Women folk dance across the Balkan countries
True women's dances are usually song-dances for the old pagan rituals such as St Lazarus Day or St. George’s Day, or wedding dances for giving away the bride. These are, for the most part, not the packaged versions that we see in recreational folk dancing, which are always presented to us as dances, never as song-dances. What we think of as women's dances are usually women dancing because of their role in the celebration, rather than true women's dances.
Women's dancing in Macedonia
In Skopje, Lazaropole and Naoussa there exists a rare type of Macedonian dance developed to a high level by private Men’s Societies or Guilds in the old days. They are by invitation only and they practice year around for special events such as the Carnival in Naoussa or the Rusalija in Djevdjelija. In these specialized dances, found only in a few places in Macedonia, men perform larger and athletic movements. And only when men dance separately, will the leg-lifts be higher due to clothing, traditional factors and gender. In social dancing, however, the men and women perform the same dances with the same styling if they are dancing together. So “styling” is the same for both sexes.
Women's dancing in Serbia
The week before Easter, Serbians living near Sredska celebrate Lazarus Saturday. A group of six girls, one of whom masquerades as Lazar (Lazarus), and another as Lazarka (the female equivalent), go from house to house singing and dancing. The girl who is Lazar wears a man’s white shirt and a man’s hat decorated with flowers. In his hands “he” carries a staff or sometimes an umbrella. The Lazarka wears a necklace of golden coins, and on her head, money, greens, and garlic to scare away evil spirits. The girls carry two baskets; in one they collect beans, in the other, eggs. After dancing in front of each house, they sing songs to bless the head of each household, the house itself, any young boys or girls in the family ready for marriage, the livestock, and of course, the bees.
Women's dancing in Bulgaria
Many villages have retained the tradition of sung dances. Women's sung Horos are of a quiet type, and certain of their ritual Horos are slow. Girls' spring dances are sung; the younger ones perform dance-games with long dialogues in song, two singing on one side, a chorus answering them. The contending sides move forward and back again in the style of many an English singing game. The game ends when the original two have pulled over all the girls on the opposite side.
The Saturday before Palm Sunday, called in Bulgaria St. Lazarus' Day, is the greatest festival of the year for the girls. They form themselves into companies, big or small, to go from house to house singing and dancing, thus `singing in the spring' to the village. The girls keep special clothes for this great day and in some districts wear richly decorted head-dresses finished with upstanding bunches of pale, lightly waving grass. Sometimes they are led by an older girl, the Kumitsa or commere. Their songs have traditional verses suitable for different occasions and different persons. Everybody can thus be greeted correctly.
A newly married couple will hear:
For the good health of this house,
For its health and abundance,
Dance for this young bride
And for next year's cradle.
To a childless woman they sing:
Apple-tree, little apple-tree, Wily dost thou blossom And not bear fruit,
As in the first year,
White and red apples . . .
While to the cornfields, as the beautifully dressed, colourful little group passes, they sing:
The field we passed,
Exhausting the ground:
From two ears, a basket of corn;
From two grapes a cask of wine!
The girls are welcomed everywhere as harbingers spring, and receive gifts of money, bread and eggs, wit which they feast in the evening, the youths being after wards admitted to dance Horos with them.
These Lazarki dances clearly belong to the spring cycle of pre-Christian good-luck and fertility customs.
