euskalkultura.eus

Eibar, Gipuzkoa.  The website Dantzan.com is up and running again, but the dantzari Oier Araolaza, one of its promoters, advises that it may only be for a short time.  They had to close last January, due to cuts in public funding, but since then, thanks to a campaign of support launched by the world of Basque dance, they have obtained enough grants to allow them to be on the web for a few months, and the future of the project is still in the air.

Dantzan.com is more than a website to share dance group activities, according to Araolaza.  It is also the virtual meeting place for groups in the Basque Country and the Diaspora which offers help in training dancers, organize courses, and advise groups from its small documentation center that it has built over the years.  “All these aspects are enriched by the other and all of those are what make up the Dantzan.com community,” Araolaza explains.

Lighthouses in the Diaspora

Among the groups that come to Dantzan.com looking for advice, data or information, are groups in the Diaspora.  Araolaza emphasizes the interest in Basque dance by people in the Diaspora and their contribution to this world: “They are really the eighth province and some things that are being lost here are being maintained in the Diaspora.”

Araolaza admits that among the groups in the Diaspora, like in the Basque Country, there is a little bit of everything, but he stresses that among them there are some that are very good.  “Sometimes we have looked at them paternally, but it should be realized that as far as rigor, and as far as interest, there are some groups that are like lighthouses for us,” he explained.  Among these he notes groups like the Oinkari Basque Dancers in Boise, ID and Ekin Dantzari Taldea in Buenos Aires, for instance.

Araolaza taught some Basque dance workshops last year in the US, invited by NABO.  According to him, “Some of them are much more advanced than us in many ways.  They always have looked to us, but it’s about time that we start to pay attention to them from the Basque Country.”

-Dantzan.com, here.
-Book authored by Oier Araolaza for the Etxepare Basque Institute in PDF, here  (The book specifically mentions the world of Basque dance in the Diaspora)