We spot a band tuning on the main floor and head over, expecting to start the festivities. The music begins, and it's a slow, plaintive Hungarian ballad. As I've alluded to earlier, these Hungarian folk songs go on and on.
"They're probably just starting slow because once the dancing starts, it'll be very upbeat."
Another song - beautiful, but slow.
"So where's the dancing? Ooh look - that 2 year old is dancing!"
...
"I think I hear something over there"
*Walk to not-so-empty room in the back*
There's another band, wailing away at their instruments (upright bass, a drum, violins, recorders, and ud, along with 60 or so people in a circle doing an absurdly simple circle dance (3 steps in, 3 steps out, all the time moving counter-clockwise).
When that song ends (I would estimate that every song was 7-10 min), this guy with a fedora gets in the middle, starts jabbering in Hungarian, and begins to slowly demonstrate some steps. As the whole crowd joins in, the band begins to play - slowly at first, but always accelerating. 2 minutes later, with a loud whistle and some hooting, the fedora'd man is running around in the center of 3 concentric circles totaling over 100 people.
As the night progressed, more and more people began to join. The room began to fill up, and a classic instance of the Prisoner's Dilemma (rather, the Tragedy of the Commons) unfolded. Everybody wanted to be in the center circle. Going into the center gives one a nice benefit of more fun dancing, costing everybody else very little (the center circle is just that much bigger). As people enter the center, the inner circle pushes outwards, limiting the space of those on the outside and making the inner circle not so inner any longer. Those on the outside begin to suffer and move in more rapidly. Now, the majority is in 1 big inner circle (when we started with 2 circles of maybe 3:1, and everybody suffers from having no room. This reminded me of 'Yalla' on a Friday night at camp. People eventually figured it out.
Also there was a girl there whose outfit reminded me of Chun-Li from Street Fighter.
The dancing was very fast paced, almost exclusively circle dancing. Most of the dances consisted of 2 phrases of ~8 counts that were repeated ad infinitum. There were 2 partner dances: one involved facing your partner and spinning for about 10 minutes; the other was about half running around in a big circle with everybody and half spinning with your partner.
One of the dances was particularly difficult. I think the sequence of steps was 10 beats, meaning that it was realigning itself with respect to the 4/4 music.
The room was underground, poorly ventilated, and filled with 100+ people running around. My undershirt (I had by now taken off my real shirt) was see through mid-way through the dancing. During the one dance I sat out for, I went outside (it's about 0 Celsius at this point), took off my shirt, and sat down for about 5 minutes. When I put my shirt back on, the sweat on it hadn't dried, just cooled down to near freezing. I promptly ran back inside (where the same song hadn't yet finished).
I think this was the most fun I've had in Budapest so far. I will be going back.
Webpages that may or may not be relevant:
YAAAYYY!!! I love this post and I'm so happy you did this. Now you will be excited to come to Stockton this summer, right? http://folkdancecamp.org/
ReplyDeleteYour description of the dancing is similar to how I'd describe most international I've done or seen... except maybe "ad nauseum" instead of what you wrote.
But don't tell the Stockton people.