On our last night in Bulgaria, in the evening after dinner on the boat Avalon Passion, a folk dance troop attended at our boat to present a program of Bulgarian folk dancing.  I did not have my camera handy, but I used my phone to take a few photos. It was a group of young men and women and 2 musicians and a very interesting leader. The leader of the group, in introducing the group, waxed philosophical and mystical.  She said that Bulgaria compares to a beautiful woman.  Everyone wants it and is prepared to fight over it. Sadly, that has been its history.

She said that Béla Viktor János Bartók was a Hungarian composer, pianist and ethnomusicologist who is considered one of the most important composers of the 20th century. According to Bartók, Bulgarian folk music has only uneven beats. And Bulgaria she said, is keeping to its tradition. Bulgaria itself has only uneven beats. Later I checked Wikipedia, the source of all knowledge, and it said

“Bulgarian folk music is known for its asymmetrical rhythms (defined by the famous Hungarian composer and ethnomusicologist Béla Bartók as “Bulgarian rhythms”), where meter is split into uneven combinations of short (two metric units) and long (three metric units) beats, corresponding to the dancers’ short and long steps. In European folk music, such asymmetrical rhythms are commonly used in Bulgaria, Greece, elsewhere in the Balkans, and less commonly in Norway and Sweden.”

I freely acknowledge I find this completely mystifying, but somehow the dancing, the music, and the explanation felt deeply satisfying. I particularly liked the exercises in jubilation where the women danced and shouted “yeah, yeah.” To me they seemed like shrieks of joy from  gleeful dancers in the glory of youth. I loved the performance.

But there was more to the dance. According to the director of the dance troupe, what we celebrated tonight was that the troupe and us, the audience, celebrated the  beauty of “you’ and “us” together,” she said. 36 years ago, during Communism in Bulgaria we could not do that. Today we could celebrate that truth is beauty and beauty is truth. We now, since the time of the fall of communism,  have the capacity to speak the truth without fear of government reprisal.

As our Romanian guide Zio would have said, with gusto, it was all excellent.