As you can guess, the huge variety of music styles comes from a
huge variety of dance styles.
During the Pre-colonial period, dances
celebrated fertility, war, seduction, land labor, etc… It was priors and
acknowledgments to divinities of Nature, ways of social relationships…
With the Spanish conquest, these
dances became mixed with ways to make fun of the colonist, to represent the
suffering endured and to alleviate souls during colored and joyous celebrations
in villages.
To mention some traditional dances, we
can note, in the area of traditional Pre-Colombian dances, chiriguano, imitation of inter-tribal wars with jaguars’ skins, diablada, the most famous Bolivian
dance, battle between good and evil, kachuta,
Aymara’s seduction dance between teenagers and veneration of fertility.
For the colonial period’s dances, auqui auquis, where they imitate and
overstate obsessions and expressions of old white men (auqui in Aymara
language), landowners, during the colonial period, with canes and small
glasses, bailecito and Cuenca, ballroom dances imported from
Europe, morenada, dance of black
African populations brought as slaves.
Dances we can see today kept the
massive costumes and colors very riches of old, especially in the Andean
regions.
This is a pleasure for the eyes to assist to carnivals of
Altiplano; Oruro’s carnival attracts every year thousands of
local and tourists, came to admire the Chunchos,
costumes recording Amazonian clothes, with feathers and arrows, the Llamaradas (Andean shepherds keeping
lamas) or the Incas, during the staging
of Spanish conquest.