MURGA...and a little Patito Feo

This is the first part in a multi-part multimedia blitz here at Mate Monday. Today, the sounds of Uruguay I´ve been treated to over the past half-year. Attentive readers have probably picked up on my being a hardcore murga fan. However, murga is hard to describe if you´ve never seen it before...so here´s YOUR chance to walk down Avenida Centenario to the Velodromo in Parque Battle for a night of murga.

The first act up is one of the oldest murgas performing - Los Diablos Verdes. They´ve been at it for 70 years now (not the same people, obviously, but the same group), and accordingly are a little bit of a tradition here...it´s not quite Carnaval without them.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gjBtbIiuHPk&feature=related

However, my favorite murga is Agarrate Catalina, the grand prize murga winners in this year´s Carnaval. They´re a young group, and accordingly are looked at as a bit of the "murga of the future," as it were. Rather than just parody life and events in Uruguay, La Catalina try to incorporate universal themes into their act - this year´s act centered around the theme of aging and mortality...the name of this year´s show is "El Último Viaje." This is the opening of their act, in the Teatro del Verano. The entrance sets the stage for the action - it´s clear that all of the players are old, and the song introduces the theme for the rest of the performance, as well as setting the physical scene.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tSS2n3JcvFw&feature=related

The lyrics in "El Último Viaje" are amazing. Murga is, after all, a form of theatre, and like any good play, a murga has characters, a setting, and suchforth. The action is set in a home for pensioners, and the characters are all elderly Uruguayans, suffering from all the ill effects of age, but still filled with memories. Themes touched on in dialogue and songs include racial prejudice (a character´s granddaughter is bringing her boyfriend to meet the grandfather, and so he sings his hope that the boyfriend isn´t a "chino," Bolivian, Peruvian, black, "maricón," Protestant, and that, of course, he´s open and accepting of other people without prejudices - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7B9aj5S6MQA&feature=related), incontinence, "drug" abuse in the form of a protein supplement (Gevral), the dilemmas faced by old leftists whose grandkids want Barbies for Christmas, and more seriously, memory loss in the form of a spoken word piece that literally brought me to tears. The act ends with this song, which continues the journey into death theme, and ends by comparing the end of life to the end of Carnaval and of the play.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QpySinIVLow

Another murga jóven that I enjoy a great deal is La Mojigata. Their act, "At The Point of Extinction," is a comment on the struggle to maintain cultural identity in the face of 21st century technology and globalization, as well as a comment on Uruguay´s very stagnant population growth - while the country is not in the negative growth category like most of Western Europe, it´s not growing, either. La Mojigata warns that there will soon be more murgistas than there are people to watch the murgas, and that many of the symbols of 21st century Uruguayan life - text messages, Eduardo Galeano, FotoLog, the twin towers of the WTC by Montevideo Shopping, and even "esos culos divinos" - "pueden desaparecer" (may disappear).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vyDAQPvYAN0

Obviously, a YouTube search turns up a lot of murga - this is a huge part of Uruguayan culture, and I could go on for quit a while posting videos from other amazing groups such as Queso Magro (such as this one...http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u9Yq9h38dPs&feature=related; it´s a satirical look at Uruguay through the eyes of a man shipwrecked on the tiny island about 300 m offshore of Playa Malvin) and El Gran Tuleque (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PNIDQYVeSeY; this year´s theme was a New 10 Commandments, revolving around the life of Hamilton and his family problems and psychoses).

However, I work quite a bit with kids and pre-teens, and sadly, murga is much easier to appreciate and share in an adult context - it´s the sort of thing you talk about at work the next morning while passing the mate around. The big hit with the younger audiences during my time here has been a pre-teen themed telenovela (more-or-less a soap opera, but the ones here tend to run for less time and have a end in sight...they are, after all, "TV novels") called Patito Feo, or "Ugly Duckling." Since its amazingly successful TV run, it has become a traveling show, and commercials for the shows in Montevideo earlier in the month were non-stop on the two stations that we get at the church. This song is ridiculously popular and ridiculously well-known...several of the 10-12 year old girls at La Obra know every move to this dance. The song is more-or-less the theme song of Las Divinas, the group of pretty, popular, snobby girls at the school.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PuHfxmW4-wA&feature=related

Now just imagine here THAT at least every other day, sometimes more, for 6 months...if you dare. My next update will, si Dios quiere, be a photo update from the beginning of Carnaval on to the present - stay tuned!