Young urbanites help revive Polish folk dance
WARSAW — Couples spin to the lively tempo of Poland’s mazurka folk dance in scenes reminiscent of peasant life from centuries past.
To rhythmic violin and accordion, they could almost be back in the simple cottages of Mazovia, the region around the Polish capital, Warsaw, for which the dance and music were named.
Taken across Europe and beyond by Polish soldiers and migrants nearly 200 years ago, the traditional mazurka evolved before almost vanishing.
But now it is making a comeback and not only in Poland, putting a spring in the step of urban youngsters and getting pulses racing and hearts pumping.
“It was forgotten, but when I see all these young people who come to learn from me, I forget I’m old,” says fiddle player Jan Kmita, 83, one of the last surviving masters of the mazurka.
He has spent hours teaching youngsters the up-tempo rhythms and steps at workshops in Warsaw.
The Polish mazurka, also known as the mazur, mazurek or oberek, “doesn’t really have much to do with the ones we know in France”, says Nicolas Roche, a French violinist keen to learn from Kmita.
“It has a very specific sound, rhythmic subtleties and a manner of conveying rhythm that is completely different, with slowdowns, accelerations, a whole swing, a feeling that’s very different,” Roche says.
Choreographer Piotr Zgorzelski, who specializes in Polish folk dances, describes the dance steps of Polish mazurka as “minimalist, with no jumps”.
Couples stay very close, twirling “like a whirling dervish, but they do it together . ... A good dancer can even spin with a full glass on their head without spilling a drop”, he says.
Zgorzelski also says that he had seen interest in mazurkas burgeon among young urbanites keen to reconnect with the rural origins of their ancestors.
Among the mazurka’s ardent new fans, Agata Kotlicka, a 27-year-old professional speech therapist, says: “We enter a trance, we can forget ourselves, we don’t need alcohol to feel it.”
Self-taught Kmita received his first violin at age six and played his first wedding when he was 12.
Forgotten over the years, his talent was rediscovered by a group of folk enthusiasts, who have spent 30 years in a quest to find and preserve traditional music.
Janusz Prusinowski, a 50-year-old singer and multi-instrumentalist, is one of those who stumbled across Kmita nearly three decades ago.
“We came across these old musicians. It was like discovering Atlantis, a Poland doomed to disappear,” he says, of his first encounters with elderly mazurka masters.
It turned out that “Poland wasn’t a land of musical illiterates but a people able to speak with an original musical language that (Frederic) Chopin himself drew on”, says Prusinowski.