The Birth of the National Dance
Recruitment Songs, or verbunks, conjure up the Romantic age and national revival in Hungary. Contemporary society created national forms of music and dance through a process of nationwide globalisation. This resulted in a common dance dialect that transcended the different traditions of various regions. During this process, the tastes and fashions of different social strata were unified through the careful mediation of contemporary dance gurus. This performance is a memorial to the development of the national dance and its survival in folk tradition.
In the first part, archaic dance forms – jumping dances, whirling dances, pair dances, and military dances – are shown. These, in turn, were used as source material during the unifying programs of the Romantic Movement. The verbunk, recruitment dance developed from archaic men’s dances, whilst the csárdás developed from the closed, whirling, stooping and cajoling duo dances, which appeared during the 16th and 17th centuries in the Carpathian Basin. Thus, the verbunk and the csárdás are combinations of past forms. The reinterpretation of such forms meant the synthesis of Hungarian dance figures and styles into a form that expressed the Romantic age and the development of national identity in Hungary.
At first, the development of the csárdás signalled the awakening of national identity in the narrower upper levels of society, but later, after the defeat of the Hungarian Revolutionary War in 1848-1849, it stood for the awakening of a much broader social strata: even the word csárdás – from csárda, inn – has its roots in the language of common people. The influence of this dance lives on today in both Hungary and the neighbouring countries. The second part of the show gives us a taste of this variety, showing us the different folk reinterpretations of the former national dance. The most common musical performers of the age were the gypsy bands. The orchestra of the Hungarian State Folk Ensemble plays a dual role: in addition to performing the music accompanying the dances, it also plays independent concert pieces from the period.
