National Polish Dances Taught on YouTube
According to popular belief, you could spot the best dancer by his ability to dance a vigorous oberek with a glass of water on his head.
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You just need to find your rhythm and use your imagination,
advises Piotr Zgorzelski – a teacher of traditional dance and the mastermind behind Poland's first internet dance academy.
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Photo: Maciej Biłas / courtesy of Taniec Tradycyjny.pl
In a conversation with Culture.pl, Zgorzelski touted:
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Dance is an excuse for us to meet, it's a vortex which sucks everyone into being together. In the olden days, they used to carry the wardrobes, beds, tables out of the room and spin around to live music played by rural musicians for two hours. We are going back to those traditions. On the ‘Taniec Tradycyjny PL / Traditional Dances PL’ YouTube channel, for your enjoyment, we teach a beautiful, simple, authentic dance with non-stylised movements. After all, anyone can dance – all you need is to find the rhythm, use your imagination and imagine you have a rushing stream at your feet and you are trying to jump from rock to rock. Once we know how to do the ‘oberek’-style jump, you just grab your partner by the shoulder and start spinning: evenly, sliding back and forth, swaying from side to side.
You can view the Taniec Tradycyjny PL / Traditional Dances PL YouTube channel here.
Spinning around! Dancing dervishes & sleeping kujawiaks
This is how you dance the oberek – a dance which, due to its dynamic and vehement nature, is also called obertas, or ober, and an array of other Polish names which refer to its wrapping, tipping and wringing moves (zawijany, przewracany and wyrywas). Alongside the mazurka, polonaise, and kujawiak, the oberek is among the most popular Polish national folk dances.
It probably looked something like this: one of the dancers went in front of the band to sing a short song. People started slowly walking around the room, speeding up their step until they were actually spinning. Suddenly – a halt, a change of direction, unexpected commotion and an atmosphere of cheerfulness.
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It's about remembering that I am not there for myself. I'm there for my partner and the other participants, and they are there for me too. Everything is spinning: you, your partner and all the couples around. It's an ecstatic dance of whirling dervishes, the only difference is that here we have couples. There is no such thing anywhere else in Europe. It's our language, the telling of our history,
Zgorzelski adds in an interview for the magazine Zwierciadło (Mirror).
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Photo: Maciej Biłas / courtesy of Taniec Tradycyjny PL
Another example: the wild dyna and drabant dances. Strongly resembling the contra-dance, danced by four couples placed crosswise, the dyna was usually danced towards the end of the evening when all the dances had already been tired out, but the desire to dance was still strong. Sometimes, as Professor Lange writes in his book on the topic, out of hurry, you could forget the steps.
When the tempo was too fast, amongst laughs and shouts, the dancing threesome would fall apart. That was the signal to start the next dance – the peaceful, ever-so-romantic, slow walking dance with a slight turn and stomp from time to time – the kujawiak. It is said to be like the Kujawy region's landscape, wide and peaceful. The dance movements are slow, sliding; the couples sway and gently turn.
A polka from the Czech Republic
Popular in the 19th century in Europe (especially in the Czech Republic, Germany, Italy and Poland), the polka says something entirely different about Polish history and temper. Composed by the likes of Stanisław Moniuszko, Igor Stravinsky, Pyotr Tchaikovsky and Dmitri Shostakovich – and as few people know, actually originating from the Czech Republic – the dance owes its name to the November Uprising insurgents and the Polish songstress Esmeralda.
The festive and glamorous polonaise, on the other hand, is characterised by its grace and elegance. Before it became an integral part of court ceremonies and royal balls, it was danced, or more accurately, slowly danced, by peasants as well. It became a national symbol thanks to the world famous, masterful stylisations of Fryderyk Chopin. Though the list does not here, our review of the most important Polish dances is completed with the krakowiak, a dance to toddle, pass by and pursue.
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Photo: Maciej Biłas / courtesy of Taniec Tradycyjny PL
Enough with the theory – it's time to try it out. Since Piotr Zgorzelski's workshops are consistently booked up, he came up with the idea of the YouTube channel, which shows not only instructional videos with the steps but additional material that sheds light on the historical and social aspects of the dances. An additional 100 videos and online dance classes are planned for the next four to five years.
The virtual lessons can be followed up with participation in dance events organised by the creators of the YouTube channel: dance evenings called potańcówki or so-called ‘dechy’ (literally floorboards), popular before the war in Warsaw. Thanks to Zgorzelski and other proponents of urban and rural folklore, these traditions stand a chance of becoming popular once again. Zgorzelski explains:
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Potańcówki used to take place in parks and the River Vistula's beaches. There was a small orchestra and everyone danced: the old and the young, the rich and the poor. The tradition got lost in the grey reality of the People's Republic of Poland.
To find the roots of Polish dances, Piotr Zgorzelski ventured through the Andes:
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I used to play Andean music. But I quickly understood that I'm not Indian. I was inspired by renowned proponents of folklore – Professor Andrzej Bieńkowski, a painter, documentalist of rural art and author of literary portraits of folk musicians; Janusz Prusinowski, the musician; and the ethnomusicologist Professor Piotr Dahlig – to search for the roots of culture.
The Taniec Tradycyjny PL / Traditional Dance PL project is financed by the Ministry of Culture and Fundacja Niepodległośc.
Originally written in Polish by Anna Legierska; translated by Mai Jones, Feb 2014
Sources: 'O Istocie Tańca i Jego Przejawach w Kulturze' by R. Lange (Poznań: Rytmos, 2005), 'Zwierciadło', own materials, Warsaw Rising Museum, www.USC.edu
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