43rd National Táncház Festival & Fair • 5–7 April 2024
Issue:
Starting page: 14
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Borbély Jolán, Éri Péter (born 1953 folk musician) – Martin taught his stepson Éri Péter to dance, especially the men’s solo dance legényes of the Transylvanian traditional dancer known as ’Mundruc’. They would go as a family even before Péter was in school, out to document dance. In this case everyone had a function: Martin would operate the camera, Péter the microphone, Jolán would take notes and still photographs. As time went on, Martin’s folk dance research methods became known internationally because of his presentations at international conferences. Foreign ethnographers would come to Hungary to meet and talk to him. Like Bartók he thought that stage presentations of folklore should be based on authentic material and scientific research. Many Hungarian artists working with folklore material sought him out, including Halmos Béla and Sebő Ferenc when in the early 1970s they got interested in hearing authentic instrumental music from Transylvania. Martin went out to the countryside to document dance regularly - even when he was still dancing professionally. "It took a long time to have the films of the collected dance material developed, but Martin had a movement memory that made it possible for him to dance what he’d collected, differentiating between each separate informant."