout their lives) in Portugal. These outfits, made in the town of Viana do Castelo in Minho, are rare and valuable because only a few seamstresses remain who can sew the intricate beadwork. Other dancers in the Hartford Rancho wear the colorful embroidered wool skirts, vests, and aprons seen in northern Portugal on feast days and festivals. The brightly colored vests and embroidered skirts are worn by village women on festive occasions. The color, style, and width of the embroidered hems vary from parish to parish in the north, identifying the dancer by her village. The subtle differences in color and width of the embroidery indicate which parish a woman is from. When performing dances from Ribatejo, Rancho women from that region wear the tightly pleated brown wool skirts, cotton blouses, and short jackets which they have collected from their villages. Unusually for a Portuguese dance group in North America, the women wear xinelo, the embroidered clogs which stamp out the rhythm of the steps, an important percussive element of the music. The clogs are beautiful and serve a function, but they are notoriously difficult to keep on the feet so most groups have abandoned them. Most men in the group wear the black trousers, white shirts, long red sashes, and the beaded vests of northern farmers. When performing the fandango, the two male dancers wear the appropriate knee-length trousers and vest of a Ribatejo cattleherder, a contest of virility and agility between two men fighting for a woman's heart.

In addition to dancing at all the Portuguese festivals around Connecticut, Rancho Folclórico participates in a network of Portuguese dance organizations who perform all over the East Coast at festivals and celebrations held in Portuguese communities such as Boston, Chicopee, Ludlow, Fall River, New Bedford, Cranston, West Warwick, Elizabeth, Newark, Bridgeport, Waterbury, Danbury, New Haven, and Cape Cod. The group was invited to dance at the Smithsonian's Bicentennial Celebration Festival in 1976, and in 1985, was invited by the Portuguese government to perform throughout Portugal on a two-week tour. They performed at the 1996 Special Olympics in New Haven and the 1997 Lowell Folklife Festival in Lowell, Massachusetts. In 2019, the group was invited to Bermuda and Canada. The Rancho has hosted several visiting Portuguese dance groups from Canada and the U.S. during the Day of Folklore events that drew audiences of almost 500 each year. The 50th Anniversary of the group was celebrated in 2022.

Perhaps the Rancho's most remarkable feature is its historically intergenerational membership, creating a continuity within families and ensuring the passing on of the songs and dances brought with them from Portugal. Many members of the dance group have been participating for decades, marriages take place and children come into the group, forming family dance dynasties. Many of the original founders from 1972 and even some from the very first group in 1965 serve as officers, musicians, and instructors now that they are too old (so they say!) for the energetic dances. The Rancho also includes many young musicians devoted to Portuguese culture.

Biographical Note: João dos Santos was born in the Portuguese village of Mir de Aire in Ribetejo, the province east of Lisbon which is the center of Portuguese bullfighting. He has been a musician playing the ret ret, a scraped wooden stick, with the Hartford - area dance group Rancho Folclorico do Clube Portugues de Hartford, and served as ensaiador, the dance instructor, in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Joao's specialty is fandango, which he learned from an older Ribatejano living in Hartford, Joachim Duarte. This dance done by two men facing each other while they swing long sticks under the other's feet, displays a contest of virility between cattle herders as they fight over a woman. Rarely performed by local folk dance groups in public in North America because of its difficulty, the fandango is also danced at weddings where its meaning can be eloquently expressed as part of the celebration. Joao taught fandango to two apprentices from the Ludlow Mass Portuguese folk dance group, in Year 7 of the Southern New England Traditional Arts Apprenticeship Program, from 2004-2005.

Additional materials exist in the CCHAP archive for this community and this group.

Cataloging Note: This project was made possible in part by the Institute of Museum and Library Services MA-245929-OMS-20.