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Victoria Soto Parties are, above all, memory.
Being participants of their gaiety and pleasure is not enough. They require memory, and also commentary, narration and diffusion. Needy of echoes, parties must live on in the memory and only this way do they endure. Or, only in this way are their multiform essences made known. The party reminds of the past. It is converted into an ephemeris and offers itself up as calendar. It measures and orders time. A party or festivity schedule structures and organizes our lives, holidays and Sundays, weddings, baptisms and communions, saints' days and birthdays, Christmases, carnivals and Easters, trips and vacations, dates, meetings and farewells, contracts and raises, banquets and bashes… An equally syncopated program marks the milestones of historical narration. Ancient depictions in relief bear witness to the first ritual structures, processions, parades and triumphs. Their myths tell us about the basic components of the festival: music and dance, food and drink, competition and contest. The miniatures and medieval chronicles reveal this inheritance of collective enjoyment in tournaments and processions, but they already distinguish between the religious and the profane marked by Christianity. Renaissance drawings, like the sketches made by Leonardo for the apparatus for the Milanese festivities of the Sforza, are significant of the most elite courtesan pomp. The printed texts from the Baroque era reveal that festivals reach levels of ostentatious development with their fusion with art. Newspaper stories, painted canvases or photographs from centuries that precede us, still recall that old and impassioned belief, the integration of the arts. Announcing billboards and programs for fairs and festivals are also testimonies to the fact that celebrations and festivities regulate our time and our history. Today, more than ever, the mass media are still an explicit manifestation of this transitory fact, the party; reflection, symbol and legend of civilization, a phenomenon difficult to pin down.
The Modern Age makes man conscious that the written word is a perfect witness of the festive image and event. The invention of the press gives rise to a specific literary genre, a confused genre, occasionally very much like fiction, that of reports on crimes and reports on parties. An affected literature, neither true nor false, in charge of transmitting detailed chronicles and vicissitudes of numerous European festivities, both public and private. No important festival throughout the Baroque epoch was organized without taking into account the corresponding printed edition. With pictures or without them, this literature propagated the very existence of the party, so that "they know the truth… in the centuries to come", a half truth overflowing with praise and that, nonetheless, manages to reflect its image and, above all, the diffusion and spreading of the desired opinion of the event. It is a value providing literature and yet at the same time, a malignant justification. Beyond the printed word, the party is an outline in the air, a
gesture and a pirouette. A sign of movement and life, of eroticism
and the absence of inhibition. Few parties ignore dance. It appears
during the most heroic epochs and it is a privileged argument of
plastic testimonies. Dance, dance, damn you! This almost biblical
phrase, negative premonition or warning of punishment for impious
worshippers of a golden calf, for the brutal inhabitants of Sodom
and Gomorra, yet an unavoidable sentence. After the dance always
comes the music, another of the essential components of the party.
The pirouette is enriched if it is accompanied by chords and rhythms,
and that sound becomes a collective dance, one of the great amusements
of all time and all social classes. (…)
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