1. What Is Folk Dancing?

I think, intuitively, many people have a vague idea of what folk dancing is and what it is not. If you ask someone on the street what a folk dance is, they will say, “It’s something my ancestors used to do”, or “It’s dancing you do in funny costumes to strange music”, or “It’s a way to celebrate one’s heritage”, or “You know, like the polka or square dancing.” If you ask them if dances like ballet, ballroom, jazz, or modern are folk dances, they will say “No, they’re not.” But where do we get these intuitions from, and do they really get at the class of activities that we identify as folk dances? Let’s probe this question a little more deeply and see what kinds of criteria we might use for figuring out what it means to be a folk dance. We will look at some criteria that people have put forward. I will give you a hint about the ultimate answer: folk dances are defined by a mélange of these criteria, and what is and isn’t a folk dance will vary from person to person and from context to context.

1.1. Idea 1: Folk dances are done by “common folk”.

If you look up “folk dance” on dictionary.com, you get the following definition:

“a dance that originated among, and has been transmitted through, the common people.”^[1]

Merriam-Webster has a similar definition:

“a dance that originates as ritual among and is characteristic of the common people of a country and that is transmitted from generation to generation with increasing secularization—distinguished from court dance.”^[2]

What these definitions share is essentially a socio-economic criterion for what kind of dances are “folk dances”. They explicitly contrast dances done by economic elites (i.e., court dances) from those done by the “common person”. Minuets are done in the royal court, so they are not folk dances. Ballet is performed on stage for the entertainment of economic elites, so it isn’t a folk dance.

But this criterion is plagued by problems. Take the case of court dances such as the minuet. While these were performed in the royal courts of Europe, they were quickly adopted by members of society outside the elite and became the “common” dance forms enjoyed by the people. Most of English, French, Scottish Country, and American Contra and Square dances have this provenance (Knight 1996, Flett and Flett 1964). They are based on dances done by the elites. The genres of waltz, polka, and schottische, while having deep roots in Northern and Western European folk traditions, were adopted as dances of the rich. Later, the common folk from the Polish region of Mazovia borrowed back the waltz from the rich, changed the emphasis, and came up with the Mazurka, which was then again borrowed back into court dances! (Shirley Hauck, p.c. January 11, 2020)

Note that this is also a very Western-centric definition of folk dancing. In East Asian cultures, economic distinctions are less important in folk dancing: everyone performs the same dances. In Middle Eastern cultures, folk dances were often performed for and by the economic and political elites. We have to be careful not to try to paint all cultural practices with the brushes invented in the colonizing West.

1.2. Idea 2: Folk dances are old and mired in the mists of time.

Another common idea about folk dances is that they represent “old” traditions. Under this view, if a dance isn’t at least 100 years old, it can’t really be a folk dance. But the reality is that it is not what actually happens when people get together to do folk dances. People want to do things that are fun and meaningful to them. If something is new and fun, it quickly becomes part of the local culture. We see examples of novelty in folk dancing all the time. Old dances are done to new music and tunes. New dances are created in a traditional style and put to new music. People combine dances, or they simplify them. Among folk dancers, this is known as the “folk process”.^[3]

In the desert of Southern Arizona, the people of the Tohono O’odham Nation have incorporated dances adapted from their Mexican neighbors into their dance traditions.^[4] They do dances called Waila (from Spanish baile), Chote (a schottische), and Mazurka (from Poland), as well as the Cumbia (from South America). These dances take on their own unique characteristics when performed by the O’odham, but they are relatively recent additions to their culture. A more recent example can be found in the whole phenomenon of Israeli folk dancing.^[5] Many current popular Israeli dances have been choreographed in the past year or two. Dances from the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s are considered “oldies” and old-fashioned by Israeli folk dancers.

1.3. Idea 3: Folk dances are only done by people of a certain ethnicity or culture.

Folk dances are undoubtedly rooted in communities of people who choose to socialize together and share a common taste in music, instrumentation, and movement styles. Often, these communities are organized around geographic considerations, which in many places means they are also ethnically or culturally homogeneous. So, it makes sense that there is a notion that, for example, Hungarian folk dancing is done by Hungarians. That is simply a fact. But the idea is actually a little squishy when you dig down a little deeper. In Europe, people often borrow from other communities’ dance repertoires. In the Balkans, for example, you will often find dances that are explicitly meant to be borrowings from other cultures. In Bulgaria, there is a popular dance known as Grčkoto,^[6] which means “the Greek dance”, and it is clearly a borrowing of the Greek dance Haniotikos, which itself is based on movement patterns from North Africa.

The traditions of folk dancing in North America also bring the tight connection between ethnicity and folk dance into question. Starting in the early part of the 20^th century and moving right through to today, there was the development of a movement for the teaching of a variety of dance styles in schools, universities, and community centers, which came to be known as the “International Folk Dance Movement”, often abbreviated as IFD. (See Nielsen 2011, for a very interesting discussion of why this movement appeared and why it flourished.)

In 1932, for example, we find the class, Physical Education for Women 112a, at the University of Arizona, which is described in the course catalog as: “Teaching of folk dances of various nations, clogging and tap. Teaching of singing games and fundamental play rhythms suitable for younger children. Open to men and women.” In the IFD movement, dance instruction and practice were explicitly divorced from the people the dances originated with. While some discussion of culture and ethnicity is, and was, critical to understanding the dances, these folk dances weren’t necessarily performed by people of the relevant ethnicity. The IFD movement is now found throughout the world, with clubs and classes in practically every country. It is most popular these days in Japan and China, where the classes are often sold as “friendship classes” or “bonding classes”. The Japanese and Chinese often perform the same IFD dances as those performed in the USA.

The decoupling of folk dances from their ethnic origins is controversial for some people. For example, there was a recent heated debate on the Eastern European Folklife Center listserv^[7] about a dance choreographed by an American folk dance teacher to a beautiful song of Bosnian origin. People got very angry that this teacher had made up his own Balkan-style dance. A Bosnian expressed their opinion that it’s not appropriate to dance to that song. They viewed it as cultural appropriation^[8] and disrespectful. Personally, I don’t see any problem with knowledgeable teachers setting dances to ethnic music, so long as they make it clear that what they are doing is an adaptation in the style of an ethnic tradition. After all, dance teachers from these ethnic traditions also choreograph dances to specific music. If it is done from a place of knowledge and respect, there should be no problem. My colleague Shirley Hauck observes:

In the past, villagers across the ages celebrated the abilities of their best dancers. These gifted dancers often acted as improvisational musicians do—they impressed their peers by inventing new variations of steps or whole dances, perhaps to some village musician’s new composition. If the new material fit the villagers’ concept of a good dance, they took up the new dance, which eventually became traditional. These days, we call that process “choreography”. (Shirley Hauck, p.c. January 2020)

There’s no reason to think that when this happens outside of the traditional community, the dance is any less of a folk dance.

1.4. Idea 4: Folk dances are only done at particular occasions.

Another common idea is that folk dances must be tied to particular cultural, religious, or social events. For example, the Greek dance Nyfiatikos Syrtos is tied to weddings. In Northern Greece/Macedonia, there are a number of dances (e.g., Syrtos Aghios Elenis or Nestinarsko Oro^[9]) that are done on particular feast days for saints or at fire-walking festivals. We might call these ritual dances. Not all folk dances are ritual dances. Sometimes they’re just dances that people do when they get together, and there’s good music.

Another challenge to this idea is the use of folk dances for entertainment. Throughout the world, one finds examples of performance ensembles, which present stage versions of folk dances for audiences. These performance ensembles—some of whom perform highly rechoreographed stage pieces, while others perform the dances as they would be performed in the village square or community center—take the dances out of their ritualized contexts (Shay 2002).

1.5. Idea #5: Folk dances involve a particular kind of transmission.

A very appealing idea about what defines a folk dance comes from looking at how one learns folk dances: they are dances that are learned “at the knee” or passed on from person to person and generation to generation, simply by the fact that the dances are done around you. This contrasts with dance styles that require significant technical instruction, often in a formal classroom setting. So, a folk dance would be a dance that you do at community gatherings, and you just join in and follow along, but a dance type like ballet requires years of formal training and practice before you can perform. Here again, the lines are blurry. There are plenty of in-between cases. Think about American clogging or Modern Western Square dancing. You typically cannot just jump in and do these dance styles; you need instruction and technique. In the IFD movement, most or all folk dances are taught in classes; they are rarely acquired by just doing them along with your parents or community.

1.6. Summary

What at first seems to be a simple, intuitive notion is actually rather more complex. What defines a folk dance is highly dependent upon the context in which the term is used. It depends on which criteria you think are most important.

2. Why Do People Folk Dance?

We have seen that finding a definition for the term “folk dance” is difficult. So perhaps it’s more helpful to think about why people dance, and what we might name those situations.

We’ve already mentioned ritual dance. Ritual dances occur on specific occasions such as weddings, feast days, or holidays. Some ritual dances are themselves the key parts of a religious ceremony. Take, for example, the whirling dervishes, who dance in a spinning, twirling figure to music, inducing a trance-like state for religious worship. There’s a recent (circa 1976) movement called “Sacred Circle Dancing” that uses traditional folk dance styles as the foundation for spiritual practice.

Some people use dance just as an opportunity to socialize, to get some exercise, and to party together. We might call these cases social dancing or recreational dancing. This can happen in communities, where we might call it village dancing, or in classes and other non-ethnic venues, where we might call it international or world dancing (as is common in the IFD movement).

Some people use folk dancing to bond over their ethnic heritage or to share it. We’ll discuss the interrelationship between folk dance and identity in more detail in the next chapter. But sometimes folk dance is a way to create a social network based on national or ethnic origin. We often call such dancing national dancing or ethnic dancing. Expatriate groups in North America, Australia, and other places with large immigrant communities often form social clubs with people who come from the same place as they do. Folk dancing is a common activity at these clubs, where members build upon a shared connection. My own family is a great example of this. My family never did Scottish Country Dancing when they lived in Scotland, but when my parents immigrated to Canada, they joined the local Scottish Society, and we all started doing Scottish dancing as a means to link us back to our old home.

3. Conclusion

Defining what constitutes a folk dance is challenging. A wide variety of definitions can be found, and we can distinguish among social, village, ritual, and national dancing. As we progress through the rest of this book, we will discover a close connection between folk dances and identity. As we will discuss in the next chapter, folk dance is part of the complex set of factors we use to mark our identities along political, class, race, geographic, religious, and gender lines. But for most people, folk dances primarily serve social and entertainment functions, which are central to their definition.

Further Reading

• Allenby-Jaffe (2006), Armstrong (1985), Bonnice (2003), Ellfeldt (1969), Kaeli’inohomoku (1972, 1988, 2010), Hoerburger (1968), Longden and Weikert (1998), Nielsen, Erica (2011), Shay (2002), Snodgrass (2016). For complete references, see the References section at the end of the book.

Discussion Questions

Discussion Question 1

Using the criteria discussed in the first part of this chapter, discuss whether some modern dance forms are folk dances or not. For example, was Disco a folk dance of the US? What about Country and Western Line dancing? How about Hip Hop or Breakdancing? What about the dances that are done on TikTok?

Discussion Question 2

One possible set of definitions for folk dancing involves inspecting the participant’s motives for dancing. What are your motivations for learning about folk dancing? How are they similar and different from those of your classmates, your family, and your friends?

Discussion Question 3

People often immigrate to new countries and take their music and dance traditions with them. Once settled in their new homes, many immigrants will form cultural groups that continue to celebrate their heritage through social activities that include music and dance. These cultural groups often continue for many generations, with new members added as new immigrants arrive. If these new immigrants see folk music and dances being performed that are different or not at all as they would have been done in the “Old Country”, are they entitled to complain that these dances are wrong? Why or why not?