Bordonia: Historical Overview

It has long been appreciated that dancing is more than just steps and figures, a form of exercise or going nowhere by the longest possible route. It is, and has always been, a form of social interaction, a form of extra-somatic culture which cannot reproduce itself without the intervention of that most imprecise process - learning. A dance can easily lose its original storyline, intended flow and homeland style passing through the hands and/or feet of a collector who adds the limp of his informant, a teacher who simplifies the difficult bits, a choreographer who is thinking of an audience, a dance-caller who says right instead of left, an untutored dancer who turns the small into the big and unfamiliar into familiar, a well-tutored dancer who imbues all with his favourite style, an historian who offers a mistaken provenance and an editor who changes the title. Every time a dance is danced it is done so differently and in a different context. Though D'Honger's work offers an invaluable intermediary-free record of dance in his day, it is but a sliver of a living evolving tradition. For all of the skill and ingenuity which they brought to their art, the Bordonians did not simply invent their tradition. They adapted forms from Italy, Spain, France, England, Bavaria, Austria, Bohemia and Poland. The same is true for the people in all these lands - they gave to the wider tradition dances which were but variations on earlier dances and borrowed as much as they gave. Similarly, as strong as the Bordonian sense of a national style has been, it is the sense engendering the style, the daughter giving birth to the mother, the present creating the past. Tradition instigates an inverse descendancy and is not only not what it used to be, it never has been. It is not so much about giving birth to an authentic heir, but recognising one's own parentage. It is not so much about doing the same thing in the same order, as imagining you are, not so much about detail and content as form and spirit. In this respect, the riches in this Bordonian collection are inseparably linked to the wider participatory dance tradition. To understand these links it is necessary to understand something of Bordonian history.

The ancestors of the people who wrote these dances and tunes lodged themselves in remote Upper Lusatia, not far from the modern border between Saxony and Bohemia, sometime in the 5th century A.D, a period when the Slavic-speaking Veneti, Wagrians, Obodrites and Sorbs were moving into land out of which Germanic-speakers were migrating. This particular people, however, spoke a language which was neither Germanic nor Slavic. In fundamental structure it appears to have gone back to either ancient Illyrian or a proto-Lithuanian, depending on whether some words in a Latin script scratched on a 6th century A.D. stone wall are to be translated as 'To the worshipful Lord of the Dance' or as 'Deposit your donation here'. Word order, judging from lengthier 8th century texts, seems to have been influenced by contact with a Celtic language and personal names by contact with Frankish, Norman and Vlach speakers. Much of the language's vocabulary was drawn from neighbouring Germanic and Slavic dialects, but with a curiously strong input of common words from Old Hungarian and Turkish and academic terms from Classical Greek. In the 9th and 10th century, as Europe emerged from the dark ages, people who for centuries had been marauders started to settled down to form states. The Franks did so in the west of Europe, the Magyars in the east and the Vikings in the North. The lands in between were divided between Germanic and Slavic-speakers - and between them were caught this other language group. In the 11th and 12th century with western Europe experiencing substantial population growth, many landless Saxon, Danish and even Flemish knights and peasants sought their fortune further east and the land between the Elbe and the Oder was gradually conquered, colonised, Christianised and Germanicised. Along the Baltic coast cities sprang up and inland hundreds of towns and villages were established. Everywhere forests were cleared for the plough and the inhabitants and settlers alike reduced to serfdom - everywhere, that is, except in this one particularly remote and particulary picturesque Upper Lusatian valley.

In the 14th century great states arose all around Europe (the Baltic coast's Hanseatic League, Austria under the Hapsburg Rudolf IV, Hungary under Louis the Great, Poland under Casimir III and Bohemia under Charles IV) but the people of this one particular valley, being surrounded by impoverished German and Slavic peasants in whom no-one had an interest, preserved their independence. But for this isolation they could easily have been drawn into the disastrous Hussite wars which ruined their neighbour Bohemia, flirting as they did with the heresy of the Two Feet, the belief that Adam and Eve were advised by the angel sent to prevent their return to the Garden of Eden, that they would only be allowed to return when they could speak with their feet, hear with their arms and reduce their knowledge of all that was good and evil to the form of a dance. Perhaps because of this belief or because of the natural beauty of the area, near neighbours commonly referred to this people's small land as the Valley of Earthly Delights. Fortunately, as these people produced no tradeable surplus of wool or wine, possessed no special expertise at metallurgy or animal husbandry, had no links to the sources of porcelain, coffee or silk, and appeared to be interested in nothing but music, dance and gardening, they came to few people's attention. Indeed, when called on to pay a tithe, they so distressed their overlords by offering it in the form of musical performances, dance instruction and exotic honey that they were not called upon again. Had the inhabitants been only half-useless, others would have found some military or economic reason for engaging them. By being totally useless they succeeded in being forgotten. From their hidden homeland they could discretely venture forth to musical and dance studies at universities in Paris, Bologna and Salamanca, where they started to define themselves using the romance language word for drone, 'Bordon', for these 'Bordonians' found it hard to shake off their love of two drone instruments, perhaps unfashionable in these rarefied university towns, the bagpipe and hurdy-gurdy.

In the 15th and 16th century serfdom in Western Europe was gradually replaced by cash-for-rent or share-cropping tenancy, leaving people ready to take advantage of more productive crops and farming techniques. In the Germanic and Slavic lands, however, inefficiently small scattered parcels of lands and rapacious serfdom made the usual European fare of war, robbery, inflation, want, pestilence and capricious administration - not to mention fear of hell, devils and witches - particularly difficult to bear and led to peasant rebellions, sometimes directed against princes, sometimes serving the princes' interests by weakening the control of the church. During these centuries the people in the Valley of Earthly Delights shut themselves off from their neighbours even more firmly than before - resulting in a heightened sense of their own difference. While others were turning the act of killing into something sacred, developing visual and poetic languages and indulging in dance purely as a form of recreation, the Bordonians made dance the central compulsion, put all their meaning, their equivalents of vanishing points and alliteration, into dance, and regarded all else as an aberration. For the Bordonians dancing was not simply a by-product of music and socialising, it was the reason for it, was not simply the foreplay to more intimate intercourse, but the climax to which all else was recovery. The more the Bordonians came to see their own culture as different from the surrounding one, however, the more they started to divide internally - principally between those in the more Protestant north-western around the town of Nenjira and those in the more Catholic south-east around the town of Dudelsac. The former favoured the hurdy-gurdy, tended to start dances with the left foot, frowned upon open displays of affection and found esoteric meaning in every figure, while the latter favoured the bagpipe, tended to start dances with the right foot, regarded a failure to kiss during a dance as bad manners and preferred down to earth explanations for their actions. Each was confident they were preserving the culture which the other was corrupting.

In the first half of the 17th century army after army drifted across the lands surrounding Bordonia, despoiling the country-side in search of plunder and sustenance, but the Valley of Earthly Delights remained untouched until the Thirty Years War was nearly at an end and a band of unemployed English mercenaries found a way between the forests, lakes and mountains. Their attempts to extort protection were, however, interrupted by an invitation to a ball that evening. The Bordonians had heard of the 'Dancing English' and the enthusiasm their late Queen Elizabeth I had for all kinds of dancing, and they insisted all other negotiations wait till the morning. The mercenaries, who were indeed keen dancers, accepted the invitation and never looked back. They settled among the Bordonians and two people cross-fertilised each other with new and wonderful dance styles. Mutual jealousy between the two sides of the valley were put on hold as all worked to the foundation of a glorious new city, Terpsichorea. This city of flawless dance floors did little, however, to dint Bordonian anonymity, lying as it did on the edge of the rambling Holy Roman Empire - an empire with no capital city, no single royal residence, no main trading centre, no fixed borders, no uniform customs regime and no unifying state institutions, an empire which could expand and contract without the Emperor even knowing, could accommodate incursions here and there without ever causing the Emperor to take his eye off the bigger picture - machinations within the Ottoman empire in the south-east, the expansion of Russia in the north-east, the latest fashion at Versailles in the west. With Terpsichorea at its centre, however, a new Bordonia took shape in the later half of the 17th century. The Nenjira dialect became the accepted written language, while the Dudelsac dialect became the favoured spoken language among a new generation of city folk wanting to put on provincial airs.

The early 18th century proved a hey-day for Bordonian dance. Dance masters travelled abroad buying dance manual in Paris and editions of Playford's Dancing Master in London, studying court style in Italy, collecting peasant dances in France and teaching dancing to the big boys of Frederick's Potsdam Guard. At home, everyone learnt to dance - unborn children were learning in their mother's wombs, toddlers from the corner of dance halls where they would be put to sleep and adolescents at school. Adults would dance till midnight, break for a supper then resume till daybreak. Everyone danced and tavern vied with tavern for dancers' custom. Larger farm houses had a special dancing room while cottagers would just clear the kitchen. Choreography became so central to Bordonians' reason-for-being that try as they might to match other states by ensconcing a prince with an hereditary right to rule in a splendid palace, all the major affairs of state continued to be handled by their 'Grand Choreographer' and the 'Master of Delight'. Then, in 1738 Egan Hrodnj, a holder of both these offices at different times and a prodigious collector and writer of dances and tunes, completed his great 'Terpsichorean Alphabet' - the first substantial work in the old Bordonian language. In 1740, however, the great philosopher King Frederick the Great attacked Silesia and started a war which embroiled France, Germany, Austria and Poland, piled lanes in Wendish villages high with corpses, and indirectly enabled England to take North America off the French. During this war, the Bordonians lost both Hrodnj's manuscript and their language. Slavic-speaking Wends sought refuge in Bordonia and, as with the English before them, they stayed, giving rise first to bilingualism, then to a half-half lingualism as the elderly clung to the old language and the young identified with the new and as families created their own pattern of usage to cross the generation divide.

The real undoing of Bordonian culture in the later half of the 18th century was entirely of the Bordonians' own making. Their urge to experiment with every conceivable dance style, an urge which had led them to sample nearly every European dance fashion of the previous two centuries, led them to bring back to the ballrooms of Terpsichorea a dance which would turn life as they knew it up-side down. The dance was the minuet, and for fifty years the Bordonians obsession with mastering it killed social dancing. Assemblies fell under the birch-rod authority of floor managers who, with plumed-tricorn in one hand and handkerchief in the other, would swoop to correct and admonish. Experienced choreographers looked on in disbelief as their compatriots of both sexes donned jewels, beauty spots, enormous powdered coiffures and artificial airs to follow their newly-appreciated franco-phone prince through an exercise in nothing more than manners and gesticulation. The human body which Bordonians had for centuries allowed to thrill in the dizzy exhilaration of dance, now, like a well-ordered state, was to be ruled by the head and each part was to know its exact place and twitch and defer according to reason and duty. A generation emerged ashamed not only of the old language, but also of their old dance tradition. It was not till the French Revolution ended the infection at source, and, by its own excesses, discredited the Enlightenment philosophies which had helped it spread, that the Bordonians began to reflect on and take pride again in the heritage they had nearly lost. Naturalism and spontaneity returned, social dancing was reinstated and a new generation attempted to catch up with developments in the English country dancing style which they had embraced a century earlier and which in the meantime had evolved in North America into lively improper contra dancing.

In the first half of the 19th century, after weathering the Napoleonic Wars, the people of Bordonia were as keen as anyone in Europe to embrace a lighter mode of living. For the women, the high coiffures gave way to shorter hair and ringlets, heavy loops and deep decolletage to more practical high waisted frocks crossed with braid beneath the breasts. For the men, the square-tailed indoor overcoat gave way to a thinner-tailed coat buttoned at the waist, the knee breeches and stockings to slender trousers and the square-toed shoe with its heavy buckle to a lighter slipper. The people were ready for the fast turning of the waltz, mazurka, schottische and polka. As elsewhere in Europe Bordonians were soon putting the new steps into dances in the older circle, longways or quadrille forms and the resulting new dances along with new versions of the couples dances were turning into new folk dances. Pre-eminent among Bordonian dance masters at the time was Jan D'Honger. Like his contemporaries Cellarius, Coralli, Markowski, and Laborde, D'Honger sought to extend that which was possible with the traditions in hand. He sought to instil in his dancers a spirit of improvisation believing, as Coralli once remarked, that 'Uniformity exists only for novices or the unskilled', at the same time as trying to record in definitive sequences the most interesting choreographic possibilities. In 1850 he put both old and new material into his Pleasures for Four Seasons. At the time problems of widespread poverty and unemployment were being compounded by a growing famine. In 1844 the grain harvest failed, in 1845 blight destroyed the potato crop and in 1846 the grain crop was lost to early summer heat. By 1848 many saw migration as the only way out. Over the next twelve years thousands of Bordonians joined their Wendish neighbours on long sea voyages to lands in which they hoped to find a better life. Terspichorea fell into ruin. A people who once made a language out of dance, a devotion out of balls and a religion out of their social calendar were scattered, and the surviving villagers in Nenirja and Dudelsac struggle to keep their traditions alive.