3. A Survey of the Chapters in the Book
© Egil Bakka, CC BY 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0174.03
Most of this book is comprised of case studies from European countries that, during the late eighteenth and the first half of the nineteenth centuries, were not the independent states they are today. They were more or less clearly defined provinces or parts of empires or kingdoms.1 Dance histories have, to a large extent, been written on the basis of material from the large, prestigious centres of Europe, written in the dominant languages. The contributions in this book present sources from a larger selection of languages, and we hope to broaden perspectives on how the round dances were received throughout other parts of Europe. There is, however, one exception: Chapter Four by Egil Bakka deals with round dancing at a number of European courts. This chapter is intended to link the other case studies in the book to the practices and discourses of larger countries which, although not the focus of this collection, are significant in the overall history of how round dances were received even at the top level.
It is most logical to group the chapters according to the century with which they mostly deal, and this is the approach we have taken in this volume. This approach tends to group sections according to the source material used, as well as topics and perspectives covered. Some chapters focus on the first half of the nineteenth century, others on the twentieth or even twenty-first centuries. There are, of course, excursions forwards or backwards in time, and Chapter Eight by Rebeka Kunej considers both centuries more or less equally.
Comparing the groups of chapters that deal with each period, those concentrating mostly on the nineteenth century (Chapter Five by Daniela Stavělová, Chapter Six by Dorota Gremlicová, Chapter Seven by Lászlò Felföldi, Chapter Nine by Iva Niemčić and Ivana Katarinčić, and Chapter Ten by Jörgen Torp) are based on published material, literary works, newspaper articles, or the reports and works of historians. The chapters dealing with the twentieth century (Chapter Eleven by Sille Kapper, Chapter Thirteen by Mats Nilsson, and Chapter Fourteen by Helena Saarikoski) are to a larger extent based on material from folklorists, ethnologists or collectors from the folk-dance revival. This material was generally collected and published in the twentieth century, and sources on dance from such experts would not usually reach back to the early nineteenth century. One chapter is mainly about the twentieth century but utilises historical sources other than folklore material (Chapter Twelve by Bakka), and the study dealing mostly with the twenty-first century uses near-contemporary sources with an ethnographic fieldwork angle (Chapter Fifteen by Tvrtko Zebec).
The rejection of, or resistance to, round dances is a theme pertinent to most of the period in which they were practised and performed, and most chapters discuss or refer to it. During the early nineteenth century there were complaints about the risks to dancers’ health caused by the rapid turning and exhausting speed. There were also references to the indecency of the close embrace and claims that the wild turning was inappropriate, particularly for ladies of polite society, as discussed by Gremlicová in Chapter Six. In the early twentieth century, however, round dances were no longer considered to be so provocative. The new African-American-derived dances were far more troubling; they were choreo-musical forms rooted in ragtime and jazz, giving rise to dances such as the One-Step and the Foxtrot. Another controversial, but popular, South American form was the Tango. These forms are not covered here in their own right since they do not fall under our definition of round dances.
Still, dancing in general — and thereby also round dances — was attacked by religious lay movements, and moral panic over dance arose from time-to-time based on reports or rumours about drinking, fighting and sexual promiscuity, as explored by Nilsson and Bakka.
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Fig. 3.1 Alexander Altenhof, Europe in 1812: Political Situation before Napoleon’s Russian Campaign. Map of Europe in 1812, immediately prior to the end of the Napoleonic wars and the many changes that took place in 1814. Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Europe_1812_map_de.png
Another recurrent theme is how national movements could embrace dances as national symbols or reject them as a harmful foreign influence, and there are examples of both attitudes in this book in the chapters by Stavělová, Gremlicová, Felföldi, Niemčić and Katarinčić, and myself. In cases of rejection, we see that new dances were created to serve as national symbols at the balls of the elite.
The second part of the nineteenth century was a period when round dances became more established and discussions about their role were less heated, and perhaps therefore less common. In the early part of the twentieth century, round dances received stiff competition from the African-American-derived dances, and slowly faded from the dancing masters’ repertoires. At the same time, the folk-dance revival grew to become an important factor in the field of dance. Folk dance collectors mostly ignored the round dances, considering them to be too simple and too recent to merit preservation or cultivation. However, they remained central to the repertoire of ‘dancing crowds’,2 and were therefore practised throughout the twentieth century in places where the influence of the new African-American-derived dances was not so strong. Several of the chapters deal with round dances in this period, when they were still controversial enough in many places to be either criticised or banned. They also aroused nostalgic feelings, as Saarikoski explores, and had different kinds of local revivals or resurrections parallel to, or even in competition with, the more elitist folk-dance revival, as discussed by Zebec.
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Fig. 3.2 Theeuro, Location Map of Armenia Within Europe, 2010. The home nations of the authors in this book. Image by Egil Bakka, based on Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Europe_map_armenia.png
Chapters on the Early Nineteenth Century
The earlier part of my introduction does not discuss the early history and reception of the two Slavic-derived branches of round dancing, the Polka and the Mazurka types. It is therefore very convenient that the two chapters by our Czech colleagues do just that.
Stavělová (Czech Republic) discusses how the Polka was established as a Czech national symbol during the middle of the nineteenth century. She analyses a large number of sources that discuss the Polka, tracing the dance from its appearance in Czech national circles in the 1830s to its success in Paris in the 1840s. She discusses its consolidation as a Czech symbol through the work of music composers such as Bedřich Smetana in the second part of the century, arguing that it was first and foremost the name of the dance that carried political meaning: Polka as a cultural product fulfilled this goal to a lesser extent. In this way, Stavělová offers a detailed discussion of how the myth of the Polka became a significant aspect of Czech national culture.
Gremlicová (Czech Republic) provides a detailed analysis of newspaper discussions of dance. She shows how a text of the kind that is often read as evidence of resistance to new dances can be contextualised: she identifies the people behind it, and the political and cultural contexts to which they belonged. Gremlicová takes the Redowa as an example of the dances mentioned in newspaper discussions: a dance that has Slavic roots, just as the Polka does, and possesses the basic characteristics of the Mazurka types. By means of the newspaper sources, Gremlicová explores the reception of the Redowa in the Czech Republic.
Felföldi (Hungary) offers a broad survey of the Hungarian dance repertoire as it stood when the round dances began to spread into Hungary from neighbouring countries, and how they were met as a foreign influence that the ethnochoreologists did not engage with. He continues by presenting a catalogue that samples the variety of the rich Hungarian sources, which are currently unavailable in other languages. Describing the sociocultural and political context that nourished the substantial resistance to round dances in Hungary, Felföldi discusses the appearance of Csárdás as an alternative national dance. It has a clear similarity to the round dances, as opposed to the alternatives arising in other countries, and Felföldi discusses these similarities and differences, and the context from which the dance arose.
Kunej (Slovenia) surveys the sources for knowledge about the Waltz in her country. She follows the Waltz from its first appearance in Slovenian sources in the early nineteenth century until the early twenty-first century, and shows how it is still popular, particularly in the countryside. Her chapter presents an overview of how one dance type finds its place among other dance types, and how it survives changing influences.
Katarinčić and Niemčić (Croatia) portray the situation around 1830 when round dances arrived in Croatian cities and started to appear in the source material. They demonstrate the tension between national loyalties and the attraction of the fashionable dances imported from abroad, and how solutions were found to satisfy and combine the two streams of influence through the creation of the Salonsko Kolo. This dance is performed by couples forming large and complex formations reminiscent of the Polonaise, the Mazurka or contra dances. Katarinčić and Niemčić‘s article concludes with a discussion of the convoluted paths of this dance through history into the twentieth century, including how it moves back and forth between first and second existence, and how it also survives among diasporic communities of Croatians.3
Torp (Germany) is the only author who focuses on music. He examines how local newspapers in the Hamburg region can throw light on the concert tours of the Viennese composer Johann Strauss the Elder in the 1830s. Strauss was known as the King of the Waltz, and Torp investigates how new music spread during this period, arguing that the dissemination of music also has relevance for dance.
Chapters on the Early Twentieth Century
While the early and mid-nineteenth century was a period when round dances were still developing, by the early twentieth century they were more stable and consolidated. The main context in which dancing took place was still the informal dances of ordinary people who paid no attention to cultivating dance forms — ‘the dancing crowds’.4 This context has always been the most significant, because this is where many round dances have continued to be practised up to the present day. At typical social dance events, round dances dominated, even if African-American forms such as Tango, Foxtrot, and, later, rock ‘n’ roll slowly also gained their places. The dancing of the upper classes and the dance schools laid the foundations of ballroom dancing, along with African-American-derived forms. The dance teachers developed standard forms for competition, and the Waltz was the only round dance that was taken up there. The third context for development was the folk-dance movement, which mostly cultivated more complex dances with firmer structures rather than the simple and loosely structured round dances (as Kapper also explores). Still, many of the folk-dance forms had music, steps and turning techniques in common with round dances, and the Waltz or the Polka were often part of more complex structures.
Kapper (Estonia) focuses mainly on the twentieth century, basing her discussion on information from folk dance collectors and researchers connected to the folk-dance movement. She surveys round dance forms described or referred to as part of this information, and discusses the relationship between round dances and other dances in a local community, particularly if that community was known as a stronghold of traditional dance. She also refers in brief to the folk-dance movement. In this way, she includes two of the groups mentioned above: the ‘dancing crowds’ and the folk dancers, and discusses the place round dancing has within each.
Nilsson (Sweden) addresses the moral outcries against dance as a phenomenon, which are levelled against most kinds of new dancing. He discusses the concepts of moral panic and ‘folk devils’, referring to a number of international research publications in the process. Nilsson concludes with a question about how adaptable these concepts are in contemporary studies. When dealing with the older source material, it can be difficult to distinguish between individual outcries and a moral panic, which is defined as including larger groups. Such panics can disappear without leaving many traces.
Saarikoski (Finland) bases the core of her article on ethnological archive material produced in the course of an inquiry in 1991 about the dancing on so-called pavilions or at outdoor dancing venues in the middle of the twentieth century. Accounts of the post-World-War-II period predominate, and Saarikoski finds nostalgia to be the primary attitude displayed as elderly people look back on their youth and happy memories of dancing. The dance repertoire was a mix of round dances and African-American-derived dances, and the distinction between the styles did not seem to be important to the dancers.
In my own chapter (Norway), I discuss, and contextualise, the banning of round dances by one of Norway’s largest youth movements for about forty years from 1917. I show how the three popular movements that built assembly houses had conflicting attitudes towards social dancing, and dealt with it in different ways. The Liberal Youth Movement, which imposed the ban, gave a variety of reasons, first among them being that it destroyed interest in popular enlightenment, which was the main aim of the movement. The movement also did not consider round dances to be folk dances, and therefore held them to be of less national and educational value. However, only the lay Christians strongly rejected round dances as having a sinful and morally corrupting effect.
Zebec (Croatia) surveys and contextualises the place of round dances, and particularly the Polka, in the twentieth-century Croatia. He shows how the folk-dance movement largely ignored or even rejected the round dances as new and foreign. He then portrays the revival of a ‘shaking’ kind of Polka that has a history in the region, but only rose in popularity as late as the twenty-first century. The peculiar aspect of the revival is that it seems to have arisen independently of the folk-dance movement, among the ‘dancing crowds’.
This book demonstrates how a dance genre grew from different roots and sources in Central Europe, being moulded into the form of individual couple dances in which the couples turn on their own axis along a circular path. The contributions show how these dances spread quickly across most parts of Europe, receiving similar criticisms of the risks to moral and physical health they supposedly posed, and a varied reception according to their perceived national value and other mechanisms of distinction. The fact that large parts of Europe are not covered here is to some degree coincidental, but it also shows that round dances are not considered traditional or rooted enough to be interesting to most researchers. This might be the case in the Balkans, for instance. The round dances, in any case, represent the largest export of European-derived social dances to other parts of the world, comparable only to the export of the European-derived theatrical dance. Round dances and round-dance-derived dances outside Europe are obvious areas where future researchers can build on this publication.
Bibliography
Bakka, Egil, ‘Class Dimensions of Dance Spaces: Situating Central Agents Across Countries and Categories’, in Nordic Dance Spaces: Practicing and Imagining a Region, ed. by Karen Vedel and Petri Hoppu (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014), pp. 129–58.
Hoerburger, Felix, ‘Once again: On the Concept of “Folk Dance”’, Journal of the International Folk Music Council, 20 (1968), 30–32, https://doi.org/10.2307/836068
1 These include Croatia, Czech Republic, Estonia, Finland, Hungary, Norway, and Slovenia; the exceptions are Hamburg/Germany and Sweden.
2 Egil Bakka, ‘Class Dimensions of Dance Spaces: Situating Central Agents Across Countries and Categories’, in Nordic Dance Spaces: Practicing and Imagining a Region, ed. by Karen Vedel and Petri Hoppu (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014), pp. 129–58 (p. 131).
3 Felix Hoerburger, ‘Once again: On the Concept of “Folk Dance”’, Journal of the International Folk Music Council, 20 (1968), 30–32, https://doi.org/10.2307/836068
4 Egil Bakka, ‘Class Dimensions of Dance Spaces’, p. 131.