Set against the darkly impressive background of the forest any tribal dance gives an amazing effect of kaleidoscopic light and colour when, with nightfall, by the flare of great fires and the glow of torches, the performance begins. The chosen soloist of the tribe jangling his circlets of nuts, sounding his gourd rattle, in a falsetto voice sings the ancient air of the dance. The warriors follow the melody in canon. Then slowly the great line of naked men, arms interlocked about each other’s necks, surges forward two steps in perfect time, pauses a moment, then recedes two steps. In a little while the whole earth shakes with the swing of the movement. It is like the flowing and ebbing of mighty waves upon a shore. It intoxicates with the recurrence of the accentuation. Slowly round the big maloka the procession passes, swaying in unison. The streaked and banded women dance uniformly in an opposite direction. The fires splutter and blaze. The torches cast strange shadows. The flutes, the pan-pipes, and the drums blare, bleat, and boom their barbaric accompaniment.
PLATE XLVIII.
OKAINA DANCE
It is a mad festival of savagery. The naked men are wildly excited; their eyes glare, their nostrils quiver, but they are not drunk. The naked women abandon themselves to the movement of the dance; they scream their chorus to the tribal dance-song; but they are not lewd. There is about it an all-pervading, illimitable delirium. The wild outburst affects even the stranger in their midst. Forgotten cells in his brain react to the stimulus of the scene. He is no longer apart, alien in speech and feeling. He locks arms in the line of cannibals, sways in rhythm with them, stamps as solemnly, and sings the meaningless words as fervently as the best of them. He has bridged an age of civilisation, and returned to barbarism in the debased jetsam of the river banks. It is the strange fascination of the Amazons.
CHAPTER XVI
Songs the essential element of native dances—Indian imagination and poetry—Music entirely ceremonial—Indian singing—Simple melodies—Words without meaning—Sense of time—Limitations of songs—Instrumental music—Pan-pipes—Flutes and fifes—Trumpets—Jurupari music and ceremonial—Castanets—Rattles—Drums—The manguare—Method of fashioning drums—Drum language—Signal and conversation—Small hand-drums.
In considering the native dances it must be remembered that the accompanying songs are essential elements of the entertainment: they mark the character of the dance; and equally, in considering the songs, it must be remembered that the imagination of the native never goes beyond the relation of the sexes. The Indian’s poetry is an inverted form of romanticism. Instead of seeking to give rhythmical expression to an idealisation, to find in the beauties of Nature an analogy to the realities of Life, he reverses the process. For instance, he views a ripe fruit, and it only suggests to him a pregnant woman. In all such natural phenomena as he recognises he notes but the crude, if possibly the scientific, origin. In the most ordinary conversation he refers to conditions that appear indecent in common print; they are, however, undetachable from him.