Originally taught by Lia and Theodor Vasilescu. From the Banat region, the title translates as “Dance of the Girls”. Vesilescu’s original notes say:
“Joc de fete” means dance of girls. Such dances are encountered all over Romania. Originally, they had a ritual meaning as premarital girl dances and they were accompanied by songs. With the time they lost the ritual function and they were preserved only as songs while the dance was forgotten. Theodor Vasilescu collected this dance in 1954 in Timişoara, the center of the Banat plain, from two dance teachers and folk collectors: Mara Ciriuş and Ionel Marcu, who mentioned that the dance has already started to be lost and is preserved only in the memory of the old people. The dance has a single part of 26 meas. A special feature of this dance is that the 9th and 10th meas are of 3/4 meter while all the others are of 5/4 due to the structure of the song.
Dance notes…
