The Ensayo

So, just as my diligent "english student" promised me, I went with him and his father to their second "Ensayo" for Semana Santa yesterday, or I should say this morning (10pm to 3am). First a little background knowledge on what an Ensayo is all about:

In Sevilla there are thousands of "pasos" or parades around the entire city for Semana Santa (Easter Week). Since I'm going to Italy with Benjamin, I am going to miss 95% percent of them, so I figured to get as close to the real thing as I could would be to go to an Ensayo. Every "paso" is different, with very distinct music (100% NOT Flamenco, that's for Feria de Abril), and even some parts are done in silence. The Ensayos are practice sesssions for the men that carry the "floats" i guess you could call them, with different Catholic sculptures and important events. For example there is a platform that is carried that has all 12 disciples, Jesus, and his table with tons of food, and is the "Santo Cena", what we know as the Last Supper. I go to see that set up last night but it was not carried around and is my favorite one! Pretty much every church in town has their own unique paso, and the church I joined last night has 3. All of the pasos have their own sculptures with tons of candles and flowers for the real paso during semana sanat, but for ensayos they just load on bricks for weight to simulate how heavy the acutal "float" is going to weigh on the day of the paso. I was talking to a gentleman who was walking alongside the ensayo and he was telling me that on average there is between 30-50 kgs of weight per person (with this ensayo there were 30 people under the platform, not including substitutes), but that it varies based on your height, and the way the street slants making the weight unevenly distributed. The video shows the exact people that I saw last night and it also shows how they head guy communicates with everyone whose under the platform. There is a hammer sort of thing they bang 3 times to get them in the ready, then he goes “YASTA” (or something along those lines), they all get in jumping position, and the farthest guy in the back goes “Hermanos, VA-MA-NOS!” (that guy was hilarious and was actually smoking while carrying his portion of the weight!) Then the head guy hits the hammer one more time and they all simultaneously jump (like feet off the ground with this much weight, incredible) and then land on their toes and slowly go down to being flat footed. It was very interesting, but very long, so I won’t go into all the details, odds are I’m the only one fascinated by them. I’ve added some youtube links for you to see what I’m talking about. You can see the way they communicate, the VERY SLOW way they turn, and the specific shoes they have to wear. I hope they all like each other because they are ontop of one another for about 7 hours during Semana Santa, you’ll be able to see how close they are in the video. There’s one of the 1st ensayo of this year (last night was their second) and the second video is their actual procession during Semana Santa.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OU4hi4gCfGc

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8rsC6niHsAk

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qDp6IG26gU8&feature=related

Sorry if this culture lesson was boring, but I was fascinated by it for 5 hours last night so I had to write something! Hope all is well back in Snowy CT!

Much Love,

Zukis

p.s. my "english student" who we can now call Andres (i figured out his name!) is one of the people who wears the KKK uniform. I told him I absolutely needed a picture of him in it when I get back from Italy and he said sure, and that he'd let me put it on and take a picture of me too! I have the Spanish culture in the palm of my hand! HAHA