Jineteadas and meetings of payadores: performance of payada from Rio de la Plata in Chile

Payada is a traditional practice of improvised poetry, originally from the Río de la Plata area, and recently popularized in Chilean Patagonia. In this paper, we will examine the artistic work of payadores specifically from the Aysén area in Chile. In order to take on payada theoretically, we follow the approach to verbal art as performance, initiated by Richard Bauman and Charles Briggs, which has proven highly productive in musicology. According to this approach, performance is a form of communication in which performers and audience converge, whose success depends on the skills of the performers, and whose contextualization affords access to broader issues that involve a community. Thanks to fieldwork, the examination of field recordings, interviews, and my own experience as payador, we can explain two ways of performing improvisation: the jineteadas and the encuentros de payadores. The success of the poetry is most effectively verified in the encuentros, which are characterized by a deeper level of interaction and complicity between singers and audience. At the same time, the contextualization of Patagonian payada, through contact with the singers and the exercise of singing, confirms that a contextual approach enriches the understanding of the performance, inasmuch as the performance facilitates the emergence of a community of singers, of communal and subjective identities, and of a territorial memory and identity.