Venezuela's Dancing Devils make UN World Heritage List

Venezuela's historic and very unique tradition of masked devil dancing, known as the Diablos Danzantes, which takes place in some 14 towns and villages each year to celebrate the Catholic Feast of Corpus Christi, has been chosen by the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) for inclusion in its List of Intangible Cultural Heritage in Need of Urgent Safeguarding.

The other six traditions chosen included: a chanted form of oral poetry practiced by the Bedouin of Oman; the Fiesta de Patios in Cordova, Spain, which preserves traditional songs and dance; the Mesir Macunu festival in Turkey, which commemorates the recovery of the mother of Suleiman the magnificent from a disease; the elaborate process of creating Romanian Horezu ceramics; and the practise of falconry in Austria and Hungary.

The decision to include Venezuela's foremost folk tradition on its list came after a week-long meeting of the UNESCO Cultural Heritage Committee at the UNESCO headquarters in Paris.

The UN-body hopes that by highlighting disappearing traditions in this way it can help prevent them from fading into extinction and protect the world’s intangible cultural heritage for future generations.

The spectacular masked dancing festivals celebrated in Venezuela on the moveable feast of Corpus Christi (the 9th Thursday after Holy Thursday) continue a centuries-old tradition brought from Spain.

In the country's sugar and cacao plantations, where large numbers of slaves were brought from Africa to sweat for Spanish masters in the fields and forests, the masked dances took on a special significance.

They represented an inversion of the usual power relationship between master and slave, when men with masks to hide their faces took over the town and made mischief without fear of retribution. It was also the one day when a group usually barred from entering the church during Sunday mass could express its defiance and rejection of the status quo.

Nowadays, people dance as a way of requesting a favour from God, to help a sick family member or to resolve a difficult situation for the family. The men who have asked for this intervention are called "promeseros" ("pledgers") because they make a solemn pledge to dance in the festivities every year for a certain number of years or for life, known as "pagando promesa" ("paying the pledge").

The devil dancing begins the day before Corpus Christi with a meeting of the Devil Dancer's Confraternity, private dances and blessing ceremonies with holy water, scapulars, amulets and prayers to protect the men and boys who are about to dance from any spiritual harm.

From sunrise the devils parade through town, dancing around to the sound of cuatro (four-stringed guitar like a ukelele) and maracas, and causing mischief, mayhem and general devilment. About midday, the masked devils gather in front of the church, led by the chief devil and his whip-wielding capataz (overseer). In front of the gathered crowds, they make a mock attack on the church that is repelled by the priest holding aloft the consecrated hosts of the eucharist.

Three times the devils attack and three times they are repelled. Finally, with good having triumphed over evil the devils prostrate themselves before the host. With their masks now removed, the devils continue to dance through the streets and the party begins in earnest.

The most celebrated devil dancers are in San Francisco de Yare, which is close to Caracas in the Valles del Tuy. Dressing from head to foot in red, the Yare devils carry maracas and wear multicolored horned masks made from papier mache.

In the coastal cacao plantation of Chuao, famous for its high-quality cocoa beans, isolation has helped preserve many early elements of devil dancing, including costumes made of colored rags and black and white masks rooted in African traditions.

Further Information:
The Dancing Devils of Yare in Literature

How the Dancing Devils of Yare Got Their Distinctive Red Costumes

Short Documentary on the Dancing Devils of Chuao

The Dancing Devils of Yare in literature

In 2008 the moveable feast of Corpus Christi falls on 22 May. On that day Devil Dancers in San Francisco de Yare in the Tuy Valley will don their horned masks and red outfits and dance outside the church to pay a promise. The tradition harks back to the conquest and Spanish traditions transplanted to the New World. African slaves found in this day of the devil an opportunity to transcend their status at the bottom rung of society, to take control of the streets, and to challenge the church. Not surprisingly, several authors have found inspiration in this unique expression of Venezuelan folk culture. The photos are by Edmundo "El Gordo" Perez, who visited Yare in 1948.

By Russell Maddicks

The first person to bring the Diablos Danzantes de Yare to a national and international audience was Venezuela’s most celebrated novelist, Romulo Gallegos (1884-1969), the author of “Doña Barbara”, “Canaima” and “Cantaclaro”.

Gallegos describes the Corpus Christi celebrations of Yare in a chapter entitled: “Diablos y Angelitos” from his 1937 novel “Pobre Negro” (“Poor Negro”). The book is set during the bloody Federal Wars that ravaged the country between 1859 and 1863 and is an excellent example of Gallegos’ ability to weave regional traditions and customs into his narrative:

“But at that moment two rockets went off announcing the arrival of the devils and the crowds rushed like a whirlwind on to the streets to wait for them, while the drummers standing in the porch of the church began the tam-tam that would accompany the dancing.”

“Devils from all over the region had come to pay promises, the majority of them made so that the Corpus Christi fiesta would lack neither the pagan nor the sacred.”

“The devils, red from their horns to their cloth tails, wore colourful adornments and rattles of every kind, as well as some who were draped in silk and bells, which represented a great investment of money..."

"They invaded the entrance to the church... where the Holy Sacrament was on show, just as the sacristan was closing the doors. Then they stretched out, face down, on the brick floor in two parrallel rows, separated by the same width as the big doors, while the drums stopped beating.

"The curveta and mina drums began again. One of the devils got up - the first in the lefthand row - turning a somersault on his hands that left him kneeling with his back to the church door, and then he got up, simulating the convulsive shudder of someone possessed, in order to shake the rattles he was wearing, and began a dance of jumps and swoops of extraordinary agility, pushing back his cloth tail in order to touch it on the wood of the door..."

"One by one... the devils took their turn, trying to repeat what the first had done, but each one making an effort to outdo the others in agility and skill.

"Now all the devils began their dance. The general dance, without rhythm or beat, just a chance to make a noise with the drums, a whirlwind of somersaults, swerves and squats that filled the space outside the church. It was primitive Africa, even though it was reproducing in America a scene from medieval Europe, and possessed by the farce, they now became frenetic...."

The other writer to draw inspiration from the Diablos Danzantes de Yare was the influential Cuban novelist Alejo Carpentier (1904-1980), who came to Venezuela in 1945 and stayed untilFidel Castro and his band of bearded revolutionaries ousted the dictator Batista in 1959.

His groundbreaking 1953 novel, “Los Paso Perdidos” (“The Lost Steps”), follows a musicologist on a journey to the source of the Orinoco River, which also takes him back to man’s lost cultural origins. Carpentier cleverly juxtaposes the Corpus Christi celebrations in Yare into his narrative in Chapter 3:

“... several devils appeared around a corner of the plaza, headed towards a miserable church of brick and plaster...”

“...they advanced slowly, in little skips, behind a kind of leader or master of ceremonies who could have played the role of Beelzebub in a Passion Play, of the Dragon, or the King of Madmen, with his devil’s mask of three horns and a pig’s snout."

"A kind of fear came over me at the sight of those faceless men... at those masks, out of the mystery of time, perpetuating man’s love of the False Face, the disguise, the pretense of being an animal, a monster or a malign spirit.”

“The strange dancers reached the door of the church and pounded the knocker a number of times. They stood for a long time before the closed door...”

“Then suddenly the double doors were noisily flung open and... the devils fell back in panic, as though seized by a fit, stumbling against one another, falling, rolling to the ground.”

When the solemn Church procession is over, Carpentier writes: “... the devils who were left outside began to run, lauging and leaping, turned from devils into clowns... shouting lewdly through the windows...”



Click here to see Alejo Carpentier's classic novel "The Lost Steps"


Click here for an article on how the Dancing Devils of Yare came to wear their distinctive red outfits

Click here for a video of the Dancing Devils from the famous cacao plantation of Chuao