the timboucher experience

Upon an excellent reader recommendation, I recently watched a video featuring a group of people who are referred to as Castellers:

The video depicts a mass of people joining together to raise up a human tower, or castell. The point of the exercise, rather poetically, is to raise up a child to the top of the tower to “kiss the sky.”

Via Wikipedia:

The tradition of building human towers originated in Valls, near the city of Tarragona, in the southern part of Catalonia towards the end of the 18th century. Later it developed a following in other regions of Catalonia and even Majorca, and currently has become very popular in parts of Spain. [...] A castell is considered a success when stages of its assembling and disassembling, can be done in complete succession. The final assemblement occurs when everyone has climbed into their designated places, where the enxaneta, the last person, often a child has climbed up to the top, and has raised one hand with four fingers erect, said to symbolize the stripes of the Catalan flag.

This part strikes me as very beautiful as well:

Aside from the people who actually climb to make upper parts of the tower, others are needed to form the pinya, base of the castell, to sustain its weight. These people, often men [2] act as a ’safety net’ if the tower structure collapses and people from the upper parts of the tower are then able to fall on them, cushioning their impact when compared directly hitting the ground.

I played a lot of chess this summer, and on occasion we would build towers made out of chess pieces. The most successful usually had rooks nearby one another as bases - but in the example above, it sounds like the pinya is made up of pawns - though maybe not necessarily.

Evidently, there are groups or teams, collas, who build these towers on a semi-regular basis during patron saint celebrations of cities. Apparently when forming a pinya (base) even people just attending the event can “throw themselves into the castell” as an active participant.

A strikingly beautiful testament to the human spirit, and an undertaking I would love to see done on Ground Zero. It seems like the perfect antidote to the negative energy of the 9/11 event.

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