Moldova is close to losing authentic folk dance, specialist

No significant effort is made in Moldova to preserve and transmit the authentic folk dance, which thus risks disappearing in time, said Pavel Popa, scientific researcher of the Academy of Sciences of Moldova. The researcher told Info-Prim Neo’s reporter that the parents pay large sums of money for courses in modern dances, not in traditional dances for their children. The education institutions don’t promote the folk dances as earlier. If there are classes of folk dances, the teachers are mainly of other nationalities. There are few books about the characteristics of folk dances. The last book was published in 2005. Since 2008, there has been held no festival of round dances or a workshop for national choreographers. Pavel Popa said that a solution is to implement a large-scale folk dance promotion project. “We are losing the round dance, which is the most important Moldovan dance. Today they do not organize round dances as earlier, but only occasionally. Even when they stage a concert in the Great National Assembly Square, only students who came from villages dance the round dance. Earlier, they gave round dance parties near the central fountain, where there played a brass band. Now the brass band plays only tangos and waltzes,” stated the researcher. Researcher Varvara Buzila, scientific director of the National Museum of Ethnography and Natural History, has told Info-Prim Neo that a national register of immaterial state cultural patrimony is to be compiled by this yearend. It will contain all the folk dances of Moldova.