Hungarian Heritage House

Hungarian State Folk Ensemble thrills PAC crowd with first-rate show 

The Current, February 11, 2007

It is always a treat when Dance St. Louis brings one of its first-rate performances to the Touhill stage.

The Touhill Performing Arts Center is a beautiful venue and few programs highlight that as well as Dance St. Louis' performances.

Dance St. Louis brought the Budapest-based Hungarian State Folk Ensemble to the Touhill on Feb. 9 and 10. The Hungarian State Folk Ensemble, established in 1951 to preserve ancient folk dances, is considered one the world's greatest folk dance groups.

The performance showcased the dances from across the country. This included the peoples around Europe's largest river, the Danube, which bisects present-day Hungary, to the central, rolling plains of the country, to the Carpathian Mountains and isolated, mountainous Transylvania, which was traditionally part of Hungary but is now part of Romania.

Hungarian dances and culture were influenced by its peoples and history, its founding in the Middle Ages by the Magyar peoples who traveled from the East, the Gypsy minority that originated in India, its history in repelling the Mongol invasion, conquests by the Ottoman Turks and then by Austria.

With authentic dances, folk costumes and music, the troupe of dancers and musicians took to the bare stage with a backdrop of stylized, modern art projected images that included film of the Hungarian countryside, a hand tracing sand artwork or shadows of dancers. The visual effect was both evocative of the past and contemporary.

A group of musicians playing violin, drum, bagpipes and other traditional instruments added to the total image of the Hungarian culture. The clarinet-like tarogato and the hit-gardon, a stringed instrument carved from a tree trunk and played percussively, complemented the dancers.

The first half of the program, which was titled "From Father To Son," featured a black and white, with an occasion splash of red, color scheme of both the backdrop and the dancers' costumes.

Black and white stills of a winding dirt road on an open plain, mountain-ringed valleys and black and white close-up footage of a flowing river created images of the physical lay of the land, a backdrop for dances that looked both forward and back in time.

The visual scheme for the second half, "Our Treasures," shifted to brilliant color, for both the costumes and the backdrop images.

The dancers performed a series of group and solo dances, couples dances and dances for men or women. Each piece moved smoothly into the next without a pause, as dancers ran on or off stage, sometimes after a quick costume change.

Hungarian dances from a number of areas were presented but nearly all the dances showcased the performers' athleticism. The dances were often staged as if they were being performed around a village square or a campfire. Musicians played in a tight grouping on stage, and other dancers looking on, clapping and calling out, as soloists danced.

Most were high energy, high kicking, stomping dances, and often involving fancier legwork than any "Riverdance," but with leg and boot-slapping tossed in.

The dancers' movements were often a high-speed, dizzying blur of hip-twisting, back-kicking, high-stepping dances.

Some dances made one think of Cossack dances and other East European high-jumping dances, while other dances showed more German or Tyrolean elements from the Alps on the western border of Hungary.

Gypsy dances were represented as well, as the Gypsies, or Roma, had a heavy influence on Hungarian national culture.

Among the dances were men's military recruiting dances called Verbunk. Verbunk are quick, athletically stunning dances that were performed at parties in the 18th century as a way to recruit young men into the military life.

These dances involve jumping, stamping, kicking, and boot-slapping in complex rhythms, at a break-neck speed. The dancers wore spurs on their boots for some of these dances, creating a sound akin to tap-dance. For other dances, clapping was part of the mix.

The dances were inspired by ancient and medieval war dances, and preserved by isolated shepherds, which were also featured in the evening's presentation. While the shepherd dances are now performed with a staff, they were originally done with swords.

Women's dances included the circle dance, which trace back to ancient Greece. One of the most striking dances was the bottle dance, a vigorous woman's dance from the Sarkoz region of Western Hungary, performed with a bottle of red liquid balanced on the dancer's head,.

The couple's dances included Hungary's national dance, the Czardas. Numerous variations of this fast-paced, whirling 19th century ballroom dance are derived from peasant dances of the 16th and 17th centuries.

The program opened and closed with a musical homage to Hungarian composer Bela Bartok, who was one of the founders of ethnomusicology, the study of music in its cultural context, and who collected peasant songs and folk music from across Eastern Europe.

The program as a whole presented a lively and entrancing evening and a peek at the vibrant culture of Hungary.

Cate Marquis