The summer of 2000. Pirin Pee National Folk Festival on the skirt of Pirin Mountain. Blue sky, bright sunshine, music, and bright colors everywhere. Several stages under the open air, hundreds and hundreds of Bulgarians presenting their songs and dances dressed in traditional village costumes and thousands of guests from Bulgaria and abroad. I am sharing the grass with many others, watching the program on the central stage. I am a philosophy teacher and a lecturer in dance folklore at New Bulgarian University. Near me sits a man who, easy to tell, is not Bulgarian. Soon I learn that he is an American. He wears a T-shirt on which back I read: I dance; therefore I am. I smiled. It had never come to me to “read” Descartes this way. But I also belong to this club. My English is very poor at that time, but we did converse for a while before joining the big horo in front of the stage. Hundreds of people, joining hands, faces shining with joy. I am in heaven.
These years, I spend hours reading just the first pages of Anthropology of dance by Anya Peterson Royce (1977) and Phenomenology of Dance by Maxine Sheen (1966) at the National Library in Sofia. The awareness of how little I knew about the topic that truly interested me and how much work I had to do to develop my English skills was simply humiliating. As a graduate in philosophy at Sofia University St. Kliment Ohridski, I had completed a diploma paper entitled, “Tantsuvashtiyat chovek” [The dancing man, or the dancing homo – if deciding to play with Huizinga’s Homo Ludens]. Although, I shouldn’t even mention it. This was a miserable attempt to draw upon Nietzsche (with his idea that we can dance with our feet, notions, words…).
There was not much literature on the philosophy and anthropology of dance at the National Library 25 years ago. I was hungry to learn. I knew that there was a discipline called ethnochoreology, and there is a study group of dance scholars who meet every two years in various places in the world and discuss topics that excite me. But how to get there?
Back to horo under the open sky, along with the joy of the blissful moment, I am now reflecting on this ala-Descartes slogan. The year is 2022. For nearly two years, the dancing world did not have the chance to dance as it used to be before the pandemics. I live in the United States – teaching Bulgarian dance to children and adults at the Bulgarian Cultural and Heritage Center of Seattle. I also teach occasionally Bulgarian dance to groups of American – International folk dancers and students from Western Washington University who signed for the program “Movement and Cultures.” I dance; therefore, I am. Really? How?
It is hard to define dance. With dance, one actually embraces the wholeness of the “three Ds: dance, dancing, and dancer(s)” put in different cultural contexts, and the complexity goes beyond my few pages. So I will move to my living room from where I began teaching Bulgarian dance via zoom in the spring of 2020.
I pushed back the sofa, took the music stand from the piano room, raised it high, and pushed it horizontally so that I could put my laptop there. I started the zoom program, still learning about its features, and here is my face in the camera. This is good; the camera is working. But what about the sound of music? What about my feet? What about my front and back – in the most general sense, but also in a sense I grasp from George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s “Philosophy in the flesh” (1999)?
Friday, 5 PM. I wear my dance teaching outfit, my dance shoes. People from my group started to join the zoom meeting. Six, seven, ten people. Before the Pandemic, we could easily count 30 people in the rehearsal hall. How are you? How are things at home? We are fine. How are you? Shall we dance? Ha, another movie title. But the situation is so far from the feeling of flying across the space in an embrace with another dancer. Or from the emotional swirling with many others in the dancing chain.
I start the music. I ask everybody to mute themselves. I lower the laptop’s cover with the camera so my dancers can see my feet, and I turn my back. In front of my nose is the glass window of the library buffet with the old CD player, hundreds of CDs, books on the top, including a beautiful vase by a Native American artist. We warm up, do some stretches up and down. And then I began jumping in, showing some steps. And everything started jumping with me – the old CD player, the hundreds of CDs, the books on the top, and the beautiful vase by the Native American artist. And I am not a heavy person. I am light on my feet. My American folk dance friends joke that I have hollow bones. And yet now, in this environment, my dance seems to shake the entire world.
In a sense, it does. It shakes my entire understanding of what dance is, what teaching is, and what interaction among people is during the mutual dance. And I am talking about Bulgarians who know what the “real” Bulgarian chain horo dance is supposed to be. But what about the first-year students from Western Washington University? With my classes with them, we first locate Bulgaria on the map. What is their impression of Bulgarian dance after one hour and fifteen minutes with me? They join me from their kitchens and bedrooms. They listen to my explanations and illustrations, clap with me to symmetrical and asymmetrical meters (I suppose, I don’t know, they are muted). They follow my demonstrated dance steps (I assume, I don’t know if they do, I need to turn my back to show). What they have learned, after all, I have no idea. They have experienced some jumps to unfamiliar music and meters offered by me. They clapped at the end. They thanked me. But did they experience Bulgarian dance? And how, more precisely, do they call their experience? Nevertheless, I am thankful. I am grateful for being invited to give this (let us say “atypical”) introduction to Bulgarian music, dance and culture. Is it better to have nothing?
Still February-March 2020. The dance halls across the States are just shut down. Before the pandemic, a Bulgarian colleague – dance professor from the Southwest University in Blagoevgrad began a teaching tour in the United States and I have had invited him to visit our Bulgarian group in Seattle. Before his abrupt departure because of the canceled workshops, we decided to organize a zoom class and open it to the whole dancing community – Bulgarians, Americans, Bulgaria’s music and dance lovers across the globe. My colleague’s host in San Diego is an engineer, a passionate supporter, and a folk dancer. Big house, large living room, tall ceilings, good lighting, decent sound, two cameras. I am moderating the class. Easily 100 people are attending the zoom workshop, who are expressing their gratefulness for the opportunity to dance with this master and to virtually meet old and new friends.
And now the year is 2022. I am conducting a survey with Bulgarians and Americans to help me understand the dance under pandemics. In this essay, I haven’t even addressed dancing with masks, which topic also takes an essential part in my quires about dance and dancing. I know a little bit more, though, than in 2020. I know what dance is not. I called my zoom classes “stand up from your laptop.” But other people may have called it differently. And I want to find out what these names are.
