Video on Russian Dance- Baile Ruso

Video on Russian Dance- Baile Ruso

            The Baile Ruso is one of the traditional dances that constitute the Russian culture. In this video, the orchestra plays the violins, saxophones, and the balalaikas to welcome the dancers. The dancers who are both male and female gracefully walk on to the stage in pairs. After arriving on the stage, the dancers start the dancing in a slow-motion where they have their hands fully stretched out on their sides and in unison, they make steps in a clockwise manner. In the second part of the performance, dance moves into a crescendo and the dancers move around the stage thumping their feet with their hands raised.  During this part of the dance, there are rhythmic expressions, jumping, and acrobatic movements among the dancers. The last part of the dance involves both male and female individual dancers. The female dancers express grace, sensuality, and feminism.

According to Kovrikova and Nurgayanova (2016), the culture of the dancers in this Russian dance video is a mixture of Russian culture, which is composed of the culture of the Slavic, Tatar, and other tribes that migrated into Russian during the 10^th century. These tribes introduced their music and dance styles, which played a role in the development of the traditional Russian dances that are performed today. In this video, the female dancers are wearing knee-high red dresses with scarfs around their waists. The dresses have gold stripes at the bottom and their heads have bedecked headgears. The men’s costume, on the other hand, is made up of embroidered pink long-sleeved shirts and black pants.

In this video, the audience is a passive participant, whereby it is seen clapping their hands to show appreciation for the music and applaud the dancers. The audience’s participation is noted at the end of the performance when the dancers are given a standing ovation through clapping. In this video, the main instruments used are the balalaika, garmoshka, bayan, violins, and flutes (Morgenstern, 2018). In this video, the function of the dance is to create a holiday mood filled with love because of the red costumes worn by the female dancers. This dance is performed by both the male and female dancers.

In their study on the roles of gender in Baile Ruso dance, Karampoula and Panhofer (2018) noted that there are specific roles played by each gender in the dance. For instance, the female dancers mainly perform graceful moves that depict feminism while the male dancers are more acrobatic in their movements and exhibit a lot of masculinity. There have been significant changes in the way this dance is performed today as compared to how it was performed in the past. The changes are noticeable in the musical instruments used and the type of costumes worn by the dancers.

Conclusion

Baile Ruso is one of the folk dances in Russia that developed from a mixture of cultures that blended to form the current Russian folk dance. This dance is performed by both male and female dancers who dance to traditional Russian musical instruments. The costumes worn by the dancers are based on specific occurrences and serve a specific function in the Russian culture.

References

Karampoula, E., & Panhofer, H. (2018). The circle in dance movement therapy: A literature review. The arts in psychotherapy, 58, 27-32.

Kovrikova, E., & Nurgayanova, N. (2016, August). Spiritual Musical and Cultural Traditions of the Tatars in the Music of Shamil Sharifullin. In 3rd International Multidisciplinary Scientific Conference on Social Sciences and Arts SGEM 2016, Conference Proceedings (pp. 63-70).

Morgenstern, U. (2018). Debating “national ownership” of musical instruments: The balalaika as a subject of ethnopolitical discourse. In Turkic Soundscapes (pp. 177-195).