Individual Creativity and Traditional Culture

The objective of the 4 years’ research project is to construct a representative source material on the dancing individuals and communities in the Carpathian Basin and to publish it in the form of a series of monographs. The planned research pays special attention to the dancing individuals, because due to their preserving and innovative abilities they take part more intensively in the tradition of the kinetic culture of their community from generation to generation. Significance of the research based both on new fieldwork and existing archival documents is justified by the fact that the generation being able to re-create the traditional dances is passing away soon in the Carpathian Basin, mainly in the Hungarian communities. Gradual disappearance of the traditional framework of folk culture results in the fading out of this elementary, simple and collective way of dance creation. It can survive and can be used for the implementation of the scientific, educational, artistic and other social tasks of the 21^st century, only by means of the correct documentation, analysis, interpretation and dissemination. Similar research does not occur in Europe. In Western Europe the respected scientific approaches and technologies were not available when this dance tradition was alive. In Carpathian Basin the Hungarian, Slovakian and Romanian dance researches have accumulated so much source material about traditional dance which would be suitable for this kind of research, but relevant works in the research of dancing individuality were made only in the Hungary. These are the exemplary works of György Martin, Ernõ Pesovár, and Ferenc Fesovár. The implementation of this project is aided by an electronic database able to store, analyse and systematise the various dance documents.