Ernő Pesovár: A magyar néptánc története [History of Hungarian folk dance]. Video tape and CD-ROM Budapest, Konkam Studio©, 2000. (Also published in book format in 2003).  Zoltán Karácsony

In 1997 Hungarian Television presented a series called Nézd a tánc nemeit (A look at [various] types of dances) directed by László Kovács, the purpose of which was to popularize Hungarian folk dance. In this program, Ernő Pesovár, a renowned choreographer and expert on folk dances, reviewed the historical development of the major types of Hungarian dances. In 2000 the ten episodes of this series were published by the Konkam Studio© on video tape, with an accompanying CD-ROM. Ernő Pesovár’s approach to folk dance traditions is a cultural- historical one, according to which “[the tradition of] folk dances is actually nothing other than the totality of dances and dance styles, which are rooted in different historical periods, but which coexist in tradition.” In his opinion, the history of Hungarian culture would be incomplete without an appropriate understanding of our dance traditions. Folk dances capture and reflect the views and forms of behavior of different historical periods. They have developed together with European trends in dancing, and thus the study of them is crucial for comparative cultural history in general.

When introducing the dances in the films, the commentator consistently points out parallels in the history of dancing in Hungary and abroad. He explains the iconographical representation of the dances, illustrating different variants in a large number of dance sequences. For the illustrative material the series producers relied on the recordings of the folk dance archives of the Institute of Musicology of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, as well as those of the television series Magyarországi néptáncok (Folk dances of Hungary), which was produced by Hungarian Television in 1974. The majority of the clips are high quality recordings with sound, enjoyable also for a lay audience. Each of the ten episodes presents a particular type of Hungarian folk dance, introducing its most important characteristics and regional variants. We learn about the so-called dances of skillfulness, which are the remnants of representational versions of medieval weapon dances. Over the generations, what were originally sharp instruments in these dances have been exchanged for more harmless objects (sticks, bottles, kerchiefs, or caps). From Antiquity we find similar dances performed with sticks, which are late and wide-spread descendants of martial dances, the martial character of which is most dominant in variants preserved among the Gypsies. Jumping dances performed in various formations (solo, in pairs, or in groups of various sizes) belong to the old-style dances of the Carpathian Basin, and most of them resemble dances that survive in territories to the south and east of Hungary (the Balkans, Central Russia, Caucasus). Its more developed version, the legényes (young men’s dance) from Transylvania, is considered as an independent choreographic and musical entity, in which the correspondence of music and dancing is the most intensive, and which has a rich and fully developed system of motifs. The dynamism of Renaissance pair dances did not leave Hungary untouched either, and in more isolated areas (e.g. in Transylvania) such dances have preserved their original structure—including turning while the dancers hold each other tightly, and with the man turning the women under his arm—up to the twentieth century. In the first half of the nineteenth century, these dances developed into the more freely structured, new-style csárdás in the center of the Hungarian-speaking territory. The spread of new men’s dances, which resulted from a gradual transformation of the slower legényes, was facilitated by the eighteenth-century practice of recruiting soldiers with dances. This practice also played a major role in the development of verbunkos (recruiting) round dances with their regulated structures. In our largely improvised, solo recruiting dances, the correspondence between music and dancing is less perfect than in the legényes, and with the augmentation of the accompanying music the dance motifs have gradually become more individualistic.

The CD-ROM version embraces the possibilities of a multimedia presentation. Besides illustrations of the dances and their iconography, it includes a map, a bibliography, a list of authors, a glossary of important terms and phrases, and an index of dances, complete with a register indicating their places of origin and the names of the collectors.