After putting on some grim looking costumes, painting our faces in the traditional Mexican style and naturally accompanied by Alchemy's 'She Walks In Beauty' and 'Empress Eugenie's Blue Heart Diamond', we hurried to Amsterdam's city centre to eventually end up walking among bride and groom Calacas and Calaveras, some even on stilts, marigolds, glow in the dark sombreros, altars and spectacular fire shows.
El dia de los muertos is the night when the thin veil between the world of the spirits and the land of the living is the most permeable, for All Saint's Day slips with a deadly silence into All Soul's day. This is the one night a year when the dead can visit the relatives they left behind. To me, the only night in a year when I actually feel united with my human fellows, young and old walking side by side, hiding behind painted faces, masks, fake blood, fangs to become ourselves, to become one.
I walked through a tunnel of tourists, among them even cheering Mexicans recognising their own festivities, photographers - scared but laughing, children, policemen making sure the road is safe and the angry, stationary traffic drivers, as almost all of the streets in the city centre were drowned in freaks.
Watching a young 'sugar man', wearing a black hoody, bounce his body to the right and to the left, listening to the rhythm of the drums created by the street musicians, I now realised the mystery and sensuality created with these macabre rituals.
The Fox Amsterdam Halloween Party was a continuation of the splendid parade. The DJ's (such as the delicious looking Jordy Huisman from Kris Kross) were all seductively black and white face-painted, playing their music and making the crowd move as if we were all possessed. I looked in all directions and realised I was surrounded by a world of darkness yet filled with colours, alcohol, laughter, a world of madness, yet a place that makes sense, crazy yet peaceful, innocent yet wicked, a place where I belong
Somewhere in the middle of the night I found myself standing on a balcony and looking down at the party. I looked at all the people drinking, flirting, kissing, dancing...were we not supposed to be honouring the dead tonight? Wasn't this perhaps the wrong interpretation of the festivity, I wondered? Yet, I a sked myself what would the Mexicans be doing at this very moment? Would they not be drinking, dancing and thinking of the ones they lost with a bit of an intoxicated mind but with a smile on their faces? In the end, Mexicans or not, metalheads, steampunks, Victorian goths, you name it, were all the same and we proved it on this special night, because underneath it all we have all lost someone we love, and we like to commemorate them in our own special way.
By Niguanta, of Romania.
http://niguanta.blogspot.co.uk
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