Introduction: When heritage stirs life

On 16 March 2018, the Galician government published in the Diario Oficial de Galicia the resolution initiating the procedure to declare Galician traditional dance a Ben de Interese Cultural (BIC) (Asset of Cultural Interest), the highest form of heritage protection recognised under Spanish law.Footnote ¹ This administrative act triggered a profound debate within the bearer community about what we currently understand by traditional music and dance, about who holds the legitimacy to represent the commons, and about the limits of institutional intervention in the domain of intangible heritage.

This moment of ontological agitation—when not only the nature of traditional dance was questioned, but also who embodies it, who defines it, and who transmits it—sparked the mobilisation of a significant part of the bearer community. Meetings were held, collective statements were drafted, and an unprecedented process of civic response to the institutionalisation of heritage unfolded. The BIC proposal was ultimately rejected on 11 March 2020. However, the dispute over the patrimonialisation of traditional dance did not end there. On 10 October 2024, the Galician government launched a new administrative procedure, this time aimed at declaring the traditional music and dance of Galicia as a BIC. At the time of writing, the new consultation process has concluded, but the final resolution has not yet been made public. The repetition of this process, with barely 4 years between them, reveals not only a persistent institutional desire to control and fix the meaning of intangible heritage, but also the critical vitality of a bearer community that continues to assert its capacity to define, protect, and collectively reinvent its cultural practices.

This event captured my attention not because of the administrative procedure itself, but because of its capacity to activate a distinct plane of meaning, to unsettle the social reality in which it emerged. As Deleuze puts it, “the event is not what happens (accident); it is inside what happens, the pure expressed which gives us a sign and awaits us” (Deleuze Reference Deleuze1989:158). It was that call, that unexpected and collective interpellation, that turned the administrative act into a true event: not an endpoint, but the opening of a space for questioning and action in which the bearer community not only responded to institutional logic, but mobilised knowledges, affects, and forms of organisation that challenge hegemonic models of patrimonialisation. It is at this point of inflection that I locate the beginning of my research.

From folkloric stylisation to festive dissent: Galician traditional dance in dispute

Galicia is a region located in the northwest of the Iberian Peninsula and belongs to the Spanish state. With a long-standing history linked to the primary sector—particularly livestock farming, fishing, and agriculture—it underwent a process of industrialisation from the 1960s onwards, promoted by the Francoist regime, which partially transformed its economic and social fabric (Fernández Reference Fernández2000). Today, industries such as automotive manufacturing and tourism coexist with traditional forms of production and a cultural life deeply marked by the continuity of distinctive modes of sociability and worldview. In this context, orally transmitted music and dance are not only part of Galicia’s intangible cultural heritage but continue to act as elements of social cohesion in the face of processes of cultural homogenisation. One of the main spaces for the continuity and renewal of these practices is the foliada.

The foliada is an open, participatory, and intergenerational festive practice specific to Galician culture, centred on the communal performance of orally transmitted music and dance. Unlike choreographed forms or those aimed at stage presentation, foliadas take place in public or private spaces—such as squares, taverns, private homes, or community centres—with an open and decentralised structure that does not separate performers from audience. Participation in foliadas is governed by unwritten norms and codes shared by the community, based on respect, attentive listening, and the fluid circulation between different roles. In this way, the musicians who take part in the gathering organise themselves into groups of varying size—ranging from 2 to 10 people—that take turns performing a rolda or festa: a sequence of 5 or 6 pieces to be danced by the rest of the community present. Once the festa is over, a remuda or changeover takes place: the group that has just played steps aside, allowing a new group to perform a fresh set of dance pieces (Feixoo Reference Feixoo2017:56–57; Feixoo and Ignacio Reference Feixoo and Ignacio2017:24–26; Feixoo Reference Feixoo2021:62–64).

In this context, both music and dance are activated simultaneously through a repertoire of oral tradition, acquired in formal—regulated and non-regulated education—as well as informal contexts, and constantly evolving. The musical repertoire focuses on dance accompaniment and is composed primarily of muiñeiras, xotas, and agarrados. The latter category includes genres of diverse origins that have been integrated into the Galician repertoire over the decades, such as pasodobres, waltzes, mazurkas, polkas, and rumbas (Pinheiro Reference Pinheiro2004:25–26). The repertoire of the foliada is typically vocal and performed with hand percussion instruments, mainly the pandeireta, though other instruments such as the square pandeiro, scallop shells, triangle, or paprika tin may also be used. To a lesser extent, instrumental pieces are performed using bagpipes—solo or in duet—clarinet, wooden transverse flute known as requinta, accordion, or hurdy-gurdy, generally accompanied by snare drum and bass drum. In some cases, performance is mixed, combining voice with melodic instruments. Each rolda always begins with dances referred to as soltos, namely the muiñeira, the xota, and their variants. These dances unfold in pairs or lines of pairs—not necessarily binary—and allow for broad margins of improvisation. Their ethnochoreological code is based on a structure composed of the punto—a set of improvised steps employing movements that must be known to all participants—and the volta—a section in which the dancers form a circle facing inward and move counterclockwise. This may resolve as a roda—round—or as a tablón, as I will explain below.

Beyond music and dance, the foliada also constitutes a space for the circulation and transmission of other dimensions of Galician cultural heritage, such as language, oral tradition, popular knowledge, and collective literary creation. These elements are naturally integrated into the festive event and contribute to its socialising and identity-forming functions. In this way, the foliada operates as a space of oral learning and transmission, but also as a site of collective creation and heritage reappropriation. Its continuity is sustained by the active involvement of local communities, who reproduce and reinvent it through self-managed forms of organisation. Whether organised by cultural collectives or arising spontaneously in domestic or festive contexts, the practice remains open to dialogue with the present, as its vitality lies precisely in its capacity to articulate continuity and transformation.

The expansion of foliadas in recent decades has coexisted with the development of a staged model of traditional representation, whose foundations were already being laid in the late nineteenth century with the emergence of the first Coros Históricos (Historic Choirs). These choral ensembles were created to publicly represent an idealised Galician identity through traditional music and aesthetics, offering staged performances for an urban and bourgeois audience. Their artistic model, designed for concert settings and public display, laid the groundwork for contemporary Galician folklorism, influencing both the aesthetic and patrimonial conception of Galician traditional music and dance. The most emblematic was the choir Aires da Terra, founded in Pontevedra in 1883 by Perfecto Feijóo, with the aim of performing “Galician popular music, accompanied in some cases by Galician instruments, and performed in Galician costume” (Calle Reference Calle1993:22).

Its dissolution gave way to the emergence of numerous ensembles with similar aesthetics across Galicia: Cántigas da Terra from A Coruña (1908), Toxos e Froles from Ferrol (1914), Agarimos da Terra from Mondariz (1916), Foliadas e Cantigas from Pontevedra (1919), De Ruada from Ourense (1918), Cantigas e Aturuxos from Lugo (1917), and Cantigas e Agarimos from Santiago (1921), among others (Fernández Fonseca Reference Fernández Fonseca2012:63). Their activity took place in a context of urban cultural effervescence, where orfeóns (large choral societies), bands, and artistic soirées—featuring soloists, musical ensembles, and staged traditional dance performances—were common. As reported by El Diario de Pontevedra newspaper on 3 May 1927, regarding a gala at the Teatro Principal in the city of Pontevedra: “In the coming days, a soirée will be held at the Teatro Principal, organised by the veteran Sociedad Artística. […] As the final number, and one of true originality, the event will feature a ninety-year-old woman, Andresa do Outeiro, a skilled pandero player and notable singer of alalás and muiñeiras. She will perform a traditional local dance with another elderly person.”Footnote ² (Editorial Board 1927). Notice that here, age functioned as a cultural credential, and older performers were framed as custodians of memory whose presence authenticated the repertoire.

This model of staging tradition—based on the stylisation of music and dance and the fixation of a representative repertoire—became consolidated over the following decades and laid the groundwork for subsequent folklorisation. As a result, performances by Galician choirs were often advertised as “Recital of regional music” or “Recital of folkloric music.” This led to the inclusion of a significant number of dance pieces alongside the vocal repertoire—which had originally dominated the performances of Aires da Terra (Fernández Fonseca Reference Fernández Fonseca2012:65).

During the Franco dictatorship (1939–1975)—established after the Spanish Civil War and marked by political repression, National Catholicism, and censorship—the regime of General Francisco Franco promoted an ideological construction of Spanish identity grounded in the exaltation of tradition, family, and fatherland. In this context, folklore was mobilised as an instrument of cultural homogenisation and social disciplining, through the selection and resemanticisation of elements in the service of legitimating ends, among which folklore played a prominent role (Ortiz Reference Ortiz, Huertas and Ortiz1997:165). In 1939, the regime created the national organisation Coros y Danzas de España within the Sección Femenina (Women’s Section), the female branch of the fascist party Falange Española, under the apparent aim of recovering and preserving Spanish folklore. This institution played a central role in shaping the official model of womanhood in service to the State. Responsible for the moral, physical, and religious education of women, the Sección Femenina developed a wide-ranging educational and cultural programme for all Spanish women, in which traditional dance played a key role as a form of bodily control and ideological pedagogy.

Traditional dance was thus employed by Francoism as a tool for domestication and indoctrination. The Sección Femenina transformed folklore into a “privileged instrument of National Catholic pedagogy,” promoting a choreographed and codified model of dance that avoided physical contact and eliminated partner dancing, which was considered improper (Busto Reference Busto2012:12). The choreography of tradition followed a disciplinary logic in which the female body was instrumentalised as a symbolic emblem of the State. Improvisation and the festive dimension of dance were suppressed in favour of standardised movements oriented towards public exhibition and moral exemplarity. Dance and gymnastics classes were spaces in which women were trained in bodily discipline, but also in obedience, submission, and patriotic duty. In this context, tradition served as a pretext for constructing a model of womanhood at the service of the State, and the dancing body became a site of symbolic, physical, and ideological control (Busto Reference Busto2012:11–12).

After the end of the dictatorship, many of the mechanisms of symbolic control implemented by the Sección Femenina were reproduced by newly formed folklore groups, which upheld a disciplinary, performance-oriented conception of orally transmitted music and dance. Within this model, dance was reframed as a public display discipline, structured around codified movements, formal uniformity, and hierarchical learning processes. The transmission of both music and dance was thus embedded in a rigid and vertical framework, in which power relations shaped by gender roles persisted: men occupied spaces of musical leadership, while women were relegated to visual and choreographic accompaniment.

Since the early twentieth century, this conception of dance has provoked growing tensions with sectors of the community who advocate for a more horizontal, critical, and situated practice grounded in improvisation, bodily diversity, and expressive freedom. One such group is Andar cos Tempos, a pioneering collective in challenging the sexist stereotypes embedded in the teaching and staging of traditional Galician dance, and in defending a relational and self-aware practice that questions automatisms and inherited norms. As they state, traditional dance is not a neutral, innocent, or free space; rather, it is shaped by a patriarchal system that distributes power, positions, perspectives, and tasks unequally between men and women (Campo and Caramés Reference Campo and Caramés2025:70–71). Against the logic of exhibition, these voices claim the foliada as a space of resistance and reappropriation—one that enables the unlearning of imposed norms and opens the body to other ways of being and becoming through music and dance.

These tensions reached a climax in March 2018, when the Galician government announced in the Diario Oficial de Galicia the initiation of proceedings to declare Galician traditional dance an Asset of Cultural Interest in the category of intangible heritage. This institutional action sparked significant unrest within the bearer community by exposing the existing tensions between the institutional, staged model and living practices such as the foliada. As reported in the article “Tradition: a Field of Conflict” published by the online newspaper El Salto (Ribeira and Pérez Reference Ribeira and Pérez2019), the proposed designation raised concerns among various collectives due to its folklorising orientation and the persistence of gender stereotypes and codified roles in the conception of traditional dance. In response, organisations such as the Galician Association of Anthropology, the Museum of the Galician People, and many individuals submitted formal objections to the initiative.

The debate thus became polarised between those defending the foliada as a living, spontaneous, and community-driven form of cultural expression, and leaders of folklore groups who largely supported a normative, codified, and staged conception of heritage. As the article stated, “a new movement of dancers and schools is advocating for Galician traditional dance as something alive: dismantling sexist stereotypes and promoting foliadas that are guided by spontaneity, moving away from outdated folklorising approaches” (ibid.). This confrontation made clear that the BIC designation served as a catalyst for a deeper debate within the bearer community, highlighting that the concept of heritage is never neutral, but rather reflects different ways of relating to cultural practices.

This article departs from this field of tension to examine the political and epistemological implications of the patrimonialisation process concerning Galician traditional music and dance. The analysis is grounded in a methodological design that triangulates a comparative analysis of an audiovisual corpus with materials produced at different historical moments (1969–1983) and available online, an analysis of official documentation—both that published in the Diario Oficial de Galicia and that consulted in person in the initiation file for declaring Galician traditional music and dance an Asset of Cultural Interest at the seat of the Galician government in Santiago de Compostela—and ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2019 and 2024 in various locations in Galicia (A Fonsagrada, Santiago de Compostela, and Mondariz). From a choreomusicological perspective (Nor and Stepputat Reference Nor and Kendra Stepputat2017; Stepputat and Seye Reference Stepputat and Seye2020), the article offers a critical reading of these sources to reflect on the normative effects that accompany heritage-making processes and on the forms of resistance that arise from practice.

My interest lies in understanding how, while discourses of preservation are invoked, legal and administrative mechanisms are activated that delimit, codify, and establish hierarchies over embodied knowledge. Against this institutional logic, the foliada emerges as a collective space where music and dance are practised through improvisation, horizontality, and community relations, offering the possibility of understanding transmission not as normative reproduction but as situated creation. This work seeks to approach a contested field in which conflicting meanings of culture are at stake, while also tracing—through the body—alternative forms of relation, transmission, and futurity.

What is tradition? Ontologies in conflict

For decades, tradition was defined as a form of cultural inheritance passed down from generation to generation. This cumulative and linear perspective—now widely contested—consolidated tradition as one of the most ideologically charged and ambiguous concepts in the social sciences. As Edward Shils (Reference Shils1981) notes, tradition is an ambiguous and much-debated category, used both to assert forms of belonging and to justify structures of power and exclusion. What is presented as “traditional” is, in many cases, the outcome of symbolic processes aimed at legitimising certain practices in the present through an appeal to a supposedly collective, continuous, and stable past.

As Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger warned, many of the traditions regarded as ancestral are, in fact, recent inventions with specific social and political functions, designed to confer legitimacy on present-day practices or institutions (Reference Hobsbawm and Ranger1983). Raymond Williams similarly observed that “tradition” is one of the most value-laden terms in cultural analysis, as it operates ideologically in the struggle over meaning (Reference Williams1976). Far from embodying a stable continuity with the past, what is labelled as “traditional” often emerges from processes of symbolic construction that generate collective narratives which not only elevate certain practices to the status of heritage, but also exclude other forms of knowledge.

In the same critical vein, Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett has analysed how tradition, once incorporated into the framework of cultural heritage, tends to become reified—losing its relational and performative nature and turning into a fixed and consumable product (Reference Kirshenblatt-Gimblett1995). This insight is particularly relevant in the musical sphere, where discourses on tradition shape not only the cultural content deemed valuable, but also the bodies deemed authorised to perform it. From an ethnomusicological perspective, it is essential to attend not only to the sounds produced but also to the social and cultural contexts in which they are embedded, and the meanings they activate. Musical tradition cannot be reduced to an isolated sonic repertoire; rather, it constitutes a collective process in which practices, discourses, and forms of sociality intertwine to generate meaning. Understood in this way, tradition ceases to function as an inherited essence and is revealed instead as a relation in motion—a process through which the boundaries of the legitimate and the audible, the normative and the possible, are constantly negotiated. This relational condition of tradition stands in stark contrast to the logic of fixation and control inherent in institutional processes of patrimonialisation.Footnote ³

A critical approach to the patrimonialisation of Galician traditional dance

The concept of Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) entered institutional and academic discourse with UNESCO’s 2003 Convention for its safeguarding.Footnote ⁴ Since then, the term has taken a central place in debates on tradition, culture, preservation, and revitalisation (Howard Reference Howard2012; Machin-Autenrieth Reference Machin-Autenrieth2017; Stefano and Davies Reference Stefano and Davies2017; Pinto Reference Pinto2023; Zapletal and Dromey Reference Zapletal, Dromey and Dromey2023), while also consolidating itself as one of UNESCO’s most popularised concepts (Skounti Reference Skounti2017:74). Its global reach and the annual growth in nominations and elements inscribed on the lists indicate that the objective of fostering worldwide awareness of ICH protection has begun to be achieved.

However, within Critical Heritage Studies, critical voices have emerged regarding the dynamics promoted by UNESCO and the institutional effects of ICH safeguarding. This approach advances a situated, reflexive epistemology that interrogates power relations in the production of “heritage” and centres bearer communities. In deontological terms, it advocates fair and sustainable research and intervention, with informed participation and co-production of knowledge, as well as attention to heritage dissonances, territorial diversity, and non-expert knowledges, defending shared authority over processes of definition and safeguarding. Within this framework, Laurajane Smith coins the notion of Authorised Heritage Discourse (AHD), a hegemonic epistemological frame that “disconnects the idea of heritage from the present and from current values, confining it to the ‘past’” and “identifies who has the authority to speak about or decide on that past” (Smith Reference Smith2006:12).

This conception of tradition as a closed product legitimised from outside the community is made manifest in contemporary heritage policies. In this framework, heritage operates within a regime of governmentality, in the Foucauldian sense, in which the notion of heritage functions as a truth regime sustained by bureaucratic procedures and expert knowledge (Bendix, Eggert, and Peselmann Reference Bendix, Eggert and Peselmann2012; Castelo-Branco and Sánchez-Carretero Reference Castelo-Branco, Sánchez Carretero, Machin-Autenrieth, Castelo-Branco and Llano2023). The inscription of cultural assets, the creation of inventories, or the designation of “representative manifestations of intangible heritage” serve as institutional mechanisms that bestow legitimacy and reproduce power relations between the state, experts, and communities. In this way, musical heritage safeguarding policies support state objectives while simultaneously neutralising local musical diversity and disabling the situated dimension of cultural practices (Castelo-Branco and Sánchez-Carretero Reference Castelo-Branco, Sánchez Carretero, Machin-Autenrieth, Castelo-Branco and Llano2023:228). This dynamic is particularly evident in the Spanish case, where Law 10/2015Footnote ⁵ strengthened state authority in the declaration of heritage assets and favoured symbolic de-territorialisation processes aimed at constructing a common cultural identity, to the detriment of the existing plurality among regions (Castelo-Branco and Sánchez-Carretero Reference Castelo-Branco, Sánchez Carretero, Machin-Autenrieth, Castelo-Branco and Llano2023:235–236).

These dynamics are concretely manifested in the Galician legal framework, whose development in the field of ethnographic and intangible heritage displays significant structural limitations. The heritage policy of the regional government of Galicia has been marked by a late and fragmented evolution, with a legal basis consolidated in 1995 through the passage of the Law on the Cultural Heritage of Galicia (Law 8/1995). Article 1.1 of that law recognises as Galician cultural heritage “all tangible and intangible assets which, by virtue of their acknowledged intrinsic value, should be considered of relevant interest for the permanence and identity of Galician culture,” and it classifies assets into three categories: Assets of Cultural Interest, catalogued assets, and inventoried assets. In administrative practice, however, ethnographic assets are often treated as secondary, without clear acknowledgement of their processual or symbolic dimensions (Pereiro Reference Pereiro2012:29–32).

In the 2000s, conservation policies and targeted funding schemes were reactivated, with an emphasis on spaces such as the Camino de Santiago (Way of St. James), yet a ruralist and ornamental orientation towards Galician culture persisted across them. The coalition government of the Socialist Party and the Galician Nationalist Bloc (2005–2009) introduced, for the first time, a dedicated Dirección Xeral do Patrimonio Histórico e Documental (Directorate for Intangible Heritage), which enabled initiatives such as the Ronsel project aimed at compiling an inventory of Galician intangible cultural heritage. Nonetheless, these actions coexist with a persistent tension between a folklorist conception of heritage—focused on conserving inherited forms deemed “authentic”—and a socio-anthropological view that understands heritage as a living, plural, and situated process. The patrimonialisation of the intangible in Galicia thus retains certain essentialist traits linked to the historical construction of a rural, emotive, and distinctive Galician identity, leading to the folklorisation of cultural policies and the partial exclusion of urban, critical, or dissident memories (Pereiro Reference Pereiro2012:40–42).

This essentialist and normative logic was particularly explicit in the resolution published in the Diario Oficial de Galicia on 16 March 2018, which initiated the process for declaring Galician traditional dance an Asset of Cultural Interest. The wording of the document exemplifies how tradition can function as a tool of symbolic legitimisation, fixing cultural practices through criteria of authenticity and antiquity that serve present-day interests. The text states that after the Franco dictatorship, “a new way of understanding folklore began to emerge, and through fieldwork, efforts were made to base the repertoire on more authentic dance forms stemming from the purest and most genuine tradition” (DOG 2018:22205), articulating a conception of authenticity as a recoverable essence more closely tied to an idealised past than to living practices. This archive-based validation logic is reinforced with specific examples, such as the muiñeira vella, described as “the oldest recreational dance in Galicia” (DOG 2018:22207). In this framework, ancestry becomes the guarantor of heritage legitimacy, reproducing a notion of tradition grounded in antiquity and purity.

The resolution also incorporates a validation logic based on documentary reconstruction, claiming that “thanks to the work in recent decades of those who collected and documented the testimony of informants and older members of the population, a knowledge of old-style choreographies has been pursued, seeking greater authenticity and an expanded repertoire” (DOG 2018:22212). Improvisation—elsewhere described as “the most outstanding creative feature within the national folklore, since each dancer modified the known steps and adapted them to their personal style” (DOG 2018:22211)—is thus subordinated to a logic of archival reproduction that contributes to the patrimonialisation of dance as a freezing of movement. Although the resolution acknowledges that “it is not possible to recover old movements identically,” this limitation does not affect the institutional aspiration to reconstruct an “authentic” repertoire in the present (DOG 2018:22212).

The document also formulates a normative conception of dance at the corporeal level, articulating a binary vision of gender in which bodies are organised according to fixed and complementary functions. It describes a structure of “two lines: one of women and another of men facing each other” (DOG 2018:22210), in which “the steps were initiated by a man who, in most cases, stood at the head of his line (leader), and both the other men and the women were obliged to follow him” (DOG 2018:22209). Women, it states, “always danced without lifting their feet from the ground” (DOG 2018:22208). This vision of the traditional body is further shaped by a gendered distribution of musical roles: “[the muiñeiras] were sung by women, for instance, who could accompany themselves with any type of traditional percussion instrument (frame drum, tambourine, shells, carbide or paprika tin, cymbals with thimbles, etc.) or could be accompanied by the [male] bagpiper and snare drummer, bagpipe quartet, brass band or street ensemble” (DOG 2018:22207). Music thus appears to be structured according to a gendered division of functions: while women sing and play light percussion instruments, men occupy the central sonic space through melodic and wind accompaniment. These descriptions construct a disciplined, binary, and highly codified “traditional body” in which gender roles, spaces, and movements—both in dance and music—are fixed and hierarchised.

It is also worth noting that the resolution was initiated by five influential folkloric associations in the country, without the explicit support of the broader community of bearers of Galician traditional music and dance. This exclusion reveals a representational problem, as the declaration recognises not the people who sustain these practices in community settings as the principal stewards of intangible heritage, but rather those entities that present them through folkloric and institutionalised performance formats. The definition of the heritage asset does not refer to traditional dance and music as a living and situated practice, but rather to its folklorised spectacularisation, designed for performance on stage and in exhibition spaces. This explicit orientation is reinforced by the nominal identification of the promoting entities as legitimate heritage bearers: “The bearers of intangible heritage must be its main stewards, and therefore, certain entities that have shown their interest and willingness to promote this declaration must be recognised as such: Xacarandaina, Cantiagas e Agarimos, Etnográfico das Mariñas, O Fiadeiro and Cantigas e Flores” (DOG 2018:22215). This model of institutionalised representation of tradition not only excludes other forms of collective agency, but also consolidates a heritage regime based on delegation and professionalised stage performance, disconnected from the diversity and spontaneity of living practices.

Thus, what the document defines as traditional dance aligns more closely with a model of staged and spectacularised representation than with a living, communal, and dynamic practice. The heritage logic articulated in the DOG privileges codification, antiquity, and authenticity, sidelining improvisation, variability, and the affective bonds that sustain transmission. As Shelemay (Reference Shelemay2001) points out, musical tradition is not merely a matter of the sounds produced, but also of the complex discourses that give them context and meaning. In this light, the proposed patrimonialisation clearly illustrates the shift from tradition as a relational process to tradition as a stabilised product—transformed into an object of institutional intervention and legitimised from outside the bearer community.

In contrast to this institutionalised and essentialist model, there are alternative ways of relating to living heritage. Foliadas—like other living practices of transmission—function as spaces of relationship and dissent. These are practices that not only evoke or reactivate the past, but also create a shared present. Their power lies not in representation, but in the capacity to affect and be affected, to activate a texture of the world that does not rely on codification but on presence. As Suely Rolnik writes, “there is something that only the body can apprehend and that escapes words and consciousness” (Rolnik Reference Rolnik2019:31). In foliadas, this non-verbal knowledge is embodied in every gesture, in every shared vibration, constructing a sensitive plane of collective resonance. This form of politics—“the politics of vibratile bodies”—does not act upon the world as an external programme, but produces it from within, modulating the conditions of what can be lived (Rolnik Reference Rolnik2019:34). In foliadas, this production unfolds through dancing bodies, circulating music, and the networks of affection that sustain the gathering. It is not merely about preserving a cultural practice, but about setting in motion alternative forms of existence.

Two models in tension: Staged folklore and spontaneous dance

The tension between staged folklore and living tradition, understood as an ontological conflict between two regimes of relating to the body and the commons, becomes particularly eloquent in traditional dance practices. To explore how this tension is embodied, I will analyse four audiovisual scenes drawn from distinct historical and political contexts, which allow us to observe both continuities and ruptures between living and institutional models.Footnote ⁶

The first two scenes, recorded at the Foliada da Fonsagrada (2022) and during a serán in Rubiós featured in the television programme Raíces (1975), illustrate forms of collective dancing marked by improvisation, emotional engagement, and community participation. The latter two—an interpretation of the Muiñeira vella de Mórdomo by the Sección Femenina group, and a performance by the folkloric group Xacarandaina (1983)—represent, by contrast, a staged and standardised model in which tradition appears codified, stylised, and framed within a logic of representation.Footnote ⁷ This comparative analysis reveals the ongoing coexistence of two conflicting conceptions of traditional dance, which go beyond aesthetic concerns and point to antagonistic understandings of agency, community, and the body’s role in tradition.

The first scene was recorded on 8 December 2022, during the Foliada da Fonsagrada Festival (Feixoo Reference Feixoo2022), an annual gathering held in this Galician town that brings together hundreds of people around traditional music and dance. The footage captures a spontaneous moment of a xota, one of the most common bailes soltos—free couple dances—in foliadas, along with the muiñeira, performed by six dancing couples and a group of four pandeireteiros—traditional Galician tambourine players. Galician traditional dance in general, and the xota in particular, are collective, spontaneous, and improvised dances performed in pairs. Both the music and the dancing involve a high degree of improvisation, meaning that their macrostructure and microstructure are determined exclusively in the moment of performance (see Figure 1).

Figure 1.

Spontaneous traditional dance during a foliada in Galicia. Photo by Xulia Feixoo.

Figure 1. Long description

In the center foreground, a young woman with curly hair and a green sweater dances with her arms outstretched. To her right, a man in a dark sweater and glasses performs similar rhythmic steps. A young child in a striped shirt stands behind him. In the background, a group of women stand in a line holding and playing traditional Galician tambourines. The setting is an indoor venue with a wooden floor and stage. The lighting is warm and focused on the dancers, while the background remains slightly darker. A person's leg and torso are partially visible in the extreme left foreground, suggesting the proximity of the photographer to the dance floor.

As shown in the video, once the pandeireteiros begin singing the copla,Footnote ⁸ one of the dancers proposes a punto. Footnote ⁹ After this initial proposal, both their partner and the other dancing couples attempt to replicate the punto suggested by the person currently leading the dance. This replication may or may not be successful. Sometimes, dancers make mistakes or are unable to follow the lead. Everyone continues dancing the proposed punto until the pandeireteiros finish the copla and signal its end with a series of accented beats, switching their playing technique from striking the pandeireta in the air to hitting it with the fist against the skin. At that point, dancers stop performing the punto and transition to a new figure: the roda. Footnote ¹⁰ When the pandeireteiros begin the retrouso,Footnote ¹¹ the circle closes and the dancers move into another figure known as tablón. Footnote ¹² As soon as a new copla begins, the cycle is restarted.

This act of proposing and imitating an improvised punto involves constant negotiation between the I who proposes and the you who decides whether—or not—to accept the invitation. That negotiation is ultimately resolved in the we, at the moment we all dance together. There is also a tension embedded in the challenge of proposing a punto: one may put another’s skill to the test, but one must also gauge the difficulty of the figure, since the dance only becomes communal when others manage—or choose—to follow our lead. It cannot be danced alone. This tension softens when dancers move into the roda and the tablón, producing a constant dynamic of tension and release that keeps the dance alive until the end.

The continuity of such dance forms as communal and spontaneous practices can also be observed in historical audiovisual documents. A particularly significant example appears in a video broadcast in 1975 as part of the documentary series Raíces, directed and presented by Manuel Garrido Palacios and aired on Spanish public television (TVE) between 1972 and 1983. The programme aimed to document cultural traditions deemed at risk of disappearance, including dance, music, festivals, and popular trades. The scene I will analyse here—recorded in the village of Rubiós, in the municipality of As Neves—shows a moment of Galician traditional dance that, despite being mediated by the camera and the television format, retains essential elements of the foliada Footnote ¹³ as a relational space: spontaneity, improvisation, and the active participation of the local community. This recording allows us to draw a bridge to the present, illuminating lines of continuity between today’s foliadas and the living practices that persisted even under General Franco’s dictatorship.

The scene takes place on the ground floor of a farmhouse, a space traditionally used for housing livestock. During the winter months, this room became one of the preferred settings for communal dancing. Its shared use reflects an understanding of the home as a porous, multifunctional place, where communal life extended beyond domestic functions to embrace festivity and encounter. The entire community participates actively. Children and young people watch with laughter, curious gestures, and clapping; adult women sustain the singing; and older people sit around the dancers, contributing with their voices, pandeiretas, and watchful eyes that care for the proper unfolding of the event. In the centre of the room, two experienced dancing couples perform puntos with ease. While dance and music form the core of the celebration, a choral involvement emerges around them: those who do not dance offer applause, suggest new coplas, shout “Viva!,” and keep the serán alive. The structure of the dance follows the same logic seen in the Foliada da Fonsagrada, but this time applied to a muiñeira, another baile solto—free couple dance—from the Galician oral tradition. The pandeireteiras—in this case, a group of women joined by an older man—sing a copla, after which the person leading the dance proposes a punto to be imitated by the rest of the dancers. When the copla ends, the figure changes and the dancers rearrange into a roda. The retrouso also marks the end of the circle. A new copla initiates the next cycle.

The two scenes—from A Fonsagrada and Rubiós—share the same relational logic, in which dance functions as the core of a collective experience sustained by shared codes, intergenerational transmission, and emotional involvement. In both contexts, musical and bodily structures shape each other: the singing and percussion guide the movement, while the bodies, in turn, respond to and shape the music. Continuity, therefore, does not lie in the repetition of a pattern, but in its capacity to be activated in the present.

However, this expressive freedom and collective sense of dancing have not always occupied a central place in public representations of tradition. For decades, living and community-based forms of celebration coexisted with institutional models that, from positions of power, sought to fix and control bodies and repertoires. In 1939, as previously explained, the regime of dictator Francisco Franco promoted the creation of the national organisation Coros y Danzas de España, within the Sección Femenina, with the apparent aim of recovering and preserving Spanish folklore. Yet behind this seemingly innocent endeavour lay a mechanism of ideological and bodily discipline, which used tradition as a tool for symbolic domestication and regime propaganda. In Galicia, thousands of men and women were incorporated into the Falange Española through this structure, turning folklore into an instrument of occupation and social control (Busto Reference Busto2012).

This instrumentalisation of tradition as a tool for ideological control and bodily discipline by the State found one of its most explicit formulations in Circular No. 222, signed by Pilar Primo de Rivera on 10 March 1944 (Reference Primo de Riveran.d.:22). In this document, the National Delegate of the Sección Femenina sets out the guidelines for the dissemination of folklore in public spaces, with the aim of turning traditional dances into instruments of political socialisation and cultural homogenisation:

In the following video, I will analyse the Muiñeira vella de Mórdomo, a choreographed piece performed by the Mixed Group of Coros y Danzas of the Sección Femenina in A Coruña. The video was broadcast in 1969 by the Francoist newsreel NO-DO,Footnote ¹⁴ as part of the regime’s official programme for the dissemination of Spanish folklore. Far from being a neutral representation, it constitutes a clear example of low-intensity symbolic violence exercised on bodies through institutionalised folklore.

The scene takes place in an idealised natural setting, an oak grove, which functions as a symbolic stage. Nature is thereby associated with an alleged timeless and harmonious origin of the people and their customs, presenting tradition as a dehistoricised folkloric tableau. The ensemble is made up of two distinct groups: (i) the musical group, composed of two pandeireteiras—a woman playing scallop shells and a man with a square frame drum; and (ii) the dance group, formed by four mixed couples. In the background, a choir of women watches the scene from a secondary plane, reinforcing the choreographic and visual composition of the representation.

Over the first bars of music, a voice-over narration states: “La Muiñeira Vella is so called because it dates from the fifteenth century, and it is also known as the ribeirana of Mórdomo, as it is danced along that riverbank. We present its performance by the Mixed Group of Coros y Danzas of the Sección Femenina of A Coruña.” This introduction contributes to the construction of a narrative of essentialised tradition, with no reference to its concrete social context.

The piece follows a highly codified stage choreography, executed with meticulous synchronisation. The dance begins with the percussion marking the rhythm of the muiñeira, while the dancers perform a figure called paseo, which consists of moving forward and backward in opposition to one’s partner. At the very moment the sung copla begins, all the men raise their arms in unison, while the women—eyes fixed on the ground, faces hidden beneath wide-brimmed hats—perform a zigzag movement. During the refrain—ailaralala…—the formation shifts into a circular figure—roda. The end of the circle is marked with a single percussive strike, precisely timed with the men lowering their arms and initiating a new paseo, this time with lateral movement. Once again, the copla introduces a new cycle. There is no room for improvisation—everything is choreographed with military precision.

The staging makes it clear that there is no space for improvisation or individual expression, as everything is designed to enact a disciplined, hierarchical, and binary bodily order, aligned with the regime’s discourse. The dancers’ bodies appear rigid: the men execute energetic, vertical movements with their arms raised; the women, faceless, dance submissively with restrained, soft steps, their arms held close to their hips. The division of roles is strikingly binary: strength and visibility for the men, docility and restraint for the women. The singing voices, meanwhile, are rendered in a high register with a choral timbre that departs from the vocal quality characteristic of Galician traditional singing, which typically blends chest and head resonance. This is a clean, restrained, and controlled sound, more typical of educated and refined women than of “rough peasant women.”

All the performers wear the so-called traxe rexional de gala—gala regional costume—a model inspired by historical garments that was standardised during the Francoist regime. As Beatriz Busto notes, this costume not only embellishes the dance but also legitimises participation in it (Busto Reference Busto2012:22). Access to representation is conditioned by clothing and by belonging to an official ensemble, establishing a symbolic distinction between those who perform and those who observe. The institutional appropriation of traditional dress forms part of a broader process of folklorisation, in which popular music and dance lose their communal functionality and become cultural products directed at a passive audience.

The analysis of the video of Muiñeira vella de Mórdomo enables an interpretation of Francoist folklore, from a Foucauldian biopolitical perspective, as one of the forms that power adopted to intervene in people’s lives during the dictatorship—particularly through the regulation of bodies and the imposition of gender normativity. Michel Foucault defines biopolitics as “what brings life and its mechanisms into the realm of explicit calculations and makes power-knowledge an agent of the transformation of human life” (Foucault Reference Foucault1979:173). In this new regime of power, the aim is no longer to exercise sovereignty through the threat of death, but rather to manage life in its smallest details: to regulate behaviour, shape bodies, optimise conduct, and integrate people into productive and ideological systems.

The Sección Femenina operated as one of the institutions responsible for applying this biopolitical rationality during the Francoist dictatorship. Through the staging of traditional dances such as the one under discussion, the regime mobilised folklore as a disciplinary tool, turning dance into a political language aimed at the performance of social order. This was not only about codifying movements or assigning differentiated functions, but about inscribing in the body a visual grammar of obedience: every gesture, every rhythm, every spatial arrangement acted as a sign of symbolic learning, intended to internalise the position each body should occupy within the social order being enacted. Dance thus became a pedagogical instrument oriented towards the reproduction of normative subjects and the internalisation of hegemonic values of gender, order, and nation.

The choreography shown in the video exemplifies what Foucault called the “anatomo-politics of the human body,” focused on the education of bodies, the increase of their utility, and their docility, through control procedures characteristic of disciplinary mechanisms (Foucault Reference Foucault1979:168). The biopolitical logic does not affect women alone; it imposes a gender normativity that disciplines all bodies, including male bodies, eliminating any form of dissidence or deviation from the hegemonic model. The bodies that dance, sing, and play have no room for action beyond the bounds of what is decorous and normative. There is no space for other kinds of corporeality or for alternative modes of expression.

At the same time, the folklore dispositif orchestrated by the Sección Femenina contributes to what Foucault identifies as the “biopolitics of the population,” aimed at regulating vital processes and managing the social conditions that affect reproduction, health, and productivity (Foucault Reference Foucault1979:168–169). The choreographed dance, far from being a living cultural practice, becomes an exercise in normalisation: a staging of the ideal body—active, pure, national—that excludes all deviation and helps to “qualify, measure, appraise and hierarchise” subjects (Foucault Reference Foucault1979:174). Folklore thus ceases to be a space of communal expression and becomes instead a technology of subjection at the service of power.

The end of the dictatorship in 1975 and the subsequent consolidation of the democratic regime did not entail an effective rupture with the systems of corporeal control established under Francoism in the realm of folklore. Far from disappearing, many of the disciplinary logics instilled by the Sección Femenina were reproduced by hundreds of cultural associations that, from the late twentieth century onwards, assumed a central role in the institutionalisation of tradition. These associations, which often claim fidelity to traditional forms based on ethnographic research,Footnote ¹⁵ have contributed to the standardisation of choreographic models in which movement is governed by strict rules and bodies are codified according to norms of spectacle and gender. These are highly precise choreographies, oriented towards stage performance and exhibition, leaving no room for improvisation or for the activation of the present as a shared event—unlike what we have seen in the scenes from the Foliada da Fonsagrada and from Rubiós. The practice of traditional dance in staged contexts demands uniformity, synchronisation, and a clear gender differentiation, reinforcing patriarchal frameworks and excluding dissident corporealities. Thus, even in democracy, folklore continues to function as a technology of subjection, where individual agency is absorbed into a logic of collective control.

In what follows, I analyse a video of a performance by the association Xacarandaina, one of the most renowned groups in the current Galician folklore scene and one of the driving forces—alongside other organisations—behind the proposal to designate Galician traditional dance as an Asset of Cultural Interest in 2018. The video features a staged performance of the Muiñeira vella de Albite, presented during the fifteenth Festival of Galician Folklore, held in 1983 in the Quintana Square in Santiago de Compostela, the capital of Galicia (see Figure 2).

Figure 2.

The folkloric association Xacarandaina during a stage performance. Photo by Marcos Míguez.

Despite the democratic context and the supposed ethnographic renewal that often accompanies this type of initiative, the staging reveals a significant continuity with the models of representation institutionalised under Francoism. The stage layout follows a now-familiar pattern in such representations: the musical group is positioned on the left, consisting of two bagpipes, snare drum, and bass drum—all played by men—and, as the only instruments played by women, a pandeireta and cunchas—scallop shells—in line with the gender restrictions inherited from the Sección Femenina model (Busto Reference Busto2012:8). The dance ensemble consists of eight mixed-gender couples arranged in a symmetrical formation at the centre of the stage space.

The piece, an instrumental muiñeira in two parts, is presented as a highly synchronised choreography devoid of improvisation. It begins with a melody associated with paseos or rodas, to which the dance group joins in precisely on the third bar. At the moment the melody shifts, all the men execute their part with force, while the women, with lowered gaze and arms held close to the body, wait for their cue. Once the men have performed the punto in full, the women join in with restrained and measured movements, following a logic of subtle gestures and expressive containment. This structure is repeated with precision, alternating paseos and puntos until the end, when the dancers gradually leave the stage via the back.

The performers’ costumes follow the patterns of the traxe tradicional de gala—gala regional costume—carefully reconstructed from old models and widely used in the staged spaces of Galician folklore. Beyond its aesthetic or identity value, the costume functions here as a marker of belonging and a guarantee of legitimacy: only those correctly uniformed are permitted to take part in the performance. This condition reveals the persistence of a logic in which tradition is something that can be worn and displayed, but not necessarily lived. Rather than linking bodies to their social context or territory, the traxe serves to homogenise them and neutralise their expressive potential, consolidating a representational aesthetic that excludes spontaneity and connection to the present.

The choreographic model reproduces—with few variations—the same corporeal language based on the opposition between strength and delicacy, visibility, and modesty. Although the Francoist rhetoric that accompanied the Sección Femenina’s staged folklore may have disappeared, the disciplinary dispositif that configures bodies as codified elements of a predictable order remains intact. Individual expression is subordinated to the aesthetic of homogeneity. It’s supposed ethnographic basis does not prevent the representation from departing from living practice. In contrast to the foliadas in Fonsagrada or Rubiós, here there is no space for improvisation, nor for the present as a shared event. Tradition is no longer presented as experience, but as a closed and archived form, ready to be exhibited.

These four scenes, recorded in very different historical and political contexts, reveal the ongoing coexistence of two conceptions of traditional dance which, far from being mutually exclusive, exist in tension. On the one hand, a staged and institutionalised model that operates as a mechanism of biopolitical control and normalisation of bodies, reproducing hierarchical structures and aesthetic patterns that neutralise the transformative potential of dance as a relational practice. Through its choreographic codification, its staging, and its integration into heritage policies, this model perpetuates subtle but effective forms of control, in which dancing bodies are regulated, ordered, and legitimised from outside. On the other hand, forms of dance which—despite their marginalisation in official spaces of representation—continue to activate in the present a communal sense of tradition as a bodily, improvised, interdependent, and open web of relations.

Within this framework, the spontaneous and collective practices that take place in foliadas can be read as dissident activations of tradition, in which expressive freedom and communal bonds challenge the normative parameters of institutional representation. This tension, which is not merely aesthetic or formal but deeply political, also manifests at the institutional level, as became evident during the 2018 procedure to declare Galician traditional dance an Asset of Cultural Interest. In that process, the bearer community submitted statements of objection that questioned the criteria of the proposal and demanded alternative ways of understanding and practising tradition. All of this compels us to rethink what we mean by tradition, who enacts it, who represents it, and under what conditions it may be inhabited today as a space of relational and biopolitical dissent.