Carnival festivals of Europe and the Americas precede Lent, filling the three days before Ash Wednesday. In Austria they perpetuate many pagan dances, particularly in Innsbruck and Imst, with the masked and ghostly phantoms and witches and noisy processions with songs, bull-roarers, drums, and whips. In Spanish and Latin American villages the unruly characters enact a more orderly "combat of winter and summer," in the guise of the ancient Moors and Christians, with the obvious victory of summer. Devils and deaths (diablos y muertes) are also on the loose in the role of buffoons. Morality plays are relics of medieval ideology, with speeches in the local vernacular and decorous steppings of Sin, Death, the Devil, Pastorcitas (shepherdesses in white communion dress), and masked animals from the Garden of Eden or bears or tigers.
Urban carnivals bring out animal maskers, deaths, and devils, without ritual connotations in, for instance, Munich. The famous carnivals of Rio de Janeiro and New Orleans draw huge crowds of tourists to observe the masking, competitive parades of floats, and street and ballroom dancing. In the Brazilian medley the street and ballroom dances show interesting contrasts: the samba in the streets is ecstatic, improvisatory, and disorderly, whereas the samba of the ballrooms is more sedate and has set steps. Such urban carnivals have lost sight of the original ritual purpose.
On the other hand the observances of Pentecost, the springtime feast that falls 50 days after the Christian Easter, fit the dances into a framework that meaningfully combines Christian and pre-Christian, New and Old Testament, forms. The Jewish Shavuot festival follows by the same period the Passover, which often coincides with Easter. The Pentecost, known also as Whitsunday, has since AD 200 commemorated the descent of the Holy Spirit on the Apostles, and the Shavuot, originally a feast of thanksgiving for first fruits, has been associated by rabbis with the giving of the Law at Sinai. Both express the joyous resurgence of animal and spiritual powers and of new vegetation.
In the southerly climates the festival may already celebrate the first fruits. Everywhere Jewish celebrants bring offerings of fruits and flowers to the temple, with chanting and prayers. In Haifa, Israel, white-clad youths and maidens dance and sing. In the Balkans girls dance for Pentecost, and the community winds in snakelike kolos. In England the community circles around a tree, then around the church, or it holds a maypole dance. In some villages, such as Bampton-on-the-Bush and those of the Cotswolds region, "Morris men" dressed in clean white caper and leap in a procession or in double files, waving white kerchiefs or green branches. The dancers may have the company of clowns, a Jack-in-the-Green clad in greenery. In some English villages and in British-inspired American locations, such dances take place on May Day rather than Pentecost.
Agricultural festivals, especially harvests, may adjust their dates not only to the local climate but to the particular year's weather. The Iroquois Indians of New York State and Ontario adjust their calendar to the ripening of the crops of berries, beans, and corn. They may hold their thanksgiving rounds for green corn between the third week of August and the middle of September. The square dances of the American farmers were held on the occasion of husking bees--before combines took over the work--whenever the corn was ready. Farmers continue their square dances, or "country dances," in barns or in grange halls at odd times or even weekly. Their urban imitators perpetuate these dances assiduously when square-dance and folk-dance societies, often mingling the traditional American dances with those of immigrant peoples, meet in national halls or centres, school or college gymnasiums, or other locations. The gatherings of these enthusiasts and analogous groups on both sides of the Atlantic are legion.
Certain secular or semisecular celebrations adhere to a definite date. Such political holidays as the French Independence Day (July 14) and the Mexican national holiday (May 5) and Independence Day (September 16) feature regional dances outdoors and at indoor balls. The Guelaguetza at Cerro Fortín, Oaxaca, formerly a ritual festival, now combines religious and regional dances for the general public on July 16. Such festivals attract vast numbers of dance teams, native visitors, and tourists.
