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EDITORIAL Rosa Olivares
The sparkle is going out gradually, like the lanterns in a street fair. It's time to end the party. When we reach this conclusion, the reality is that the party has ended some while back, and only a few determined stragglers are still trying to revive the corpse. It's time to pick up our things and head for home, any home; with a bit of luck maybe even our own. Perhaps trying for one last drink on the way - a very Spanish ambition this, possibly unthinkable elsewhere in the world when everything looks closed and we are alone in a city just stirring from sleep. The party's over and, with it, the unbridled and rather artificial merriment that came with the preparations: the clothes, the food and drink, decorating the house or the street, the anticipation… If it was a birthday celebration, that's it for another year, if it was a wedding, the bride and groom are off to a new life that will soon be old. The party's over and it's back to normality, routine and looking forward to the next time. The party has certain standard, defining traits without which it would have to claim some other name. First is the extraordinary nature of the causal event, an exception to the rule of daily life: a wedding, the end of winter, a birth, a religious celebration (Christmas, the end of Ramadan...); we so long for parties that we now even celebrate Friday night, the end of the working week and the start of a weekend of leisure. In short, exceptions as vulgar as the daily life we are trying to escape, repetitive events which arrive at their appointed time and surprise no one: everyone knows the dates of the big religious celebrations, no one is astonished to find that 25 December is Christmas again this year. Weddings are organised months or years in advance; crops are harvested in the same weeks and each of our birthdays falls on the same annual date. After every Thursday comes a Friday and every Sunday, inevitably, has a Monday in the wings. The party holds no surprises, everything is programmed, everything arranged. Even its own particular ritual will have the same or a similar pace, the same exposition and development and the same conclusion.
The rites held of old were to do with life and death, the resurgence of warmth and life, the arrival of winter and, along with it, the arrival of the long winter nights. Weddings and baptisms were celebrated as moments of life, rebirth and joy… and deaths too were celebrated, only differently. But invariably, since man has been man or even before then, all parties have ended in a kind of frenzy, at times orgiastic, at times destructive, with the abuse of substances like alcohol or drugs leading to excesses in eating, sex, dancing, movement, violence. Nowadays we celebrate everything, from the burial of the sardine to gay pride by way of Constitution Day, Mother's/Father's Day, Nation Day, Thanksgiving, Labour Day, of course, then the day of the working woman, the day of the child… If we add these festive occasions to Saturdays, Sundays, the saint's day calendar of each particular country, etc., we might well conclude that working days are the real exceptions. The truth is that man has spent his whole life celebrating or getting ready to celebrate. Partying is a natural, spontaneous escape valve and only culture and so-called civilisation have tried to temper it with rules, dates, customs… to no avail. Almost everything is regulated these days, and only the house party, private, practically clandestine, can escape the populist, rumbustious festive fever which breaks out at the slightest excuse. The party, however, takes place in a magical territory. One which has no existence before or after the celebration. A space in which the rules change: where rich and poor can drink together out of plastic glasses. The mighty and the meek, the boss and the employee, the bright and the dim, the beautiful and the ugly, share this nameless spot which is not on any map. An oasis, one might say; an island of gaiety and noise, fun and colour where everyone seems fine, for a while at least. Not ruled by the same laws or the usual timetables. A place where the impossible might happen at any moment and, on occasion, you don't even have to pay for your drinks. During carnival, or a simple fancy-dress party, this alteration of the rules and customs governing daily reality is taken to its ultimate extreme: licence is given, without offence to dignity or modesty, for a man to dress as a woman, for the good wife to be unfaithful for a night, for the rich to go ragged and for the king to go naked. In the fun of the party, sex is freed up, children drink and the old get up and dance, the rigidity of customs and morals is relaxed, if only for a few hours, and afterwards, when the night is nearly over, everything slips back into place, the face paint melts and disguises revert to ridiculous rags.
This magical transformation, as if we were living the adventures of Cinderella or on a visit to Wonderland, is characteristic of a festive celebration: clothing, decor and the ways we address each other are changed or even inverted. Permissiveness takes over from social norms. Changed approaches to sexuality reveal a society without shame where a few hours before all was prudery and restraint. The mocking of social icons, like political power, authority, the rich, money, fame and the famous, recurs systematically in fancy dress events or Valencia's Fallas. Irony and criticism are present in most kinds of celebration, from a wedding - where the groom's underpants are cut into strips and the bride's garter is auctioned, and where sex floats like a cotton cloud above the heads of all the guests - to a popular street party, the celebration of a sporting triumph or any other explosion of joy which, in our straitlaced western society, is increasingly massified and organised. Another feature of parties is the gloom they leave behind. The feeling that we have lost something valuable, an inexplicable physical exhaustion, a blur of gaiety, noise and words which has left us empty and dry. The dirty house or street (the rubbish collected on the day after street celebrations is currently measured in tons) is the coda of any fiesta. It's especially surprising to discover how many people have a bad time at parties: those pioneering drunks who fall victim in the first throes of partying pleasure; the frustration of those equipped with too-high expectations, who pin on the party all their hopes of diversion - a romantic encounter, a break with their previous lives, the chance to forget all sorts of problems. Arguments, jealousies and break-ups between couples or friends also find fertile ground in the social whirl. Because every party, like a low-life Pierrot, has its two faces; constantly hiding and emerging in a game which is amusing for some, perverse for others. There is no pleasure without the danger of pain, and just as new lovers come together, others separate and suffer. The party is just one more timeless facet of human activity, but a facet which dissimulates and has its locus in a territory which seeks to level everyone and to impose - that's right, even so seemingly free and spontaneous an event as a party - certain rules of play. But the zeal for freedom, which should burn in each of us, makes us sceptical about these occasions, each so like the last, where fun is an imperative; where we have to drink, dance, be deafened and be many. Because if we don't or we aren't, then this isn't a party. But a party can be something else, and should potentially be many more things. A party for two, a sweet and silent encounter between lovers; a group of friends who gather one afternoon to talk and laugh around a table stacked with all types of drinks... The expression "a feast for the senses" is more than just a cliché if we are looking out over a particular landscape, or talking, laughing, eating or making love with the right person or persons. Life can sometimes be a party even though the date's not marked in the calendar, there are no family preparations and no hundreds in attendance. A party should be irrepeatable, and not compulsorily recurring like a nightmare every Friday at the same time, every year on the same date, all our lives without end. That's not a party, it's a punishment.
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