Balkan, East European, Circle, Israeli & International Folk Dance Notes

Here are dance steps/notes for some Balkan (& similar) dances.

These are my notes mostly for dances I have taught or lead since 2006. I wrote the notes originally for my own reference then augmented and proofread those of dances I lead for those who wanted them after the dance sessions. Although it is unlikely that many other people will want notes for these particular dances out of the tens of thousands of Balkan etc. dances in circulation in the English-reading world, they might be of use to someone so I've put copies on the WWW here. There are not many dances here because I am not a regular dance leader, just a sort of very occasional stand-in.

Please note that I did not invent these dances, I merely wrote down the steps I learnt from others, and I may have made some mistakes. It is also very likely that there are other versions of many of these dances and even completely different dances with the same names so do not treat these as definitive. The full notes are verbose & often include multiple descriptions of the same steps; that is a deliberate attempt to reduce the ambiguity from using normal text, rather than specialist dance notation, to describe complex body movements.

Also note that is far better (& more fun) to learn dances by dancing them with someone who knows them than by reading notes!

The Dances

Source Code

I did not write the notes directly in HTML as that would have been too tedious to maintain. Instead I wrote them in a markup language. The language is one I created just for this particular task of writing Balkan etc. dance notes. It is basically plain text with tags (each of which is a single character to speed up writing!) denoting part, bar, count, summary, front matter, etc. blocks and supporting nesting thereof. To convert it to the full & summary HTML versions (and some others) I used a program I wrote in Perl for the purpose.

If you want you can download both the programs I used to format dance notes and the source code versions of all the dance notes on this page in a zip file. As well as formatting them as per this website, it produces versions with embedded stylesheets for emailing and combined summaries as plain text which I use on my old Palm V PDA.

By Andrew Hardwick.
Distributable under CC-by-sa freeware licence.
Page created 2007/8/19.
Updated 2007/8/21, 2007/8/23, 2007/9/1, 2007/9/2, 2007/9/3, 2007/10/6, 2007/10/20, 2007/11/11, 2008/3/28, 2008/6/12, 2008/9/20, 2008/10/2, 2008/10/18, 2008/12/31, 2009/2/13, 2009/5/27, 2009/8/14, 2009/11/28, 2010/6/10, 2010/10/31, 2011/6/15, 2011/9/6, 2011/9/27, 2013/1/26, 2013/8/18, 2013/11/16, 2014/9/2, 2015/3/1, 2015/9/1, 2015/9/22, 2016/8/23, 2017/4/17, 2017/6/8, 2018/4/29, 2018/7/15, 2019/3/16, 2019/9/7, 2020/4/13, 2020/8/14, 2020/20/19, 2021/3/12, 2021/10/6, 2022/7/15, 2023/2/2, 2023/7/2 & 2023/8/26.
Available on-line at http://duramecho.com.