KEEPING TRADITIONS ALIVE: HUNGARIAN STATE FOLK ENSEMBLE AT TOUHILL ON FEBRUARY 9-10, 2007
January 27, 2007.....On Friday, February 9 and Saturday, February 10 at 8 p.m., from Budapest to the Touhill Performing Arts Center comes one of the great folkloric dance companies of the world, when Dance St. Louis presents the Hungarian State Folk Ensemble. Authentic costumes, rousing rhythms, and breathtaking choreography based on centuries-old folk dances combine with 21st-century technology for a spectacle of captivating beauty and heart-pounding excitement.
Dance St. Louis Artistic and Executive Director Michael Uthoff will host a free program, Speaking of Dance, with Mária Ferencz, managing director of the Hungarian Heritage House of Hungary’s Ministry of Education and Culture, in the Touhill’s Terrace Lobby at 7:15 p.m. prior to both performances.
The program uses modern theatrical techniques, special lighting effects and video projections to emphasize the context of the dances in real life. Old photographs sometimes appear behind the dancers. Instead of all performers beginning a dance together, one couple will start and the others gradually join in, just as would happen at a village gathering. ”We are the only ensemble in Europe who present folklore in a modern way,” says Ferencz.
Inspiration from Bartók
The program is entitled Hungarian Concerto: Hommage à Béla Bartók, honoring a Hungarian whose life-work proved that tradition and modernity were complementary. Bartók was not only one of the great composers of the 20th century but one of the first scholars of folk music. With his friend, composer Zoltan Kodály, Bartók traveled throughout Hungary and other parts of Eastern Europe recording peasant songs on Edison wax cylinders. Bartók’s own music became suffused by the folk themes, modes, and rhythms he studied, which he synthesized with the contemporary music of his time into his own style.
For more than five decades, since 1951, the Hungarian State Folk Ensemble’s dancers and musicians have brought the rich traditions of their homeland to 44 countries across the world.
The dances range throughout Hungary’s historical regions, from isolated, mountainous Transylvania, to the Danube River valley. Couples whirl at dizzying speeds in Hungary’s national dance, the czardas, which developed as a ballroom dance in the early 19th century but was based on peasants’ dances of the 16th and 17th centuries. The czardas has innumerable regional versions and complex variations.
Other dances are from medieval calls to war. The shepherds’ dance may be performed now with crooks, but it started with swords. The men stomp their feet and slap their boot in intricate rhythmic patterns. The verbunk evolved in the 18th century from dances performed at lavish parties given by army recruiters to attract young men into military life. Women’s circle dances, often accompanied only by the women’s own singing, are the most archaic form of folk dance found in Hungary.
The Ensemble’s musicians play both Gypsy music and Hungarian peasant music. The Gypsies, who know themselves as the Rom, came into Europe from northern India in the 14th and 15th centuries and deeply influenced Hungarian culture.
Among the instruments are the bagpipe, hit-gardon and tarógató. The hit-gardon is carved from a tree trunk and is a stringed instrument played percussively, with its strings all tuned to the same note. The tarógató is a medieval wind instrument resembling the clarinet. Because it was used during battle to signal the troops rebelling against Hungary’s Austrian rulers in 1703-1711, this instrument was forbidden, and became a symbol of the struggle for freedom.
Mountains and Magyars
Hungary is located in the central southern part of Europe in a huge, rolling plain called the Carpathian Basin, the remnant of an ancient sea. The Basin is surrounded by mountains, the Alps to the west, the Dinaric Alps fringing the Adriatic Sea to the southwest, and the Carpathians and Balkans swinging around in an arc from southeast to northwest to close the circle.
In 896 A.D., a people who called themselves the Magyars came over the mountains from the east and made the Basin their own. On Christmas Day 1000, a Magyar prince, Stephen, was crowned king with the blessing of the Pope, and the nation of Hungary was officially born.
Hungary largely flourished during the Middle Ages and Renaissance, in spite of the heavy cost of repelling a Mongol invasion in the 13th century. In the early 16th century, however, the Ottoman Turks overran the land. The Turks were expunged in 1686, but all of Hungary came under the control of the Habsburg rulers of Austria, where it remained until the Austro-Hungarian Empire fell apart in the aftermath of World War I. In those post-war years, Hungary clashed with its neighbors, and the 1920 Treaty of Trianon drastically redrew its borders so that the nation lost two-thirds of its land. Transylvania became part of Romania. Millions of Hungarians abruptly found themselves living outside their homeland.
After World War II, the Soviet Union took over. A revolution in 1956 was crushed. Soviet control eventually disintegrated, and in 1990, free elections were held in Hungary for the first time in 45 years. Today the nation is a parliamentary republic and a member of NATO and the European Union.
The Hungarian State Folk Ensemble was established in 1951 to collect and play authentic folk music, and preserve the traditional dances and costumes of Hungary and Hungarian-inhabited areas of Europe. Since its foundation, the Ensemble has repeatedly toured North America, the Far East, and Western Europe. The troupe also gives about 100 performances every year in its home city of Budapest, Hungary’s capital.
The Hungarian State Folk Ensemble is sponsored by Centene Corporation, with additional funding provided by Zoltek.
Tickets are $25-$43 for the general public, $22-$40 for students and seniors. They are available at the Dance St. Louis box office in Grand Center at 3547 Olive St., the Centene Center for Arts and Education. They are also available at the Touhill’s box office at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, by phone at Dance St. Louis at 314-534-6622, and via dancestlouis.org. Handling charges apply to phone, online and outlet sales.
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