Cultural Proof #4: Hungarian Folk Dancing

On Tuesday of this week, I attended a traditional Hungarian dance class. If I'm being honest, it was a kind of bumpy experience. However, I am really glad that I got out of my comfort zone.

The class was held in the ballroom of a dorm just outside of my campus, and it was run by the University's dance team. I was going to be joined by my roommate, but she had a last minute project to finish. I was really looking forward to having a friend to look ridiculous with me, but I understood why she was so stressed about her assignments. So, in spite of my anxiety, I got on the tram by myself, and headed across the Danube to campus.

Inside, everyone was speaking Hungarian. I probably shouldn't be shocked by this, but so far most of the student events that I have been attending have been tailored for international students. The room was full of students and also older community members who came out for the night of traditional music and dancing.

I sat down next to some students in matching dance-club t-shirts and we got to talking a little. They were telling me about the Hungarian tongue twister:

Te tetted e tettetett tettet? Te tettetett tettek tettese, te!

Did you do this pretended act? You, doer of pretended acts, you!

(I found the translation on this website: http://www.alphadictionary.com/fun/tongue-twisters/hungarian_tongue_twisters.html)

I told them that my tram stop was a tongue twister (Harmisketesek Tere!!) and they laughed as they tried to teach me to pronounce it. I asked them more about the Hungarian dancing, and they told me that Hungarian folk dance is a very broad style of dance. Even in Transylvania, which is not technically part of Hungary anymore, there is a kind of Hungarian dance specific to each village.

Before we knew it the dancing lesson began, and one of the students I was talking with grabbed me as a partner. We switched partners throughout the lesson, some of them spoke absolutely no English, which made it difficult even to say hello. Soon the instructor came to the center of circle. He was a short and athletic looking man, and he commanded the room. I'm pretty sure he was hilarious because people kept laughing at what he was saying. We began just stepping back and forth, and then we jumped very quickly to spinning, turning and dancing in a couple. 

The dance was made of soft steps and stomps, and involved a lot of spinning around. I learned very quickly that it was going to be a lot harder than I originally thought! I kept trying to watch the instructor and dance with my partner, which was impossible to do at the same time. I kept going for the wrong direction, and sometimes I even tried to lead my partner around! The more I tried to get better the harder it became, and pretty soon I realized that I wasn't going to get any better if I couldn't relax. 

My last partner was a Hungarian, Information Technology student at the University, and we had been introduced just before the dancing began. To my relief he was just as bIad as me! I had a lot of fun laughing and looking really goofy while trying to follow the instructors. He was trying to do a complicated kicking pattern that the instructor was showing to the men, and I was really happy to have a chance to relax and just take in the complicated steps without having to execute them myself. 

I decided that my brief time as a Hungarian dancer had come to a close when the instructors stopped and the music go much faster. I took a brief video so you guys could see what it looked like! The music was primarily string instruments, and it has a very distinctive Eastern European sound. 

Afterwards I did a little more research on the dance itself. It seems that like other dances around the world, Hungarians originally started dancing for religious festivals, and there was a very famous dance created for funerals. The dancing is also heavily influenced by the Gypsy population here, who came into Hungary after the Turkish invasion. Under the Hapsburgs, traditional folk dance and music lost popularity to the preferred classical and formulaic music (like Mozart, I wrote a little bit about his home in Vienna in the previous blog post). Still, the traditional dances survived in rural Hungary, especially in Transylvania like the other students were telling me before. 

The dancing has survived through history, and through many changes of power. Still it remains uniquely Hungarian, not Austrian, Turkish, German or Russian.) 

I had a lot of fun trying my hand at traditional folk dances! I also learned that I have a long way to go before I will be able to dance well at full tempo!