El buen viar (El baile del cereal)

A cumulative song used as a dance at wedding feasts. This song is formulated as a series of questions and answers regarding how to perform the agricultural tasks required to cultivate cereal—an omen of fertility for the new couple: how to sow, to water, to harvest the grain, to mill, to knead the dough, to bake the bread and to eat it. Each task in the song is performed its own accompanying gestures, then 46 all the former tasks are repeated in reverse and performed with the gestures. The refrain at the end of each strophe hints at the dance and also mentions the sea, a common poetic allusion of erotic overtones: “This way we put our foot into the sea and turn around.” A similar dance song is found in the North Moroccan Sephardic wedding repertoire (Weich-Shahak 1989).