In the phrases of the devotional songs sung until recently in the Polish lowlands resonate polonaises and mazurs. These musical forms used to accompany dancing and later became the musical layer of religious texts of more or less known poets. Many of the songs were arranged by folk artists, now anonymous, who composed melodies that reveal the idiom characteristic for dance-orientated music-making. The Memento Mori Dance Club project seeks out contexts and circumstances in which both, seemingly contradictory, layers – instrumental dancing music and contemplative religious texts – can coexist.
Our way of actualising this idea is to sidestep the distinction between the performers and the audience. Blurring this separation line is a practice proper to traditional rural culture. Thus, the concerts we play essentially turn into group singing events. With the use of a mini-songbook everybody has the opportunity to join in on the chants; the instruments’ tone and the rhythms’ pulse only facilitate participation.
We play the same melodies for dancing, too. Having the devotional and wise lyrics in the back of one’s mind adds the slow polonaises grandeur. And the meanings and contents of the texts seem to have a greater power in the paradoxical context of a whirling dance party.
Memento Mori Dance Club looks for the spirit of traditional music culture not by ethnomusicological reconstruction. Instead, it treads its own path of creative expression, stemming from the experiences of the musicians forming the band, to whom folk creators have been passing down traditions for many years now, in the best possible way – by direct cultural transfer.
Translation by Maria Wojciechowska.