How to drink while dancing: Traditional Catalan wisdom for prancing drunks

If you've read my previous posts, you presumably now have a hot Catalan girlfriend and have mastered drinking wine from your porró, the squirty Catalan wine pitcher. The obvious next step is to dance with your Catalan gal while drinking from your porró.

Fortunately, drunken Catalan dancing has a storied past; and I found a literally crumbling old book with the evidence: El Diccionari de la Dansa, dels Entremesos, i dels Instruments de Música i Sonadors (The Dictionary of Dance, Short-Form Entertainments and Musical Instruments). That's right, y'all, Tipsy Pilgrim spent a day in the library.

Of the hundreds of Catalan dances in this 1936 ethnographic pan-Catalonia study, there were at least three folk dances that called for heavy wine drinking while dancing. To perform each of them, you should drink from — but attempt to not break — a fragile porró.

Ball del Porró	The Porró Dance	Place a porró full of wine on the head of the gentleman and a coca (small, pizza-like flatbread typical of Catalonia) on the head of the lady. The two of you dance together, slowly “marking out a soft and relaxed step”, until you reach the other end of the plaza, at which point you eat the coca and drink the wine. The gentleman should then dismiss his gal, pick up another, and again make his way across the plaza with more wine and another coca. This must not stop until the gentleman’s porró falls and breaks.
Rossinyol	Nightingale	This dance is performed in taverns and inns by men only. Place porrós on your heads, and sing about nightingales building a nest. Unfortunately, the details of the steps have been lost to the ages.
Dansa	Dance3	Another dance for men only. A flabiol (one-handed Catalan flute) is played as the men dance in a circle; when it stops, the dance’s leader of the moment must grab the porró from the center of the circle and drink as the men sing: Oh my God, little Mary, what luck you have now, now, now … now that summer’s coming.1 The catch is that those singing can repeat the word “now” for as long as they want, and the drinker cannot lower the porró until the entire refrain has ended. Obviously this power is meant to be abused.

To watch or partake in traditional Catalan folk dances:2 For the sardana, ball de bastons (stick dance), ball de gitanes (gypsy dance) and others, check with the group Esbart Català de Dansaires in and around Barcelona. The site is Catalan only; use Google translate to figure out what’s on or call +34 93.318.82.59 or +34 93.303.10.01 and ask about their upcoming events and dance classes. No guarantees that they'll do the porró dances above.

To find Catalans drinking beer while dancing/unsteadily weaving: Head to the Raval neighborhood of Barcelona, where there are many small clubs with rowdy pop groups, as well as streets full of drunks staggering to their own beat. The best listings for musical events in the city are to be found at lecool or at Bcnweek.

Thanks once again to our hero at El Fem Fatal for advice on the Catalan language; she of course has nothing to do with drunken porró dancing.

NOTES:

1. Valga'm Déu, Marieta,
quina sort que teniu,
ara, ara, ara,
ara que ve l'estiu.

2. Most tourists in Barcelona who watch dance go to the just-for-tourists flamenco shows, which have sprung up to serve those who erroneously believe they are visiting Spain. This makes about as much sense as heading to China for sushi. For excellent flamenco, visit Flamenco’s homeland, the south of Spain, or else Madrid, where many of the great musicians wind up living.

3. This is a rather generic name, but apparently in the town of Tosses d’Alp this was all that was needed to refer to this step.

PHOTO: Traditional Catalan dancing. Photo by Josep Puigdemont. 

How can we all get sloshed from the same pitcher without getting cooties?

The porró, Catalonia's solution for shared wine drinking. Photo credit.Welcome to the porró, the traditional Catalan wine carafe that gives you all of the pleasure and convenience of drinking from a squirt gun.

A porró is a little like a glass watering can; there’s an opening in the top where it is filled, and a long snout that tapers to a small opening — when you tip the carafe the wine shoots out. Your goal is to tilt the porró with a quick, sure movement, and to have your mouth pre-positioned exactly at the receiving end the stream of wine. Beginners frequently have difficulty starting and stopping the flow without spilling wine everywhere, which in and of itself makes the porró a delight to trot out at a party. Gentler hosts sometimes offer newbies a bib.

Here are some tips for successful porró use: 

• If you’re a novice, start and stop drinking with the tip of the spout as close to your mouth as possible.
• Open your mouth very wide.
• To stop the flow of wine, bring the porró back to level with a quick, sure movement. And (this should seem obvious, but is often strangely problematic) then close your mouth and swallow the wine.

Catalans have a number of other traditional tools for shared consumption: 

• If you want to share water instead of wine, you should reach for a càntir (the traditional Catalan water jug).
• While Spaniards have enthusiastically adopted the porró (they call it a porrón), they also have their own traditional device for shared wine drinking: the leather squirt-sack known as the bota. In Catalonia, it is called a bot, and is sometimes used for olive oil as well as wine.
• If you mistakenly ask for the porro instead of the porró (that is, if you stress the first syllable instead of the last), you will be handed a marijuana joint.

TO START DRINKING LIKE A CATALAN: Check out www.tienda.com, a specialist in all sorts of goods from the Iberian peninsula, including reasonably priced porrós (search for “porrón”).