The History Of Dance - Gipsy, Hungarian, Bohemian, Russian, And Polish Dances

By Lilly Grove

Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating back to the 1900s and before, are now extremely scarce and increasingly expensive. We are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Read Books Ltd.
• Release date: Jun 14, 2011
• ISBN: 9781446549551

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GIPSY, HUNGARIAN, BOHEMIAN, RUSSIAN, AND POLISH DANCES

GIPSIES

EXCEPT that both are without a fatherland, there seems very little similarity between the Hebrews, a rich, refined, and musical nation, and those hearthless wanderers, poor and uncultivated, the Gipsies. Liszt, in his book on the music of the Bohemians, points out that, during their dispersion and persecution, the Hebrews retained their individuality by living under strictest subjection to antique rule and law: the gipsies, on the other hand, have vindicated their peculiar character by irreclaimable lawlessness. While the Hebrews have a language and a book, the tongue of the gipsies is preserved only in a few folk tales and rude songs. These races, however, so widely separated in sentiment, owe to their common Oriental origin a love of music and dance that are in touch with the beginnings of art.

The mystic or legendary witch dance may claim a few words; thence it will be necessary to glance at the gipsy dances of Russia, Hungary, Transylvania, Italy, Spain, England, Scotland, America, and France.

I am indebted to a correspondent for some notes on the kind of erotic dancing which was practised from the earliest times in the East, and even in Europe, by a class of women who, if not absolutely proved to be gipsies, had at any rate many points of resemblance with them. Thus, the ‘Syrian girl who haunts the taverns round,’ described by Virgil, suggests the Syrian and Egyptian dancer, who is of Indo-Persian, that is to say of Luri, or gipsy origin. Spanish dancing girls of old times were conjectured to have come from this universal Hindoo-Romany stock. It would be too much to say that all the deliberately cultivated profligate dancing of the world is of Indo-Persian or gipsy origin, but it is curious to note that the dances of Persia are said to have been originated by ten thousand gipsies sent from India. The description by Delancre of the ancient—shall we say legendary?—dances of the Persian girls pictures that exercise as nothing less than a Witches’ Sabbat. They were taught the art by devils, who danced among them in the forms of goats or other animals. The dances were of three kinds, and ‘were very wild and rude,’ Delancre somewhat unnecessarily says.

Modern gipsy dances in Russia possess a superficial resemblance to these grotesque and rude diversions. The song suggests the dance; old wrinkled beldames, gradually animated by rum, take part with the youthful gipsies, ‘jumping and whirling about in more and more rapid rotation, then, uniting in one compact mass, a final gyratory movement is made, and