Interview with Anna Székely (C2) By Kavya Iyer (C6) & edited by María Peredo Guzmán (C4) The idea is to interview one unknown person from a Cohort other than yours. Thus you get to know each other while practising the beautiful craft of interviewing. Do you want to be part? Just contact us by e-mail Kavya: It has been a while since I did an interview. It felt so good - getting to know you and getting close to someone I have only just met! Anna is from Hungary, graduated from Choreomundus in 2015, and is currently a PhD student at the University of Szeged. She recently received a scholarship grant to go to New York to study Hungarian diaspora folk dances in the USA [which has been postponed due to the pandemic]. K: What are you doing currently? Are you working or doing research or dancing? A: I’m doing everything! (laughs) Currently I am in London, but during lockdown in 2020 I was at my parents’ house in my hometown in Hungary. I had to move back there from Szeged because of the COVID situation. I recently finished the second year of my four-year PhD studies. At the beginning of summer this year, I accomplished my comprehensive exam for the PhD and I got my required language test in Romanian for my university studies. I finished the academic year quite busy! K: That’s great! So what is your PhD research topic? A: The theme is the “Myth of Authenticity in the Hungarian Dance House Movement”. In the 70’s, a group of folk dancers from Budapest made a journey to Transylvania, and they saw an original - “authentic” - traditionally organized dance event called Dance House, literally held in a house or in a room. These urban dancers were fascinated with this experience, and they recreated the event in Budapest in 1972. It was a very big thing and became successful, and then spread all over the country. This movement was really about recreating tradition and promoting dance transmission at the dance houses, conducting folk song sessions and promoting social interaction. Since then, it is still going on. Maybe all of you went at least once to a Dance House when you were in Szeged? My main focus is on this recent phenomenon - the contemporary expression of the Dance House movement. I am looking at younger generations; my aim is also to investigate the relationship between generations and how their notion of traditional culture is shaped. What is your “before” and “after” Choreomundus story? I received my Bachelor degree from the Department of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology in the University of Szeged in 2011. And in 2012 I started a Masters there, after which I got accepted into Choreomundus in 2013. After finishing Choreomundus in 2015 in London, I went back to Szeged to pursue the Masters that I had started, and finished it in 2017. My PhD dissertation topic is actually inspired by one of the essays that we had to write during Choreomundus for the Anthropological Approach of Dance course. I wrote about the concept of authenticity in a male folk dance competition in Hungary. After this, I applied for another scholarship called the Petőfi volunteer program. Petőfi Sándor is an important national poet, and this is a scholarship funded by the Hungarian government. It sends volunteers to Hungarians living territories in Transylvania, the upper part of Slovakia, Serbia and Ukraine in order to help the communities there. I spent 9 months in Sighișoara, Romania, working with children, teaching dance and English. We even had a theatre group and I go to visit my friends whenever I can. I would call this, my “gap year” a necessary one after many years of studying: I needed something refreshing! K: I’m currently applying for PhDs and I see that there are many different motivations for people to pursue a PhD. So, what motivated you to do a PhD after that? A: I cannot imagine myself doing anything else other than research. I want to become a professor at some point, but it is not my first motivation. I want to use the advantages of being a PhD student to go far with this research, which I believe, is really important and deep. After the PhD I hope to find a good job that suits my projects and research. Is not easy to visualize the future, I will see…! K: How do you look at your experience during Choreomundus? Was it useful for you? A: My situation is funny - Being in Szeged since 2009, and thanks to Professor László I went to diverse courses in Norway, so I already knew the Choreomundus teachers: Egil, Andrée, Gediminas, Georgiana. In fact, my application video to the Choreomundus programme was recorded one year before with Professor Sándor’s group at one of the intensive courses in Trondheim where I danced csárdás. I felt really happy when I got accepted. I lived in Clermont Ferrand with the group coordinated by Georgiana and it perfectly suited my interests. Georgiana was a great supervisor: in very specific moments, when I needed her, she was really helpful. The topics and lectures we had about ethnographic research methods, helped me to find my own ways of doing research. My group was adorable, we did not have issues, we partied a lot, this made our relationship stronger, and opened my view on how to look at dance and at society. One of my fellows was another Hungarian, Kinga. She is a contemporary dancer, and I didn’t know much about contemporary dance. From an innocent perspective, one may think that contemporary has nothing to do with traditional dances. But we had the chance to work together in Clermont and we combined our two fields: this experience was amazing! It opened our views; it altered my feelings, my respect towards other dances. Up to today, I have some ideas of collaboration with Kinga. Szeged was more home than a trip, and all my cohort went there. We were five flat mates and had lovely months together. During the last semester, in London, I worked as an au pair, a nanny for a Hungarian family. I was in love with the library in Roehampton…I liked London, it was a short time, and we were writing our dissertations. But the feeling was: “I want more…”! I want to study more. The Department is amazing there! I hope I can collaborate with them in the future but currently I'm very busy with my research projects. It opened our views; it altered my feelings, my respect towards other dances. K: Talking about dissertations, what was yours about? A: In the beginning, it was about dance transmissions in folk dance and music camps in Transylvania: I visited three camps during the summer of 2014. During fieldwork, I was hesitant about my topic, something was missing… Until, one evening, a musician from a nearby village came to play in the dance house in the camp. He was like a “special guest”. I knew him from other dance houses, and I was having a good time, when suddenly I noticed that everyone was looking at him with special attention, whispering about, inviting him for a drink (a pálinka!) or getting closer to see him. He was seen as an important representative of a folk music genre, some kind of a ‘legend’. That night I saw interaction and participation that I had not seen in the previous months. He was what we could call an ‘informant’. In the Hungarian terminology, informants are not only interviewees, but people who have first hand information; we could call them “gate keepers” or those who are an authentic source of dance and music knowledge. So I started to look at these relationships in dance camp settings. My dissertation was thus titled ‘The Imaginary Homeland’ to convey the sense of: something is familiar, but not! Familiar to the folk dance practitioners because everybody there speaks Hungarian. But they are not aware of the traditions, even though they are attracted to them. So they go to these camps to acquire such knowledge. And, these special guests are respected and loved in the revival community, and are regarded as “gods and goddesses of traditional culture.” K: I see. So what is your ‘dance’ story? How did you begin dancing? A: At the end of high school I had to decide what to pursue my Bachelors in: I liked literature but not enough to analyze poems or essays. I loved history, but I wasn't great at memorizing names and dates. Somehow I thought ethnography and social anthropology could be a good combination of these. Of course later I discovered it is bigger and quite different to what I had imagined! K: Oh wow. In India, we do not have Bachelors dedicated to study dance theoretically as in Hungary! A: Yes, this is special about Szeged! Hungary has four departments of ethnography and social anthropology, but the one dedicated to dance is in Szeged, and it exists thanks to our Professor László - he started it. I went to a practical folk dance class with Professor Sándor: it was really new for me since I had only done folk dances at primary school. I got fascinated: during that first year it became a passion. The folk dance groups were really great; we made deep connections. Dance brought us together as good friends, and eventually we founded our own dance company. My group is called Möndörgő which means thunder. I am not a professional folk dancer, I dance because I enjoy it. When I go to a Dance House, or in the field, of course I dance, I like it. I don't like to do it for “self-expression” but rather to dance with others together. K: What excites you the most about dance? A: If I were to say ‘dance and heritage’, it is too wide. If I were to say ‘dance and tradition’, it is too narrow! So I would say I am most interested in folk dances as subcultures rather than as structures. I see culture as a living thing, and I'm passionate about how people consider dances, the link between dance and community. (Give an eye to It is not like used to be which also gives a hint of Anna’s research interests.) K: That is indeed fascinating! It is hard to explain to people why we do what we do. Why should we study dance? What would you say? In some way I think it is our responsibility to make dance studies more accessible to people. A: What we are studying now, will be history some day! We can give an understanding of how a community functions. I like to discuss this with people of all kinds: people who are a part of my field, as well as people who are not in academics. It is important to listen to what they need to say about dance. K: What message would you like to leave for the reader? A: Once I had a discussion with Georgiana. I explained everything I wanted to research, and she said “Okay, if that is your topic, sure, you can do it! But so what?” That question has stayed with me forever. This “so what?” is the challenge. It is the base of my discipline. Everytime I write something, I try to answer that question.
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