April 8, 2008

28th György Ránki Hungarian Chair Symposium at Indiana University in Bloomington: Folk Music Revival and the Dance-House Movement in Hungary

From Friday till Sunday, April 4-6, 2008, the Indiana University in Bloomington organized the 28th György Ránki Hungarian Chair Symposium titled 'Folk Music Revival and the Dance-House Movement in Hungary'.

The symposium was opened by 92-year-old Professor Dénes Sinor, remembering those Hungarian professors, who have been working at Indiana University for the last 30 years, including György Ránki, Kálmán Kulcsár, Mihály Szegedy-Maszák, Csaba Pléh, Ignác Romsics, and, currently, Dr. Ágnes Fülemile, who, personally, was most devoted to organizing this symposium.

In his opening remarks, Hungarian Consul General in Chicago, Dr. István Mezei conveyed the greetings of Ambassador Ferenc Somogyi to the leaders of the university and participants of the conference. He emphasized that lectures and discussions about Hungarian folk music and dance-house movement, the main subjects of the symposium, fundamentally help to understand the history of the Central Eastern European region, and also its national diversity and cultural complexity. The Consul General donated books about Hungarian history, the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, and Hungarian folk dancing to the Library of the University.

In his speech, Hungarian Honorary Consul in Cleveland, László Böjtös talked about the initial problems and difficulties during the setting up of the Department, and also the results and successes of the Hungarian Studies Program. He stressed that the conferences and symposiums organized annually by the Hungarian Department have been outstanding and significant events in the life of the Hungarian American community.

During the 3-day-long symposium, the Hungarian folk music band Téka staged several performances and taught many volunteers and participants to dance and enjoy typical Hungarian folk dances.

* * *

Short introduction to the Hungarian dance house movement

Hungary has a uniquely wide spectrum of activities in the folk dance and music scene. The rich variety of regional traditions of peasant culture evolved gradually from late medieval and early modern antecedents, peaked in the 19^th and early 20^th centuries, and has been disintegrating during the 20^th century up to recent times. The perception, reinterpretation and representation of peasant art by non-peasants (elite, artists, scholars, urban middle class etc.) have seen many waves since the first part of the 19^th century. One of the most recent waves of revival was the so-called “dance house movement”, an urban youth movement that emerged in the 1970s and 80s in the period of late socialism. Several prominent intellectuals had leading roles in the revival movement. In the country of Béla Bartók and Zoltán Kodály, the fields of ethnomusicology and dance study provided a scholarly background to this folkloristic discovery and gathered together an enormous amount of field material into archives, which was possible due to the longevity of some aspects of peasant culture in some regions of the Carpathian basin.

The movement reinvented the institution of the village dance-house in urban settings and focused on the process of learning of freely varied, improvisational, yet rule-bound dances for live musical accompaniment. Young people, who were searching for an “authentic tradition” started relearning the technique and the style of dance and music from the “last” remarkable personalities of peasant performers in the “field” within Hungary and among minority Hungarians in neighboring countries. In a way there is a unique continuity in the transmission of knowledge. The fresh experience of improvisational dance which started as an amateur movement soon revolutionized the concepts of choreographed performances and created a new sensibility and politics of staged dance as well.

Pilgrimages made to the “sources” revealed the up-until-then unspoken narratives of Hungarian minority existence in the neighboring socialist countries for a subgroup of the younger generation. In the period of milder political suppression of late state socialism, the dance-house established strong communities of young people with similar tastes, values, sets of identities and critical ideas deviating from the official view. The movement, besides increasing pride in “national culture”, was able to mediate a flexible, tolerant attitude toward other ethnicities by the interactions that took place in the field, in the dance-clubs and in festivals.

More than 35 years after its beginning, the revival is now a complex half-professionalized and institutionalized movement with several music bands, professional dance-ensembles, many amateur groups, choreographic workshops, music schools, folk-clubs, dance-houses and summer-dance camps with arts and crafts activities within and outside Hungary.  The newly established Department of Folk Music at the Liszt Ferenc Academy of Music in Budapest started its first academic year in September 2007.

This symposium brought together scholars and practitioners who have researched different layers of this wide range of activities from different scholarly points of view.