Bit­ter­sweet

Dance to Transylvanian folk music

This Transylvanian Anthology of the Hungarian State Folk Ensemble is one of the products of a lengthy artistic process that aims to examine the relevance and significance of our traditional culture in present-day life. This dramatic performance interprets folklore in a contemporary manner and mixes it boldly with modern dramatic forms.

The authors wish this poetry of dance to be a brief but rich summary of the immense Transylvanian folk dance and its treasury of folk music. Bittesweet is a drama of contrasts: it counterpoints the tragic and the comic, the joy and the sorrow, life and death, confronting the audience with the crucial questions of how to maintain our inherited values in an increasingly globalised society. The performance seeks an answer to the eternal dilemmas of leaving our homeland and our past behind without losing contact with it entirely. It seeks a means of preserving our native cultural community that in turn preserves our identity in the chaotic multiplicity of 21st-century life.