A few weeks ago I visited a dance group in another city. They danced Walenki and I asked the dance leader if he had read the latest article about it on TANZRICHTUNG. Yes, he said, but that didn’t matter to them because they were primarily interested in the fun.

This small side note nicely illustrates two common threads running through our work for this Internet magazine: on the one hand our effort to provide evidence-based, or at least guaranteed, correct information about our dances, and, on the other hand, the often received critical responses to our effort, complaining that we are taking away the „fun“ out of dancing. The latter, of course, is nonsense.

We only care about information and non-information, false claims and fake news about folklore dances, which, unfortunately, leads to confusion for many and is still widespread (and cannot be remedied by our TANZRICHTUNG). As I said, we have often written about this. See for example: Joc de leagăne: „ein alter, traditioneller Tanz“, Ethnomusik: Tirili und Tralala!, Die Tradition im Blick – spaßfreie Zone?, Misirlou, Otkoga etc.

We have already mentioned the basic, comprehensive paper on this topic by Radboud Koop (1) elsewhere (see above: Joc de leagăne: „ein alter, traditioneller Tanz“). It has now been published in book form; we would like to warmly recommend it to our interested readers.

Based on the observation that the dances danced in the recreational dance groups are clearly different from those common in the places of origin, Radboud Koop has investigated the processes associated with the transfer of the „original“ folk dances to the repertoire of the recreational dance scene. With it

„one discovers that this image of ‚traditional‚ dances is not really accurate, rather it becomes clear that the path from the ‚village‘ to the recreational dance group constitutes many stages and layers, in which ‚agents‘ and their personal choices and influences play a large role, leading to less or more transformation of the dance material. At the same time, many participants in the mainly western, recreational folk dance community, still believe they are doing ‚traditional‘ folk dances.“ (The Myth of Village Source … p. 3)

R.K. examines the phases and agents involved in this process and presents them in detail. Here is his paper: The Myth of Village Source of Recreational Folk Dances.

We are grateful to Radboud Koop for providing us with his paper and invite our readers to participate in the discussion (see below).

(1) Radboud Koop (Delft, The Netherlands): folkdancer, folk dance teacher, member of the study group Ethnochoreology of the International Council for Traditions of Music and Dance, Ljubljana.