![]() In the 1920s and the 1930s, Kapampangan peasants and workers learned their first lessons in Socialism through music. These traditional Kapampangan songs, sung with some measure of bawdy irreverence, are still the preferred form of entertainment among the urban poor and the rural folks in Pampanga, which is why in the coming elections, expect local politicians to again recruit polosadores to compose their campaign jingles and to keep the crowds entertained during late-night political rallies. The musicality of Kapampangans can also be seen in the persistence of basulto and polosa, which still fill the airwaves and continue to be updated and reinvented by younger singers. #Totoy bato song fullKapampangans’ propensity for dancing is on full display during religious processions, when they not only dance but also sway the andas and carrozas (vessels where the holy images are mounted) to make their patron saint dance along with them! When a man danced around a woman, that was called libad (which today means fluvial procession). Our ancestors must have danced a lot because Fray Diego Bergaño’s 1732 Kapampangan dictionary distinguished between the dance done by men (terac) and the dance done by women (indac). It was the golden age of Kapampangan arts and letters. Everyone in the neighborhood was either a poet, a playwright, a performer or a patron. Imagine a town where you walked down a street and every house you passed by had a theatre group or a choir busily rehearsing for an evening performance. It was staged in 1901, ahead of the first Tagalog zarzuela Walang Sugat. The first zarzuela in any Philippine vernacular was Ing Managpe, written by a Kapampangan, Mariano Proceso Pabalan Byron of Bacolor. Long before West End and Broadway, our ancestors were already watching musicals on stage in the form of zarzuelas. ![]()
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