The rural-urban controversy of the 1930s divided the Hungarian intellectual world and it was later revived several times during the 20th century with new characters, new tones and varied intensity. The relationship between rural areas and cities has also been an important issue in various social, political, economic and climate policy discussions in the 21st century. Dominika Trapp has researched transit points of folklore traditions and modernism for a long time. She has interpreted the legacy of Hungarian peasant folk music from a critical perspective with her conceptual orchestra Peasants in Atmosphere, building relations between contemporary artists and a new generation of folk musicians. Her exhibition “Don’t Lay Him on Me” in the Trafó Gallery in 2020 was a reinterpretation of traditional folklore. Trapp and her co-creators turned “towards the archaic in order to find a way out of the crisis of the present” and approached the cultural heritage from a unique “hungarofeminist” perspective related to “hungarofuturism”. She presented her video Maiden’s Dance co-created by folk dancer Kata Szivós and director Noémi Varga that reconsiders the traditionally fixed gender roles in Hungarian folklore, especially in folk dance. As Trapp writes, the protagonist of the video, Kata Szivós is a student at the folk dance department of the Hungarian Dance Academy “who expands the space bequeathed to us through folk dance traditions [...] I met Kata two years ago at the New Year’s Eve Hungarian folk dance event at Fonó, where she stood up to perform a dance traditionally danced by young men, to the dismay of others.” The video Maiden’s Dance and the interview connected to it attempt to reinterpret and divert the traditionally male-dominant Hungarian folk dance culture. Kata Szivós transforms the traditional men’s dance to her own image.

Edited details from the Interview with Kata Szivós:

“The basic concept was how male Hungarian folk dances, that I really like to dance, can be staged without evoking thoughts like ’well, that’s a girl dancing a male dance’. This was the basic idea in the early stages of the work, but obviously what I wanted to keep from female dances and what I would incorporate from male dances changed a lot until I settled on the final version of the dance I called Maiden’s dance. In male dances, virtuosity is what is essential and what I miss from female dances. Because we do have beautiful female dances that are soloistic, but when we refer to beauty, we mostly talk about group dances. These are not primarily focused on virtuosity, but rather on archaic and singing circle dances. Even those, who don’t know a lot about Hungarian folk dances, knows that these are not about dancing the stars out of the sky. It is possible to find beautiful female dances, but still, somehow in authentic folk dance, the dynamic enhancement stops at one point.

I’ve always missed this all my life, even though I started getting to know folk dance early enough. When I was four. But I have never been able to express myself fully in a female dance. This does not mean that I did not enjoy it or that I could think of something else in that particular dance situation, because I am obviously taken by its heat and charm, but I still missed something extra that I do absolutely feel in couple dances, but not in female dances. For me, female dances are too restrictive, that is why I danced male’s dances unscrupulously. And I did not find these narrowing, because I simply loved them. I made attempts to adapt them to my taste but somehow some people thought that I might have some identity issues. But that is absolutely not the case. That is why the main principal of all this is that I do not want to eliminate or question femininity in dance in any way. On the other hand, I would like to dynamically enhance women’s dances to their fullest extent, until the point when male gestures and motifs can be incorporated into a female solo dance without someone saying ’you are a very good and technical dancer, but this is a male dance performed by a female body.’

At the Budapest Contemporary Dance Academy it wasn’t strange that a girl was dancing a male dance. The community there wasn’t as narrow-minded as, say, in a folk dance subculture, where certain things are almost unquestionable. Another question is what kind of reactions this act will spark, but I suppose the folk police won’t seize me. But in the context of a communal folk dance event, on the other hand, it can easily happen—that has already happened to me more than once— that people approach me after the dance and start to question me like ‘hey, what was this?’. And then I say it’s the same thing you do…

I was wondering about the female-male relationship in the past. Not just in dance, but in everyday life. Women did not have their say, what women said did not have the same weight, they did not have the final say and they were not the dominant party in dance either. But despite all this, it would not have been possible to perform a couple dance without a woman, because the basis of everything is really the woman. Usually it can be get out of boys or men to say that a couple’s dance cannot be performed without a woman, but apart from this, I still don’t see this reflected on stage, as for the most part, nobody cares what the female compartment does. Because there is a delightful male dance that absolutely takes it all, and obviously we won’t look at what the girls shuffle in the back corner or squeak in a half-circle. Of course, I am not saying that this is unnecessary or that it is a problem, because it is also an equally important part of the whole culture and the whole tradition of dance.

When we talk about dance, we are basically talking about motifs, and as far as I know, motifs has no gender. I believe anyone could dance anything. Whether we are talking about folk dance. I think you can dance a male motif in a way that is feminine. Or more organic, or aesthetic than a male body dancing it. For me, the point is not to do a genderless choreography, but a female dance where I can really show the technical excellence. As a woman.

Folk dance is basically similar to playing lego: there are those basic bricks that surely everyone has and everyone knows; the csárdás, the cifra motif, the three steps, the swinging. There are obviously more complex things, but we usually learn them as a process; there is a beginning, a middle, an end, and that’s the only way we can think about them. We can put these lego bricks from one place to another, but we cannot really just throw them all in a pan and blend them fully—I myself couldn’t do it for a very long time. Why not break down those elements what we have learned as essences further to their atoms? So the cultivation and the transmission of Hungarian folk dance is not just about imitating a particular informant or a teacher, but it is rather about using, applying and experiencing a certain dance or a movement. Experiencing dance is crucial for this. Because I think that Hungarian folk dance can really have a euphoric effect, but if we only get these lego bricks, then we can only think along them, then in my opinion we’re stuck at a level that folk dance professionals might accept as professional, but for me this is not fulfilling neither as a creator nor as a dancer. That I can play lego like a pro.”