Kurt Vonnegut
Today's post is a continuation of the series "Most Balkan Popular Folk Dances on Zoom."
Usually for dances to be popular on Zoom, the footwork has to be adapted to fit in a smaller space because most people dance in their living rooms. Living rooms are not the only place where I've seen dancers: they also perform in kitchens and garages. One woman I saw had a really small kitchen and she did the fast Romanian dance Vulpita. She compressed it to fit in the space.
The series continues. I've spent a good part of the summer participating in Zoom dances. There is usually at least one for every day of the week. Most take place in the evening, and the ones that work best for me are on the East Coast. I usually stay at the dance meetings until about 10 p.m. or so. When we danced in person that was the time the dances ended.
Video #1 is Dedo Mili Dedo (the song for this is also known as Dedo Mili Zlatni). There is no English translation but from what I got from Google Translate the song describes an elderly couple going about their daily routine (Dedo means grandpa in Macedonian). The group in the video is the Bonding Folkdance Dance Class from Taiwan. They have many videos on YouTube. I wonder if they have resumed in person dancing in Taiwan yet. Their Covid stats are very low. I'm sure these days if they do get together they dance in small groups and wear masks.
There is no way we could do that in the United States; the numbers are too high.
The dance Lesi is also very popular on Zoom. The song for it also appears in the film Kapetan Lesi from the year 1960. According to the YouTube comments, the song was created in 1930 by the Albanian composer Tish Daija and originally titled Po Vijne Krushqit Maleve.
Corlu Aroman is a dance from Dobrogea, in Romania. According to the notes, the dance is from the Macedonian ethnic group in Romania. Corlu is another name for hora; Aroman is another name for people of Romanian origin who live outside Romania. They settled in a number of Balkan countries: Bulgaria, Serbia, Macedonia, and Greece among others. They are also known as Vlachs and speak a language related to Romanian.
The article in the link mentions "not to be confused with Armenians or Romanians." Readers of my blog know how I like to write about confusion: are you confused yet?
The music sounds neither Macedonian nor Romanian, except for the gaida (bagpipe) in the introduction.
If you enjoyed this you may also like:
Most Popular Balkan Dances on Zoom: Part Three (links to the others in the series)
Vlach Dances From Bulgaria and Serbia
Age is an Issue of Mind over Matter: Old People in Balkan Folk Songs
Dances from Oltenia: Part Two
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
