Enart festival, day 2

19 November 2011

I spent all afternoon at the ENART festival, what a great event.

Here is something I would never see back home - a bus driver taking a nap in the luggage compartment.  I guess it is more convenient than looking for a hotel.

A little girl enjoying her full-skirted gown. 

The shops included various traditional handcrafts.  These two shops were selling leather goods as well as equipment for chimarrão.

Cute lil mini cows.  Moooo!!!

Dancing shoes, gaucho style.

Only in Brazil would you see this combination of footwear standing side by side.

Of course, there was more folk dancing to watch.

This group of girls preparing for their dance reminded me so much of my Rainbow sisters.

Some more groups getting ready for their performances, each group different from the others. 

Wait, am I at Renaissance Faire?  I see a group that looks like the Sea Dogs.  Deja vu!

Some other areas of the festival and grounds.  This memorial to the Olympic ahtletes is a permanent part of the Oktoberfest Park site.  Behind it is the gymnasium, where some of the dance competitions are being held.

This exhibit hall looked like it had display booths made by each chapter of the historical society.

Here is the camping area - again, shades of RenFaire...This is the "backstage" area but accessible to anyone who cared to walk that way.

Now THAT is a real man's churrasco!

The biggest difference between this encampment and the ones I remember from RenFaire and SCA events is that every encampment has a central cooking and dining area.  With tons and tons of food.

Here I got a closer view of the decorative stitching/pleatwork along the sides of the traditional men's pants.  Also in this photo you can see the elaborate belt.

Yet another dance hall for ballroom dancing competition.  (Could they make that number any bigger?)

A very special type of traditional dance is called the chula.  It resembesa combination of clogging and sword dancing.  Two participants at a time compete alternating turns in a series of short dances over a spear.  Each pair competes for about half an hour or more, so it's quite intense.

The next young man made an error during one of his dances, and the crowd clapped and cheered to encourage him to continue - whenever a competitor made a major error the crowd did this.  Unfortunately for this young man, he was thrown so far off balance by his error that it affected all of his subsequent steps.  I was glad that the crowd remained supportive, as did his opponent.

Here is his opponent, have to admire his sportsmanship in supporting his partner.

The next pair up seemed to go even faster than the ones before.  Amazing.

I saw two dancers use a ribbon like this one, quite an athletic feat.

Another layer of the chula competition is that the participants can try to intimidate or fluster their opponents.  The pair in the following videos were very good at it, and if you watch you can even see that they are making eye contact and playing off each other theatrically, even while they are performing the chula.  It made it much more entertaining to watch!

I don't know whether "Tchê" is a person, place or thing, but their homemade sweets were amazing!  There were candy apples, peanut fudge, peanut brittle, macaroon bars and coconut haystacks in three flavors.

Something lovely for my morning coffee - an artisanal cachaça liqueur with chocolate and chili pepper, made by a cachaceria in Rio Grande do Sul called Gotas da Moenda. There were several others, including mint, orange, strawberry and ginger.