4. The Waltz at Some Central European Courts

Chapter Four by Egil Bakka deals with round dancing at a number of European courts. This chapter is intended to link the other case studies in the book to the practices and discourses of larger countries which, although not the focus of this collection, are significant in the overall history of how round dances were received even at the top level.

10. Waltzing Through Europe

Torp (Germany) is the only author who focuses on music. He examines how local newspapers in the Hamburg region can throw light on the concert tours of the Viennese composer Johann Strauss the Elder in the 1830s. Strauss was known as the King of the Waltz, and Torp investigates how new music spread during this period, arguing that the dissemination of music also has relevance for dance.

11. Continuity and Reinvention

Kapper (Estonia) focuses mainly on the twentieth century, basing her discussion on information from folk dance collectors and researchers connected to the folk-dance movement. She surveys round dance forms described or referred to as part of this information, and discusses the relationship between round dances and other dances in a local community, particularly if that community was known as a stronghold of traditional dance. She also refers in brief to the folk-dance movement. In this way, she includes two of the groups mentioned above: the ‘dancing crowds’ and the folk dancers, and discusses the place round dancing has within each.

12. The Ban on Round Dances 1917–1957

Bakka (Norway), discusses, and contextualises, the banning of round dances by one of Norway’s largest youth movements for about forty years from 1917. He shows how the three popular movements that built assembly houses had conflicting attitudes towards social dancing, and dealt with it in different ways. The Liberal Youth Movement, which imposed the ban, gave a variety of reasons, first among them being that it destroyed interest in popular enlightenment, which was the main aim of the movement. The movement also did not consider round dances to be folk dances, and therefore held them to be of less national and educational value. However, only the lay Christians strongly rejected round dances as having a sinful and morally corrupting effect.

15. A Twenty-First Century Resurrection

Zebek (Croatia) surveys and contextualises the place of round dances, and particularly the Polka, in the twentieth-century Croatia. He shows how the folk-dance movement largely ignored or even rejected the round dances as new and foreign. He then portrays the revival of a ‘shaking’ kind of Polka that has a history in the region, but only rose in popularity as late as the twenty-first century. The peculiar aspect of the revival is that it seems to have arisen independently of the folk-dance movement, among the ‘dancing crowds’.

7. Reception of Nineteenth-Century Couple Dances in Hungary

Felföldi (Hungary) offers a broad survey of the Hungarian dance repertoire as it stood when the round dances began to spread into Hungary from neighbouring countries, and how they were met as a foreign influence that the ethnochoreologists did not engage with. He continues by presenting a catalogue that samples the variety of the rich Hungarian sources, which are currently unavailable in other languages. Describing the sociocultural and political context that nourished the substantial resistance to round dances in Hungary, Felföldi discusses the appearance of Csárdás as an alternative national dance. It has a clear similarity to the round dances, as opposed to the alternatives arising in other countries, and Felföldi discusses these similarities and differences, and the context from which the dance arose.

5. The Polka as a Czech National Symbol

Stavělová (Czech Republic) discusses how the Polka was established as a Czech national symbol during the middle of the nineteenth century. She analyses a large number of sources that discuss the Polka, tracing the dance from its appearance in Czech national circles in the 1830s to its success in Paris in the 1840s. She discusses its consolidation as a Czech symbol through the work of music composers such as Bedřich Smetana in the second part of the century, arguing that it was first and foremost the name of the dance that carried political meaning: Polka as a cultural product fulfilled this goal to a lesser extent. In this way, Stavělová offers a detailed discussion of how the myth of the Polka became a significant aspect of Czech national culture.

14. Nostalgia as a Perspective on Past Dance Culture in Finland

Saarikoski (Finland) bases the core of her article on ethnological archive material produced in the course of an inquiry in 1991 about the dancing on so-called pavilions or at outdoor dancing venues in the middle of the twentieth century. Accounts of the post-World-War-II period predominate, and Saarikoski finds nostalgia to be the primary attitude displayed as elderly people look back on their youth and happy memories of dancing. The dance repertoire was a mix of round dances and African-American-derived dances, and the distinction between the styles did not seem to be important to the dancers.

9. Dancing and Politics in Croatia

Katarinčić and Niemčić (Croatia) portray the situation around 1830 when round dances arrived in Croatian cities and started to appear in the source material. They demonstrate the tension between national loyalties and the attraction of the fashionable dances imported from abroad, and how solutions were found to satisfy and combine the two streams of influence through the creation of the Salonsko Kolo. This dance is performed by couples forming large and complex formations reminiscent of the Polonaise, the Mazurka or contra dances. Katarinčić and Niemčić‘s article concludes with a discussion of the convoluted paths of this dance through history into the twentieth century, including how it moves back and forth between first and second existence, and how it also survives among diasporic communities of Croatians.