Folk Dancing

Yesterday afternoon, I went to Daugavpils' cultural center Vienības Nams (Unity House) to watch a performance of Latvian folk dance. I was joined by Svetlana, a Russian woman I met at the USA Information Center in town. She is studying English, and for a year's study has made remarkable progress. She also makes a mean apple cake which she brings to English classes, but that does not influence my assessment of her ability at all . . .

I'll have more to say about Unity House, but for now I'll discuss folk dance. Like folk music, folk dance has a really popular following in Latvia, both people watching it and people performing it. Like folk music, one of its appeals is that anybody can do it; the steps are not so difficult that it would be out the reach of someone with a moderate sense of rhythm. At the same time, the dancers yesterday had clearly practiced and done so for a while because they were impressive. As you might expect, the younger the dancer, the more energetic the kicks and the more complicated the fancy footwork. Even so, you could tell that these were not professionally trained dancers, though they were very polished. They reminded me of swing dancers in the United States, people who saw the folk dancing, thought it looked like a lot of fun (I sure did), and decided to join a troupe and learn how to do it. I may have to ask my acquaintance Uģis, who dances with a troupe, how I could learn some of the basics.

I was also impressed by the range of age groups onstage yesterday. Several troupes were made up of young kids, several of teenagers or young adults, and several of older dancers -- probably my age and up. Apparently folk dancing is an equal opportunity activity here. It reminded me a bit of the range of people that you see at a typical contra dance in Maine. Everybody can dance, so everybody does dance. And, as I have written in a previous post, the music is really infectious.

The troupes were joined by a troupe from Lithuania, or at least I think they came from there. They may have been local, but they were decked out in traditional Lithuanian costumes, and I could tell this by the ribbons they wore in the colors of the Lithuanian flag. (I can now identify the national flags of Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, and Belarus.) There was a Russian troupe and a Polish troupe as well that I think were local, as Daugavpils has a large Russian population and a smaller but significant Polish population. And there was a group of women musicians, I think from Lithuania as well, who played folk instruments that looked and sounded like the central European cousin of a dulcimer.

Here's one of the troupes, and then there's a photo of the ubiquitous group shot at the end, sort of like a Scottish gathering of the clan:

I am totally taken with traditional Latvian dress. The women's skirts are full and twirl beautifully when a dancer spins, and the men's long jacket -- sort of a cross between a sportcoat and a tunic, with an intricately embroidered belt -- looks so practical that I can't imagine why it ever disappeared as an everyday garment in the first place. Furthermore, the great asset of this dress is that, regardless of the wearer's physical shape, everybody looks really good in it.

Next week: the Daugavpils Chamber Orchestra. There wasn't a lot going on when I arrived in Daugavpils, but now it's a feast of cool events.