Hungarian Heritage House

Hungarians make audience feel like party guests

Star-Ledger, March 12. 2007.

Time appears to stop, marking a pause in the wild gaiety of the Hungarian State Folk Ensemble. When the dancing couples come to a sudden halt, some dancers are crouching near the floor. Others seem frozen in the midst of a spin whose centrifugal force has been arrested.

Only a moment before, it seemed as if the party would go on forever. But the members of this troupe, which opened a string of local appearances on Friday, at the McCarter Theatre, in Princeton, know time is their enemy.

The folk traditions of Hungary, which flowered for a thousand years in remote villages, are dying out as modern communications bring the world closer together. Kept alive by ethnographers and aficionados, they represent a precious legacy.

These exquisite dances seem so sturdy. They are as lusty as the young men, who stamp the floor, bring their boots together sharply in a leap and slap their thighs with bravado. Yet they are as fragile as a way of life that can be abandoned from one moment to the next. With their eerie tableaux, the dancers of the Hungarian State Folk Ensemble make us aware that we are witnessing history.

The dancers appear dressed in a variety of costumes, patiently embroidered by hand with gorgeous designs. As gypsy violinists István Pál and Ferenc Radics play faster and faster, however, the members of the musical ensemble gathered around the cimbalom (a Hungarian dulcimer) abandon themselves to frenzy on a mad rush to oblivion.

The end will not come tomorrow -- not if company director Gábor Mihályi has anything to say about it. For the current tour, he has arranged a delightful suite of dances and music representing various regions and particularities, and has placed the show in a clever, modern framework.

Computer graphics compensate for the simple purity of the dances themselves. Only one dance, "Shepherds," has what might be called a narrative, wherein two male dancers spar with staves and a woman skips dangerously between them.

At the outset, we seem to see a hand painting the backdrop, using fingers to create the rough symbol of an eye, the sun and a bird. These dun-colored pictures and the photograph of an old country road resemble woodblock prints. Later, the backdrop displays a latticework filled with the silhouettes of dancers who come alive.

Virtuosity is a natural component of folk-dancing -- from the speed with which the men waggle their feet, the leg turning in and twisting, to the racing circle of women with their arms entwined behind them. So the choreographer doesn't really need to arrange the dancers in theatrical patterns like a ballet divertissement.

When dancing couples fill the stage, they come close enough to jostle yet instead they slip past one another with unconscious ease. Everyone is so attuned to the rhythm and the style of these dances, that their movements always seem natural even while their bodies remain strictly encoded.

They could dance the Csárdás in their sleep; and, indeed, this performance resembles a fantastic dream filled with sentiment and wonder.

Before returning to the Old Country, the Hungarian State Folk Ensemble will stop at the State Theatre, New Brunswick, March 22; Raritan Valley Community College, March 24; the Community Theatre, Morristown, March 29; and the New Jersey Performing Arts Center, in Newark, March 30.

ROBERT JOHNSON