Whilst children’s groups are generally open to all to participate, prospective members of the more prestigious adult ensembles must attend an audition. These are normally held in the autumn, when an ensemble has vacancies, in order to give the of urbanisation in Bulgaria, the majority of the members either had a grandmother living a village or else had a relative who was, or had been, an ensemble dancers or singer.
new members time to learn the repertoire of dance suites before the next season of performances. In the Communist period, the ensembles with the prime reputations were always oversubscribed and successful applicants were restricted to the number of current vacancies. Since 1989 a more inclusive ‘selection process’ has commonly been adopted that works over a longer period or throughout ensemble membership.
Field Note extract: 2009 auditions
In October 2009 a poster was displayed in the Culture House window advertising an audition for new members for Timişul. On the nominated evening over forty-five girls arrived, and a handful of boys! For a dance genre that usually involves equal numbers of males and females dancing in couples, this posed a challenge to the organisers. The prospective members were lined up in a semicircle and the choreographers demonstrated the basic steps, encouraging the novices to copy. Some of the new arrivals clearly did not fit; one small (plump) boy was obviously well under the minimum age for the group (I later saw him dancing with the children’s group); several appeared to have no sense of musical rhythm, whilst others looked as if they had been dancing all their lives.
Universally one of the main changes in recent years has been that the number of boys joining these groups has fallen, so it is no longer practical to enforce the equal male to female balance. This can possibly be attributed to the wider range of entertainment opportunities available, in particular computer gaming. Before the internet age, in Eastern Europe dancing was considered an acceptable masculine activity equivalent to playing football, unlike in western Europe where, until the 1980s, dance as a leisure activity was linked to femininity (McRobbie, 1984:130-161) although it is now considered more acceptable for men to dance. For the 2009 intake into Timişul only those with no sense of rhythm or below the accepted age range did not come back the next week. There was no visible selection only a quiet conversation with these individuals. In general the audition process is inclusive with the ‘selection’ taking place on a longer term basis, by who is invited to join in the choreographic suites and who is left sitting on the chairs around the room (as I will discuss later in this work). This approach to entry is the one of the aspects that marks out this activity as closer to Turino’s participatory dancing than presentational performance, as ‘[n]ewcomers are encouraged, because people in a local scene want it to grow and remain vibrant’ (Turino, 2008:33), and this strategy makes provision for the future continuity of the genre. In the case of the students’ group Doina Timişului, similar to university groups elsewhere, dancers can only notionally remain in the group for the three to five years that they are at university, whereas Timişul dancers stay with the main group for
around ten years. Recruitment to Doina Timişului is also through open auditions held annually at the beginning of each academic year. Their choreographer told me that at the beginning of the 2010 term he had fifty new female recruits and a few men and only about six had previous local dance experience. Again the selection is though (self) selection and perseverance. By the end of the autumn term he told me that only the keen ones remain and usually these individuals have previously belonged to a Banat village group or an ensemble in a nearby town (see Chapter 4).
My enquiries have revealed that the underlying motivation for joining an ensemble has not changed substantially over time despite the changes in Romania’s (and Eastern Europe’s) relationship with the rest of the world. Responses to Giurchescu’s pre-1989 enquiries included the following reasons: ‘local patriotism, artistic prestige, rewards (especially trips abroad), and the feeling of togetherness’ (Giurchescu, 1990:58). The majority of these motivations still apply today. As Stavělová (2012:251) commented regarding Czechoslovak ensemble dancers, in the Communist period, participation in an ensemble gave an escape from the realities of living under a totalitarian regime, allowing a means of expression that could not be found in daily life. Both before and since 1989 joining an ensemble gave the opportunity to socialise with people of similar age, background and interests, and the feeling (communitas) of being part of a community of people (Turino’s cultural cohort) with similar interests. The next question is why an individual chooses to join a particular ensemble. At that stage personal notions of communitas and habitus are unlikely to be at the forefront of their thoughts. The replies that I have been given revolve around; the choreographer is the best in town, they have a wonderful orchestra, or similarly to the dancers from Cluj that Amy Mills interviewed, their friends or family members encouraged them to come along (Mills, 2004:43). The opportunity for travel abroad on tour still remains the greatest draw and so for many prospective ensemble members, the range of tours that a group has on its portfolio can influence their choice of which ensemble to join. More recently, especially in Romania, an additional incentive is provided by potential opportunities to take part in television broadcasts (see Chapter 8). It is common for those with some knowledge in a city or town to have their own personal ranking of local ensembles. The ensembles may advertise their awards and prizes but this is not necessarily concurrent with local opinion, and there is also a strong element of informal competition between ensembles as to which has the highest (self-awarded) ranking.46
46 See Turino (1989:19-20) regarding similar informal competition between Aymara music ensembles participating in local fiestas.