Bolivian folk dances

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.