Back in 2008, Frances Busuttil and her colleagues had sought to recreate the original form of the kumittiva when they reverted to an all-male ensemble.
“We decided to try out the original dance, with half of the males cross-dressing as women, but it didn’t work,” Busuttil says. “The men drank too much whisky, and they began to confuse the moves and became uncoordinated in their drunkenness. The costumes also didn’t match well.”
The male performers, half of them dressed as women and dancing in couples, didn’t gel because the performers lack the professional capacity to perform to order. The dancers are merely local rural folks for whom the stupendous dance they perform during carnival in Xagħra, Gozo is a tradition that runs in their families. Real women were brought in again the following year, and the kumittiva – a dance of gaiety and amour that’s the only performance in the Maltese carnival that largely survives in its original mediaeval spirit – was allowed to retain the social evolution it underwent when real women had replaced the cross-dressing men.
The kumittiva is also one of the two manifestations of Gozo’s traditional carnival, the other being the carnival in Nadur. The carnival in Nadur has become one huge street party, attracting tens of thousands of revellers on a busy Saturday night. It’s been partly taken over by the motions and ethos of modern clubbing, with floats blaring dance music, although it retains aspects of its original form: the weird and politically- or socially-provocative costumes and performances, the traditional instrument ensembles playing in a scatter of bars, and the overall sense of debauchery before the fasting of Lent.
The reason for the rapid evolution of the Nadur carnival is due to its inclusiveness and egalitarianism. Anyone can don a costume and become a performer, and any bunch of friends can construct a float: it was always about street theatre. And this street gathering of creative debauchery has become hugely famous – it draws so many visitors that carnival weekend has become one of the busiest weekends in Gozo.
The lesser-known kumittiva is another kind of street performance that was similarly provocative and risqué in its heyday, and it continues to evolve as living heritage. The performance is not a re-enactment and the group is not a troupe – the participants simply turn up year after year to perform the dance as their fathers and grandfathers did before them.
“The kumittiva is part of an entire subculture that goes back a long way,” Busuttil, who has been helping out the organising committee and doing research on the kumittiva for years, says. “It has its own lexicon, a language of love and flirtation, and even the names of particular subsets of dance are symbolist of amour. So you can imagine how important it is from a heritage perspective.”
Women did not go to bars then so some of the men in the bar began to cross-dress and dance flirtatiously with their friends
When the dance emerged sometime in mediaeval times, the innuendos of love were akin to a mime of protest. In the beginning the peasants who congregated in the local bar at the In-Nazzareno community in Xagħra used to get drunk during carnival and break into inebriated dancing. The proprietor then began to give them free drinks, so that they could dance with inebriated abandon and make something of a hilarious show that would attract more customers. Women did not go to bars then so some of the men in the bar began to cross-dress and dance flirtatiously with their friends.
At the time the cross-dressing and then the suggestive dancing in public were provocative, and at some point the performers began to dance all the way to the Xagħra town square. And in this way the dance represented something of a coming-out for the peasants: the farmers who were rendered faceless and voiceless by the condescension of the social elite boldly took to the square in drunken dancing that made a mockery of social mores.
Now the social conditions have changed, but the performers dance with the same passion and defiance as their predecessors. For most of them, the kumittiva is the only time during the year when they can dance with unbridled abandon. During the dance itself, whisky is available for the dancers to partake – inebriation is an important lubricant to loosen up the participants.
The dancers loosen up nicely: they twirl and tango with emphatic passion, debauchedly and flirtatiously. The pace is natural, and the occasional misstep makes the kumittiva all the more intimate and endearing. The performers might lack the finesse of professional dancers, but their movements are organic and meaningful, as innate and intangible as historical memory.
Astoundingly, no training takes place throughout the year, and the number of dancers varies from year to year. Knowledge of the dance passes down the generations. In fact, the performers only hold a couple of rehearsals before carnival to improve their coordination.
“Sons and daughters normally begin to dance to join their father or mother respectively, and in that way knowledge of the moves passes down from father to son or mother to daughter,” Busuttil says.
“The ideal number of performers is 12 couples, but whoever turns up can dance and some years there would be 16 couples. Some of the couples are actually married to one another, others are not. The role of each participant also runs down the family lines.”
At the moment the dance is led by Noel Teuma, a vegetable hawker. Teuma’s father was a prime mover of the kumittiva for many years, and the dance now courses through the family like a bloodline: Teuma and his other three sisters all dance, and Teuma met his wife when they both began to dance in the 1980s.
The kumittiva is constituted of a couple of separate set pieces, and each set has its own symbolisms. In Is-Salib, they form the shape of the cross, a potent symbol in the deeply Catholic Gozitan society. In another set, called Il-Mina, they dance through a tunnel formed by raised and clasped hands. Il-Paruta means parody: the set piece is literally an abstractive parody of a kind of sword-fight that used to take place in Malta long ago and the participants engage in playful provocation by lifting and kissing the girls. Il-Bixkilla is an adaptation of the maypole dance that used to be held in many places in Europe, but here too the locals adapted it sardonically: the participants hold a string in their hand and then dance around the bamboo-woven basket (bixkilla in Maltese) mounted on a pole (the basket may be construed as a phallic symbol), and the string is spooled and unspooled around it – this set is the climactic set piece of the kumittiva.
In this year’s carnival, the kumittiva will be performed in the square of In-Nazzareno in Xagħra on Saturday evening (February 6) at 7.30pm. It will then be repeated the next day at Xagħra’s main town square at noon.