Festival of Flanders - GLoW Collective

We know the 'Chaconne' as a stately baroque dance, with a constantly repeating bass line of four notes. But originally, it was cut from a very different cloth. It was a fast, lively dance that arose from the cross-pollination of different cultures in the overseas Spanish colonies. The lyrics were naughty, spicy or downright obscene; the dance movements suggestive and the music rousing. These forbidden dances were so popular in their time that one could not prevent them from slipping inside even through monastery doors. A striking example of this is the seventeenth-century A la Vida Bona by the Catalan composer Juan Arañés. The song is bursting with scenes that seem to have escaped from a painting by Jeroen Bosch. GLoW Collective takes this musical form as a starting point for a journey of discovery through different cultures and genres with the central question: what does it mean for your identity if parts of your culture are banned, forbidden or claimed?