A Tribute to Sunni Bloland

Always keep your smile. That's how I explain my long life. Jeanne Calment

Sunni Bloland, a teacher of many popular Romanian folk dances passed away on April 5th 2025 at 98 years old. Her birth name was Frances Lober. 

I have seen videos of her performing and teaching and the name "Sunni" fitted her outgoing and dynamic personality.  This is an old video from the 1970's with her dancing in a miniskirt!

 Dance # 1 is Boereascǎ . The dance is named after the landlords or Boyars.  They were highly ranked people in the feudal nobility in Eastern Europe.

The region is Oltenia. Many of the dances she taught were from this region in southwest Romania. This one is relatively slow. 

       

Dance #2 is more typical of dances from Oltenia. This is Vulpiuta (translates to "little fox.")

Vulpiuta is a dance that you do when you want a serious aerobic workout in under two minutes.

   

Dance #3 is from the Alunelul family of dances, also from Oltenia. This one is Alunelul de la Bailesti. Unfortunately, the video is only one minute long. (The uncut music is a little over two minutes).  A folk dance club in China posted the video. I looked up their webpage, used Google Translate, and it seems to be outdated.  

Bailesti is a town in the county of Dolj.

   

Dance #4, popular in our group is Alunelul Batut. It's time to beat up the hazelnuts! The stamping gives the dance its name.    

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That back basket "torture hold" is a bit awkward, so this dance is best done in short lines. It speeds up as it progresses.

 

 Dance # 5 is Trei Pazeste Batrinesc. This is one of a family of dances with Trei Pazeste in the name. "Batrinesc" loosely translates to ancient in Romanian. Maybe this was the original Trei Pazeste. 

In Oltenia there seems to be many dances with similar names; they can be told apart by the description after the name.  It's usually the name of a city, town, or region.

       

 

Dance #6 is a video with music (but no dancing). The music is from a dance Sunni Bloland taught (not from Oltenia): Hora Mare Modolveneasca.  The region in northern Romania is known as Moldova (not to be confused with the country with the same name). To avoid confusion, I refer to this area as Bukovina.

  

If you enjoyed this you may also like:

Dances from Oltenia Part Seven (links to previous posts in the series).  You will find a number of dances Sunni Bloland taught in these posts.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.