English
Memento Mori
Dance Club
Memento Mori Dance Club is an experiment situated at the crossroads of traditional music, early music, and the individual musical experiences of the ensemble’s members. It explores the relationships between Polish traditional religious singing and the dance music of past centuries.
Within the musical phrases of devotional songs, still practiced until recently in the villages of the Polish lowlands, one can hear polonaises and mazurkas—melodies that once accompanied dances and later served as musical settings for religious texts by both well- known and lesser-known poets. Many songs were also composed by anonymous folk creators, who wrote melodies revealing the idiom of dance music-making. The Memento Mori Dance Club project seeks the contexts and circumstances in which these two seemingly contradictory layers—instrumental dance music and contemplative religious texts—can function simultaneously.
Our path toward this goal has been inspired by a characteristic feature of traditional rural culture: the avoidance of a strict division between performers and audience. Thus, we play concerts that naturally transform into communal singing gatherings. With the help of a small songbook, everyone has the opportunity to participate in the songs, and the sound of the instruments and rhythmic pulses only help facilitate this participation.
We also play the same melodies for dancing:devotional and wisdom-filled lyrics, remembered somewhere in the back of the mind, that lend dignity to the walking polonaises, while the meanings and messages of the texts seem to gain greater power within the paradoxical context of a swirling dance celebration. Memento Mori Dance Club seeks the spirit of traditional musical culture, not through ethnomusicological reconstruction but by following the path of its own creative expression—an expression rooted in the long-standing experiences of its musicians, who have absorbed the traditions of rural artists through direct transmission.
Memento Mori Dance Club
All Souls’ Dances
On December 8–10, 2025, thanks to favorable decisions by the Polish Radio Folk Culture Center, we met at Studio S4 to record the material for our first album, All Souls’ Dances.