The Myth of Polishness in Polish Dances. How Ideologies Interpret Phenomena Related to Music and Movement

Abstract

Abstract The article discusses the myth of Polishness in the context of dances which gained the social status of ‘national’ ones, i.e. those incorporated into the canon of national culture. I shall start by establishing the terminology and chronology related to the phenomenon of ‘national dance’, and sum up Mieczysław Tomaszewski’s comments on the ways of expressing nationality in music, including dance, and the various aspects of this phenomenon. Methodologically speaking, the present paper is based on the concept of myth as presented by Joseph Campbell, Leszek Kołakowski and Maria Janion, as well as on the findings of Jan Berting, Christiane Villain-Gandossi, Maria Janion and Jan Stęszewski concerning the phenomenon of stereotypes, which are crucial to defining a myth. The main body of my text has been dedicated to the conditions in which the myth of Polish dance was born, its form and relation to the ideology of Sarmatism then current among the Polish nobility, and to its subsequent transformations. Further transformations took place mainly under the influence of a specifically conceived Romanticism, in which the nation’s struggle for liberation took pride of place, accompanied by the cult of the family as a bastion of national culture, in which women played a prominent role as model wives and mothers, as well as by an interest in folk culture, which attracted the upper social strata to folk dances and led to the emergence of the claim (unsupported by existing sources) that the nobility’s dances had folk origins (this myth was particularly popular among the adherents of chłopomania, i.e. the intelligentsia’s fascination with, and interest in, the peasantry). In the final section I point to the durability of the myths concerning Polish national dances, which – thanks to educational efforts and to broadly conceived artistic work – are universally present in the social consciousness also today.