[HN Gopher] Once banned, Poland's stately 18th century dance gar...
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Once banned, Poland's stately 18th century dance garners UNESCO
honors (2024)
Author : danielam
Score : 65 points
Date : 2025-04-15 17:20 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (apnews.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (apnews.com)
| danielam wrote:
| More about the Polonaise[0].
|
| [0] https://culture.pl/en/work/dancing-through-history-the-
| polon...
| 0rzech wrote:
| It's disappointing that neither Monika Scislowska with Rafal
| Niedzielski of apnews.com, nor Aleksandra Bogucka of culture.pl
| - all of them Polish people - bothered at least once to mention
| how this national dance is called in its mother tongue. So,
| here it is: polonez.
| viccis wrote:
| Oh wow, like 3 letters difference, pronounced identically in
| English, glad you cleared that up.
| 0rzech wrote:
| That's not the point, but whatever.
| Majestic121 wrote:
| `polonez` is a deformation from the actual name `polonaise`
| (cf https://www.reddit.com/r/BoneAppleTea/), it makes sense
| that they don't mention it since it's obviously not Polish of
| origin (why would Polish people call it Polish dance ?)
|
| They do mention the original Polish dance chodzony,
| extensively
| where-group-by wrote:
| Currently it's mostly referred to as "polonez", with that
| exact spelling. It's one of those loan words that got it's
| spelling changed in Polish.
| 0rzech wrote:
| And yet, this is exactly how it's been called in Poland for
| years. [1] Unsurprisingly, you can find "polonez" on gov.pl
| too. [2]
|
| "a deformation from the actual name" in this context is
| called a loanword.
|
| Regardless of etymology, an article talking about a
| national treasure being put on UNESCO list absolutely
| should mention that, IMO. Can be next to "chodzony". No
| problem with that. Even better, TBH.
|
| AP didn't write even "chodzony", btw. Only "the <<walking
| dance>>". [1]
| https://sjp.pwn.pl/sjp/polonez;2572042.html [2]
| https://www.gov.pl/web/kultura/wpis-poloneza--tradycyjnego-
| tanca-polskiego-na-liste-reprezentatywna-niematerialnego-
| dziedzictwa-kulturowego-ludzkosci
| tumdum_ wrote:
| Also https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/FSO_Polonez ;)
| piokoch wrote:
| Russians considered Frederic Chopin music to be "Polish guns
| hidden in flowers" (one of the Russian officials citation) so
| they had to ban it (on the Polish territory occupied by Russia,
| in Russia itself it was legal to play Chopin...).
| amszmidt wrote:
| That quote is from Robert Schumann, a German composer
| contemporary with Chopin. It was not a citation from any
| Russian officials, nor was Chopin banned in Poland by the
| Russians (it was banned during the German occupation for a
| while).
| akho wrote:
| Can someone give a source for communists banning polonaise? It
| sounds implausible, and googling did not produce a satisfying
| result.
| where-group-by wrote:
| Surface google searches do not return anything meaningful. It
| would be also weird to call one of the domestic car lines after
| something that is supposedly banned.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FSO_Polonez
| HPsquared wrote:
| It's interesting, I asked ChatGPT about this and it said it was
| not banned, then I turned on "search the web" and it says it
| was - citing AP News and VoA, basically this very article. I
| wonder if there's any more info.
|
| Edit: funnily enough DeepSeek gives an answer that sounds
| plausible: apparently during the Stalinist period of 40s-50s
| while it supposedly wasn't outright banned "overt displays of
| national pride were often discouraged" ... That seems to fit,
| and a bit of judgement over whether something is banned
| explicitly or simply so unthinkable in the official climate
| that it may as well be banned.
| everdrive wrote:
| >It's interesting, I asked ChatGPT about this and it said it
| was not banned,
|
| Asking ChatGPT is useless for finding a definitive answer for
| anything, and all the more so when the facts are in question.
| floydnoel wrote:
| it feels like soon anything that chatgpt doesn't know will
| be deemed "misinformation"
|
| any experts in any field can easily find tons of stuff LLMs
| don't know.
|
| hell they don't even know how to measure or calculate
| wallpaper correctly.
| olddustytrail wrote:
| Nobody can. Wallpaper calculations are in the realm of
| eldritch mathematics.
|
| You always end up with a gap, and despite that _several
| rolls left over!_ Which you will then keep for years
| "just in case".
| p_l wrote:
| Imperial Russia, not communists
| amszmidt wrote:
| AFAIR .. it wasn't even banned during the Imperial Russian
| times; rather it was just considered a "Russian" dance.
|
| Never heard of the Polonez being banned during PRL times...
| We sure danced it out in the fields then (though this was
| later times).
| vkazanov wrote:
| As a half Polish half Russian who grew up in soviet
| Lithuania i still remember hating to learn polonez in the
| late soviet period. Dancing doesn't involve computers...
|
| Anyways, as a single statistically insignificant fact:
| polonez was not banned in late ussr.
|
| And a glamorous version of polonez was also taught in
| higher imperial circles. At some point everything polish
| was quite trendy. Probably not around the big 19th century
| uprising though.
|
| The full story of the dance and the music in the empire is
| quite a bit more complicated than just "banned" or "not
| banned". Many polonezes were written by Polish aristocrates
| integrated into imperial elites and were very popular.
|
| One example is Oginsky's polonez. Oginsky was one of the
| uprising avtive participants. And also an imperial senator.
|
| There's also Kozlovsky (orthodox Polish from belarus or
| something) whose polonez was an unofficial imperial hymn at
| some point.
|
| So go figure. History is never as simple as narrative
| builds try to put it.
| p_l wrote:
| Polonez certainly wasn't banned under PRL or USSR, but it
| would not surprise me if Chopin arrangements of Polonez
| were banned in "Congress Poland" but allowed in "proper
| Russia"
| anticodon wrote:
| Wasn't banned by Imperial Russia either. There was a very
| short period of time (1799-1828) when all kind of waltzes
| were banned, but the ban was never enforced and it had
| nothing to do specifically with polonez or Poland.
| sparky_z wrote:
| I wouldn't describe 29 years as "a very short period of
| time".
| olddustytrail wrote:
| Clearly not a geologist...
| akho wrote:
| And the de facto Russian national anthem at the time was a
| polonaise.
| akho wrote:
| The article's title is "Once banned by communists, Poland's
| stately 18th century dance garners UNESCO honors".
|
| Imperial Russia also never banned the polonaise, obviously.
| krige wrote:
| The sources come from Polish language books.
|
| Folk dances were a part of school curriculum in the first half
| of the XXth century, and part of the maturity exam was
| ceremonial dancing of polonez. In 1948 the whole education
| system was changed to be in line with USSR programs, and folk
| dances, including the polonez ceremony, were removed as class
| "unjust". This was not a hard ban, and the tradition slowly,
| unofficially at first, came back a couple decades later anyway.
|
| FWIW the Imperial Russia didn't like the Chopin polonez (the
| music) either and considered it "a cannon hidden in a bocquet",
| forbidding its performance in their part of the
| occupied/partitioned territory (ironically it was perfectly
| fine to play it in Russia itself).
| akho wrote:
| There is a large distance between "removed from curriculum"
| and "banned". I suspect that it's not in the current school
| graduation requirements either.
|
| The "cannon hidden in the flowers" quote comes from Schumann,
| who wasn't Russian. Chopin, of course, sympathized with the
| November uprising and renounced his Russian citizenship, so
| Tsarist Russia was not happy about that. That does not tell
| you anything about the polonaise itself, though.
| alxlaz wrote:
| > There is a large distance between "removed from
| curriculum" and "banned". I suspect that it's not in the
| current school graduation requirements either.
|
| Not necessarily, early on things got dropped from the
| curricula all the time _because the GUKPiW had banned them_
| , either specifically or by topic.
|
| Blanket bans on general topics or activities make it
| extremely difficult to discuss censorship post-factum. For
| example, Juliusz Slowacki wasn't banned, but while some of
| his works could be freely published in some media they were
| fully or partially banned in other media (notoriously,
| _Television Theatre_ got in trouble over parts from
| _Kordian_ ). Lots of cultural activities or works weren't
| banned directly, or not in all forms.
| akho wrote:
| Yes, "large distance" implies that many in-between
| options exist. Folk dances, however, were a whole thing
| with Stalinists ("culture that is national in form, and
| socialist in content"), so an outright ban would seem out
| of character.
|
| I would probably remove folk dances from school
| graduation requirements too, if I somehow fumbled into a
| position where I take those kinds of decisions.
| ozornin wrote:
| Terrible fact-checking and I doubt the good faith by Associate
| Press. The authors (Monika Scislowska and Rafal Niedzielski)
| claim that Polonaise was banned in USSR, which is false. Neither
| it was ever banned in Russian Empire.
|
| The culture.pl article mentions that > dancing the polonaise was
| temporarily banned in the Congress Kingdom
|
| Which could be the case, I don't know, but I couldn't google
| other sources in 10 minutes either.
| alxlaz wrote:
| > Terrible fact-checking and I doubt the good faith by
| Associate Press. The authors (Monika Scislowska and Rafal
| Niedzielski) claim that Polonaise was banned in USSR, which is
| false. Neither it was ever banned in Russian Empire. > > The
| culture.pl article mentions that > dancing the polonaise was
| temporarily banned in the Congress Kingdom
|
| I'm not sure that qualifies for terrible fact checking, or in
| any case, none of this refutes any of it. Since the AP doesn't
| cite its sources, their claim could certainly be wrong, but
| neither of the facts you cite contradict its claims.
|
| First, the AP piece doesn't say it was banned in the USSR, it
| says _Poland's post-World War II communist authorities banned
| it from schools_ , which ~~is actually supported~~ isn't
| refuted by culture.pl, too:
|
| > [After 1933], the tradition of dancing the polonaise together
| by the students of the graduating classes returned to schools,
| _but it disappeared again after 1948 for the duration of
| Stalinism_.
|
| I know culture.pl doesn't explicitly say "banned" but both the
| idiomatic translation and the parallel experience in virtually
| every country under Soviet occupation would indicate that.
| culture.pl unfortunately (and unforgivably) doesn't cite
| sources, so I can't follow the trail, and dance history is
| definitely not my field. But a social dance with notorious
| ethnic rules not being banned in that space would've been the
| exception, not the rule.
|
| (Edit: _If_ it happened, it wouldn 't have had to happen by
| direct government dispatch, either, this would have typically
| been done on the "advice" of party activists at lower levels
| (e.g. in each school), operating under broader directives to
| discourage nationalist expression, not some specific dance.
| Each country has thousands of traditions, some of them with
| local names, you can't issue a document to ban each of them at
| central level).
|
| Second: it not being banned in the Russian Empire has no
| bearing on AP's claim about it being banned in the "territories
| that Russia took over"
|
| The Congress Kingdom was under Russian rule, first de facto,
| and then entirely de jure. It had nominal (but generally
| disregarded, hence "de facto" rule) autonomy until shortly
| after the November uprising in 1831. Then, through the Organic
| Statute of the Kingdom of Poland, the Kingdom's constitution,
| army and parliament were abolished, thus effectively making it
| an imperial subject, under direct rule after 1837, with a weird
| customs border (and, starting from 1867 IIRC, not even that).
|
| These are "the territories that Russia took over" in the AP
| piece. The only way for the polonaise to be temporarily banned
| -- if it was actually banned, again, culture.pl doesn't cite
| its sources -- in the Congress Kingdom was by dispatch from St.
| Petersburg, unless somehow the Polish banned their own dances.
|
| Up until 1867 (at which point the kingdom, already an
| administrative fiction for more than 50 years, was finally
| formally abolished) that could be done without it being banned
| in the Russian Empire proper, too. Afterwards, what was
| previously the Congress Kingdom retained governorate status, so
| the polonaise could be banned on its territory without being
| banned through the rest of the Empire, too.
| ozornin wrote:
| Thank you for your corrections
| alxlaz wrote:
| Sure thing! News agencies could really do a better job when
| reporting on historical issues. This is no exception. What
| they're saying is _plausible_ but it 's not the sort of
| thing you'd expect a news outlet to casually throw around
| without sources. "Plausible, but unproven" shouldn't be the
| reporting standard. That's how false reporting gets in. For
| all I know (as I mentioned above, dance, and art history in
| general, is hardly my thing) this could be one such case,
| too.
| d0mine wrote:
| Here's polonaise record from 1952 published in USSR
| https://youtu.be/UCjuwnWJf88
| justin66 wrote:
| That's the trouble with mainstream media, everybody's got an
| agenda when it comes to the topic of polonaise dance.
| mrbonner wrote:
| The polonaise is a dance for those curious about classical forms.
| J.S. Bach included this elegant, fast-paced, stylized dance in
| several of his suites. Though rooted in folk traditions, the
| polonaise evolved into a refined court dance. For those
| interested, composer Sara Schumann also wrote an entire suite of
| polonaises, though she remains relatively unknown.
|
| To any music experts here--especially pianists--why are these
| called "stylized" dances? I understand they're based on folk
| dance forms, but I often struggle to connect the music to the
| original dances. Some, like the slow and distinct sarabande, are
| easier to recognize. But how do you tell the difference between
| something like a minuet and a polonaise?
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