During this period, the Hungarian aristocracy and nobility increasingly spoke German, French was the language of cultivated conversation, Latin continued to be used in state administration, and the bourgeoisie of the important Hungarian towns were often native speakers of German. In the 18th century, the Kingdom of Hungary, which existed within the framework of the Habsburg Empire, was a multinational country in which many nationalities lived together in their own cultural context. Dance Historical Antecedents in the Age of Romanticismįrom the very beginning, the representation of national themes and the form and style of Hungarian folk dances 5 played an important role in the history of Hungarian ballet. Taking these aspects into account, my study seeks to answer the question of why and how the need for a stage work to function as a national representation of Hungarianness emerged in the history of Hungarian ballet. The underlying motivations behind these dance art endeavours could be different, as they could be born in the spirit of modernism or traditionalism, or they could be the manifestation of political-social artistic aspirations, or the two different motivations could overlap. It is in this context that the dance art endeavours of the 19th and 20th centuries in Hungary can be examined, which aimed at staging folk dance culture on the one hand, and at developing a modern language of dance art by using folk dance culture as a source of inspiration on the other. In the case of a mixture of dance languages, especially in dance productions that are the result of a conscious creative process, the interpretation of the symbolic content and message of the dance language elements becomes important.
This meant a move away from the structural, formal, plastic, rhythmic, motivic and dynamic fields of dance research, or more specifically, a broadening of these classical approaches, and the intention to interpret dance not only as a cultural but also as a social phenomenon, which increasingly required interdisciplinary approaches and intensive, theory-oriented and methodological linkage with the relevant related disciplines. This endeavour became particularly important for the post-millennial generation of dance researchers in Hungary. 1 This ”new dance studies” defined the research of the second half of the 1990s in the international arena, with the main ambition to interpret the moving body as a ”text” and to ”read” it in order to explore individual and community identities ( O’Shea 2021, p. It was a period when researchers moved away from the tradition of a purely artistic, art-theoretical approach to dance and turned to the social, historical, political, economic and all other contexts of dance.
The period from the 1980s to the early years of the millennium was one of international boom in dance studies, when fundamental changes occurred in the field. The study of the symbolic power of dance on stage is becoming a new and increasingly popular field of research in Hungarian dance anthropology, joining the decades-long fertile field of mainly British and American dance studies.
0 kommentar(er)
