Opera Pampa

Last night we went with some Porteno friends to the Opera Pampa show at La Rural. As usual we had no idea what it was we were going to see, and our assumption that it was an ‘opera’ in the traditional sense was completely faulty…

Instead it was a live action theater production telling the story of Argentine history through song, dance, battle reenactments, and impressive horseback-riding…

La Rural, situated next to the US Embassy in Palermo, is a nicely restored complex that was once a sort of livestock convention arena… It has some stands that surround a rectangular riding rink and stage. From the stands we watched the dancers and horseman act out various stages in the taming of the pampas and the establishment of Argentina.

We had a pretty good general idea of how Argentina was founded and this show confirmed our view of how similar it was to the founding of the US… colonization of a bountiful new world, the purging of the natives, the fight for independence from the colonizing nation, the battle between the federalists and anti-federalists, the settling and taming of the wild west, and the hardwork and prosperity that followed… Of course, the colonizing nation was a different one which made the legal and government structure different, but the similarities are many…

Now back to the show, as we said the horseback-riding was quite good. The horses that they rode were Criollos a very well dispositioned Argentine breed, a decendent of the horses that the Conquistadors brought. In the show they did demonstrations of Argentine equestrian events. They also did tricks, like having the horses all lie-down in unison, and galluping into formations…

All in all it was an enjoyable show that we would recommend to visitors.

We’re going to try and round-up some pictures from someone… unfortunately our new digital camera slipped off an ottoman the other day and is no longer functioning. It was a disappointing loss, before we’d gotten even a fraction of our money’s worth out of the thing… uggghh.

There’s little hope of it being fixed and I don’t know if we can bring ourselves to buy another one in such short order. But for you dear reader we trouble and toil, perhaps we’ll get a cheap little gizmo, so at least you’ll have some pictures to look at to distract from our boring writings…