15. a Twenty-First Century Resurrection: the Potresujka, the Croatian Polka Tremblante Tvrtko Zebec
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WALTZING THROUGH EUROPE B ALTZING HROUGH UROPE Attitudes towards Couple Dances in the AKKA W T E Long Nineteenth-Century Attitudes towards Couple Dances in the Long Nineteenth-Century EDITED BY EGIL BAKKA, THERESA JILL BUCKLAND, al. et HELENA SAARIKOSKI AND ANNE VON BIBRA WHARTON From ‘folk devils’ to ballroom dancers, this volume explores the changing recep� on of fashionable couple dances in Europe from the eighteenth century onwards. A refreshing interven� on in dance studies, this book brings together elements of historiography, cultural memory, folklore, and dance across compara� vely narrow but W markedly heterogeneous locali� es. Rooted in inves� ga� ons of o� en newly discovered primary sources, the essays aff ord many opportuni� es to compare sociocultural and ALTZING poli� cal reac� ons to the arrival and prac� ce of popular rota� ng couple dances, such as the Waltz and the Polka. Leading contributors provide a transna� onal and aff ec� ve lens onto strikingly diverse topics, ranging from the evolu� on of roman� c couple dances in Croa� a, and Strauss’s visits to Hamburg and Altona in the 1830s, to dance as a tool of T cultural preserva� on and expression in twen� eth-century Finland. HROUGH Waltzing Through Europe creates openings for fresh collabora� ons in dance historiography and cultural history across fi elds and genres. It is essen� al reading for researchers of dance in central and northern Europe, while also appealing to the general reader who wants to learn more about the vibrant histories of these familiar dance forms. E As with all Open Book publica� ons, this en� re book is available to read for free on the UROPE publisher’s website. Printed and digital edi� ons, together with supplementary digital material, can also be found at www.openbookpublishers.com Cover image: A drunken scene in a dancing hall with a sly customer eyeing a young girl. Coloured etching by G. Cruikshank, 1848, aft er himself. Wellcome Collecti on, CC BY. Cover design: Anna Gatti book eebook and OA edi� ons also available EGIL BAKKA, THERESA JILL BUCKLAND, OBP HELENA SAARIKOSKI AND ANNE VON BIBRA WHARTON (EDS) https://www.openbookpublishers.com © 2020 Egil Bakka, Theresa Jill Buckland, Helena Saarikoski and Anne von Bibra Wharton. Copyright of individual chapters is maintained by the chapters’ authors. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0). This license allows you to share, copy, distribute and transmit the text; to adapt the text and to make commercial use of the text providing attribution is made to the authors (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). Attribution should include the following information: Egil Bakka, Theresa Jill Buckland, Helena Saarikoski and Anne von Bibra Wharton (eds.), Waltzing Through Europe: Attitudes towards Couple Dances in the Long Nineteenth-Century. Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2020, https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0174 Copyright and permission for reuse of many images included in this publication differ from the above. Copyright and permissions information for images is provided separately in the List of Illustrations. In order to access detailed and updated information on the license, please visit https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0174#copyright Further details about CC BY licenses are available at https://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/4.0/ All external links were active at the time of publication unless otherwise stated and have been archived via the Internet Archive Wayback Machine at https://archive.org/web Updated digital material and resources associated with this volume are available at https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0174#resources Every effort has been made to identify and contact copyright holders and any omission or error will be corrected if notification is made to the publisher. ISBN Paperback: 978-1-78374-732-0 ISBN Hardback: 978-1-78374-733-7 ISBN Digital (PDF): 978-1-78374-734-4 ISBN Digital ebook (epub): 978-1-78374-735-1 ISBN Digital ebook (mobi): 978-1-78374-736-8 ISBN XML: 978-1-78374-737-5 DOI: 10.11647/OBP.0174 Cover image: A Drunken Scene in a Dancing Hall with a Sly Customer Eyeing a Young Girl (1848). Coloured etching by G. Cruikshank, after himself. Wellcome Collection, CC BY 4.0. Cover design: Anna Gatti. 15. A Twenty-First Century Resurrection: The Potresujka, the Croatian Polka Tremblante Tvrtko Zebec This chapter investigates a particular kind of Polka that entered the field of popular culture and generated extraordinary enthusiasm as late as the twenty-first century. The round dances were mostly neglected by ethnographic research on dance during the twentieth century, as we see in several of the chapters in this book (see Chapters Two, Seven, and Eleven) that focus on different countries, and this was also the case for Croatia. Polka dancing was present in Croatia throughout the twentieth century, and from the 1970s it was recognised in some regions as having the value of a traditional dance. From that time and to the present day we see an extraordinary resurrection of popularity for one particular Polka form, the potresujka, in the broader region around and in the city of Rijeka. The portrayal of this resurrection will try to explore several questions about how a dance from the early nineteenth century experiences a revival that is taken up and spread by modern media. Participation in the work of the Sub-Study Group on round dances — nineteenth-century-derived couple dances — is a particularly inspiring undertaking. It has prompted ethnographic dance research that had been neglected in Croatia for some years. Nineteenth-century Central European couple dances were of little interest to Croatian ethnochoreologists for a long period. After the formal shaping of the discipline in Croatia in the early 1950s, Vinko Žganec, Ljelja Taš, and Ivan Ivančan conducted in-depth research into the dances of the © Tvrtko Zebec, CC BY 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0174.15 418 Waltzing Through Europe villagers, which were generally regarded as a reflection of national pride and identity. Such a stance coincided with the dominant theoretical, cultural and historical aims of the ethnology of that time, which resulted largely from the ideological orientation of the Hrvatska seljačka stranka [Croatian Peasant Party]. That political party, like similar examples in Europe, advocated shaping national cultural identity to distinguish the Croats from the uniform, universal, ‘civilisational’ progress that was emerging from Central European urban centres. Seljačka sloga [Peasant Harmony] — the cultural, educational and charitable cooperative, driven by the populist ideology of the Peasant Party — attempted to inspire self-confidence in the peasants, to gradually enlighten them, and to introduce them to national political life. Folklore festivals were mirrors of cultural policy and places for public presentations of recognised national practice. This process was one- sided — from urban to rural, from intelligentsia to peasantry — wherein the aristocracy and intellectuals ‘became aware of and discovered folk traditions and the life of “simple” peoples’.1 As Max P. Baumann further asserts: ‘The outsider ideology of emancipation through literacy and the aesthetisation of old traditions created a new dependency: the subordination to musical practices, aesthetics and performance concepts from the hegemonic culture of the upper classes’.2 Couple dances — the Polka, valcer, the Mazurka, čardaš, šotiš, tango, fokstrot and the like — were not readily accepted at the festivals organised by Peasant Harmony during the late 1930s, since they showed the influence of urban and non-Croatian centres.3 Even when they were later performed at festivals as an exception to the rule, they were not favourably evaluated. The analysis of the repertoires of groups that appeared long after the first Peasant Harmony festivals — at the 1 Max P. Baumann, ‘Folk Music Revival: Concepts between Regression and Emancipation’, The World of Music, 38 (1996), 71–86 (at 72). 2 Baumann, ‘Folk Music Revival’, p. 77. 3 In a similar way, in the 1920s and 1930s in Sweden, the Swedish Foxtrot was the local answer to American Jazz (cf. K. O. Edström, ‘From Schottis to Bonnjazz: Some Remarks on the Construction of Swedishness’, Yearbook for Traditional Music, 31 (1999), 27–41, https://doi.org/10.2307/767971) and manifested resistance to American influence. 15. The Potresujka, the Croatian Polka Tremblante 419 International Folklore Festival in Zagreb (since 1966) — shows that these dances were rarely seen on the stages of festivals right up until the 1980s.4 At the same time, from the end of nineteenth century one could find, parallel with their own tradition, fireman brass bands and tambura and jazz orchestras, as well as dance masters and their schools, especially in the smaller cities. They played music and danced all the European modern dances during dance evenings, events and weddings, but only for fun as a social gathering and not for the stage. The Polka in Croatia The Polka was adopted and accepted, we could say naturalised, in Croatia soon after its appearance in Central European ballrooms and dance salons in the second part of the nineteenth century.5 It was accepted in diverse ways in the different parts of Croatia. We can ascertain just how popular the Polka was by observing the strong criticism levelled against it on the part of traditionalists, who wrote about a craze for the Polka and the Waltz among the youngsters in the north- western part of Croatia in the mid-nineteenth century.6 They describe how these dances are done in mixed pairs in which partners danced very close to each other, and did so with a lot of passionate turns. They also state these new kinds of dances should be fought against, in order to protect and preserve traditional dances and national melodies (see Chapter Nine in this volume).