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Scene and Heard

Dancing with the Dead in Yosemite!

Photos by Julia Marino » I’m riding to Yosemite National Park in a funky green camper. A forest of sequoias gives way to the remote campground where Las Tortugas: Dance of the Dead IV unfolds. The music reflects the spirit of its surroundings: raw, rustic and real. 

Text by Julia Marino
Posted on November 11, 2009

Lookout, Bonnaroo. Each year Las Tortugas has “progressively ramped things up,” says Adam Haft, who along with Shaun Dolan, is in charge of planning Las Tortugas. Lake Tahoe’s Blue Turtle Seduction headlined the first festival, in which the title Las Tortugas derives, and regional bands like Tracorum, The Trespassers and New Monsoon continue to perform each year. It also includes two additional stages, more than 700 guests, and a long line-up of national artists including Poor Man’s Whiskey, The Mother Hips, Montana Slim, Hot Buttered Rum, Pimps of Joytime, Papa Mali, Umphrey’s McGee, Nathan Moore, Tea Leaf Green, Ivan Neville’s Dumstaphunk, and former Grateful Dead drummer, Bill Kreutzmann, just to name a few.

It is Thursday, the first official night of the fest, and I make it over to Ivan Neville’s Dumstaphunk on the main stage. It’s not even Halloween yet and the crowds are clad in “voodoo”-themed costumes. The music is as dirty as its name implies, and the audience loves it. Women dance on the stage during the encore.

“It was scary as shit getting here!” Neville said recalling the drive to the lodge. “But… really, it’s beautiful. I like how everything is centered... with all the cabins around the music.”

Back at the campground, I’m greeted by a production designer from Eugene, OR who goes by his last name of “Shauger.” He’s constructing a “Voodoo Swamp Lounge” for the festival guests out of poles and a tarp, as well as a giant voodoo doll with pins sticking out from its orifices, a Dracula doll singing Blondie (“I’m gunna getcha, getcha, getcha!”), a bottle of fake blood, glow-in-the-dark cobwebs, dry ice, and bottle labels scripted with names of toxic liquids—“sulfuric elixir”, “truth serum”, “spider venom.”

Sunday arrives and Halloween’s full moon begins to wane. The day softens to the sweet sounds of folk troubadour Nathan Moore. The audience, now sitting on the floor of the hall, listens quietly as Moore plays a song he wrote just hours ago in the campground. “Wonder why we’re all a little thirsty for even a little romance” he soulfully sang. “Tonight, there’s lots of music, and boy I love to dance!"

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