Capital New York

The stench of sweat was almost enough to make you turn back at the door. The Rainbow Room of the Grand Prospect Hall in Brooklyn had been so heated by the tangle of dancing bodies that the windows were completely fogged under the damask drapery. Mostly empty beer cups littered tables that no one was sitting around and a hip-looking, young band stood in the middle of the crowd, blasting adrenaline-pumping rhythms. It was the eleventh hour of the 2012 Golden Festival and proof that music doesn’t require electricity to be very, very loud.

Most New Yorkers only know the hall from its TV commercials, which feature swooning brides in ball gowns beside a frumpy, elderly couple who promise to “make your dreams come true.” Last Friday and Saturday evenings, what dreams came true did not involve miles of taffeta or life-altering events that only legal representation could put asunder. Instead, the ornate wedding factory was the site of a wild party that has brought together lovers of Balkan music and dance annually for the past 27 years. Around 2,500 people saw 62 performances over the course of 13 hours, a marathon that comes with the occasional blister but is well worth the pain.

Each winter the Golden Festival's devotees travel from as far away as Toronto, San Diego, Chicago, and Washington, D.C. to make the event, as if this year is going to be the big one—and the great thing is that it seems they’re always right. Even though the Golden Festival has kept its homespun charm, each incarnation has reportedly outdone its predecessor since its modest beginnings at a folk arts center on Varick Street In 1986. A group of music enthusiasts who had taken a beginner brass band class decided to form a band—which they called Zlatne Uste Balkan Brass Band—and then founded the festival as an excuse to get a guaranteed gig and to bring together the fledgling Balkan music community in the United States.

When the festival relocated from a Catholic school in Inwood to the Grand Prospect Hall last year, it ballooned to its current proportions, drawing everyone from aging hippies to Gen-Xers in equal numbers. All of the musicians play for free and any proceeds (tickets are $25 for the first night, $50 for the second) are donated to charities that have included Mercy Corps, IRC, Heifer, East European Folklife Center, Voice of Roma, and Search for Common Ground.

With such an epic-length event, the idea of dropping in for just a couple of hours might be tempting. But to fully experience the Golden Festival, you’ll want to observe the first laps around the dance floor and say you were there when the last folks toddled off it. It’s all about pacing yourself.

Day 1

7:37 pm

The formidable coat-check line left time to ponder the entry’s faux-coco interior, with its vaguely baroque murals and a color scheme that might have been inspired by spumoni. Up the sweeping staircase, a few hundred people had already gathered on the skating rink-size floor of the venue's centerpiece, the Grand Victorian Ballroom. Tables and chairs were stationed at the back of the hall, but their numbers were scant, the first sign that the crowd expected to be on its feet all night.

To describe the Golden Festival as a celebration of Balkan music and dance perhaps obscures a critical piece of information: the audience, rather than some group of professionals, does most of the dancing. They eschew wallflowers, aside from the painted roses that dominate the ballroom’s décor. A dance lesson to the live music of Cherven Traktor ("Red Tractor") opened the festival and indoctrinated any newcomers. Covering a range of basics, it brought disparate traditions from weddings and celebrations all over the Balkans region together under one roof: primarily the folk dances of Serbia, Bulgaria, Macedonia, and northern Greece. The Balkans are still a tense and ethnically divided region; the Balkan music scene in the United States provides unusual opportunities for fraternization, not to mention for melding genres that might not otherwise come into contact with one another.

The elements of most of these dances would look familiar to anybody who has done the Hora at a bar mitzvah (a dance that itself originated in the Balkans). Everyone joins hands in a ring, then there's a step to the side, then close the feet together; a sort of loping walk, sometimes with one foot crossing over or behind the other; a hop on one foot with the front leg bent. Repeat, with some variation. Even small children have the motor skills to do the moves. Theoretically, they’re simple enough for anyone to join in.

But when those basic steps are combined into more complex patterns, they have the potential to become a completely different beast, and a beast that’s as mentally as it is physically challenging, baffling Balkan dance tourists. For example, the music for the dance Pajdusko is based on a five-beat count, but the steps are structured in groups of four, then three, then two, and finally one, with frequent changes in direction. Balkan folk dance expert Steven Kotansky led the instruction, introducing the Macedonian dance Lesnoto as a pattern of four steps fit to a count of seven. “They refer to this as ‘the easy one,'’’ he said, then chuckled at the irony.

9:22 pm

After a couple of hours almost everyone started to get the hang of dancing together, but the real test was how the crowd fared when left to its own devices. Zlatne Uste Balkan Brass Band, the festival’s originators and hosts, worked up a head of steam playing down in the center of the floor, dancers encircling them. In contrast to the bloat of Alpine brass oom-pah bands, the unit is gutsy and raucous, and fleet at its best, despite a beefy complement of trumpets, flugelhorns, trombones, baritone horns, and tuba.

The group of self-described old codgers that calls itself Zlatne Uste currently has around 15 steady members and first formed back in 1983. They chose the name, meaning “Golden Lips,” before they’d learned sufficient Serbian grammar. Zlatne uste actually translates closer to “Golden Mouth” (they stuck with it since they’d already had T-shirts printed up). Curiously, none of the members have any Balkan heritage. They learned to play the quirky music simply for the love of it, like the majority of the serious folk dancers who attend the festival. People of Balkan descent are decidedly in the minority.

“You don’t hear these kinds of unusual melodies and rhythms elsewhere in Western music,” said 52 year-old Ben Thomas, an amateur saxophonist from Fitzwilliam, New Hampshire, who was out on the floor dancing. He’d only been to the Golden Festival once before, but has attended the Balkan music and dance workshops offered each year by the Berkeley, California-based East European Folklife Center, the organization that has arguably been the midwife for the Balkan scene in America through its summer camps (one in Mendocino, California and the other in in Iroquois Springs, New York). “It’s infectious," Thomas said. "It makes you move whether you have an understanding of the music or not.”

As it turned out, the real trick to picking up the dances was simply having a clear view of someone who knew what they were doing. Whenever a new piece began, the more knowledgeable participants—the ones who could actually tell what sort of dance was being played—would gravitate towards the center of the floor, forming the innermost circle around the band and conveniently enabling the clueless to follow along farther back. Once you had the steps, the next hurdle was joining a circle of dancers in motion without tripping up yourself or everyone else, a moment not unlike launching yourself between some swinging double-dutch ropes.

The experience of dancing along with hundreds of others hand-in-hand, synchronized in movement and circling joyously, was oddly powerful. It wasn’t hard to imagine why it had so appealed to villagers spread across remote, wooded mountain regions, for whom any collective social event was momentous. The floor of the Grand Victorian Ballroom swayed underfoot, the music pounding. From on high in the balcony, it looked like a Busby Berkeley production, only without the nymphs in identical outfits; just ordinary folks kicking up their heels.

10:43 pm

The generous complimentary buffet of edibles—smoky cured meats and salty cheeses—that had greeted attendees on entry had been consumed and cleared away in what seemed like no time. Meanwhile bar sales were changing over from beer to stara sokolova (plum brandy), a drink that comes from the village of Kostojevic near Bajina Basta in Western Serbia. Bands played 30-minute sets, which bolted along like lighting, alternating between the stage and in the middle of the floor. The close vocal harmonies of Svitanya left the crowd torn between listening and dancing, and then the Kavala Brass band featuring Lefteris Bournias—a acid-toned Greek clarinetist—gave them their second or perhaps third wind.

That is until Mal’chiki i D’evushki was up. A self-described Balkan-Gypsy- klezmer-party-punk super-band, the group served up the Balkan equivalent of ska—tunes sped-up into overdrive, nearly clearing the floor of older dancers. Hip Brooklynites in their twenties and thirties took over, freestyling, pogoing, and noodle dancing like latter-day hippies. It took the Raya Brass Band, an excellent young quintet who made a much bigger nod to tradition in their playing, to bring everyone back together, closing the evening—and the generation gap—well after midnight. The crowd was still strong, but dispersed without fanfare knowing there was yet another night of festivities to come

Day 2

6:47 pm

As it turned out, Friday night was merely the warm-up. Saturday was the real blowout. With a 6 pm start-time, the party was in full swing by 7, and full swing meant a whole order of magnitude greater than Friday’s spirited romp with perhaps around four times as many people in attendance. In addition to the Grand Victorian Ballroom, simultaneous performances took over three more stages—in the Chopin Room on the first floor, the Atrium near the second floor ballroom, and the Rainbow Room upstairs from there. Through the night patrons made mad dashes between them, trying to catch their favorites.

Despite the festival’s Balkan focus, some groups stretched geographical and musical boundaries over the course of the evening: Wind of Anatolia played lilting Turkish folk; Zikrayat, an Arab classical ensemble, deployed belly dancers whose hip bumps provided incentive for its drummers’ percussive accents. This was accompaniment to bump absent the grind; and Tribecastan conjured funky eastern fusion that could only be indigenous to New York City. The presence of stalwarts from the downtown jazz scene such as trumpeter Frank London (the Klezmatics), who performed with Eva Salina Primack, as well as multi-reedist Matt Darriau (the Klezmatics) moonlighting on gaida (Balkan bagpipe) and guitarist Brad Shepik (who's played with Dave Douglas, Charlie, Haden, and Paul Motian) in the Electric Goat Trio were potent reminders of an overlap with improvised music that reaches beyond klezmer.

A highlight of the early evening was Lyuti Chushki (“Hot Peppers”), a traditional Bulgarian ensemble from Washington, D.C. Its honey-voiced singer, Tzvety Weiner, first traveled to the U.S. from her native Plovdiv to perform at the Golden Festival over a decade ago. With the kaval (flute) and gaida following each other in serpentine accompaniment passages, Weiner intoned love songs full of innocence and charm. “My love is so poor that he has only a shack to live in,” she sang in Bulgarian (and later translated for me). “To me, it’s a palace. I think he’s the richest man in the world.”

9:00 pm

After the flurry of early-evening acts, the festival’s heavy hitters began to appear. One of the most renowned performers at the festival, saxophonist Yuri Yunakov pioneered the genre known as Bulgarian Roma (Gypsy) Wedding Music in the '70s and '80s. His style is a celebratory blend of Balkan village traditions with jazz, rock, Turkish, and Indian music. Rather than the boisterous brass of its traditional folk precursors, capacious synthesizers carve out an ample foundation for Yunakov’s frenetic lines. Yunakov immigrated to the United States in 1994 after suffering persecution under the Bulgarian regime for performing Romani music, then considered a countercultural phenomenon. He was recently named a 2011 National Endowment for the Humanities National Heritage Fellow.

For Bronx native Saniye Jasaroska, age 35, whose family emigrated from Macedonia before she was born, and who is ethnically Roma, coming to the festival has been about more than just singing and dancing to have a good time. “I’m very connected to my culture. It means everything to me,” she explained. “You have to be aware of what our community went through. We’ve been severely persecuted. We’re real people, not the stereotypes that everyone associates with us.” While many think that the persecutions of the Romani people ended with the Nazis, the group still faces widespread resistance throughout Europe, as evidenced by the mass deportation of Roma from France in 2010.

11:55 pm

When Slavic Soul Party started its highly anticipated set, the ballroom became thick with people, streaming in from the other rooms and stages, the mass of dancers turning slowly at first, then faster, like a milkshake in a blender. In the Chopin room below, patrons who stayed for Macedonian Izvorno, a traditional folk ensemble, warily eyed the monstrous chandelier, a good 12 feet in diameter, as it bounced in time with the mass of feet upstairs.

The longer the evening went on, the longer the line at the bar and the more haphazard the dancing became. What initially felt like a light pace and simple footwork eventually became arduous. Even simple steps were bungled as the effects of fatigue and alcohol set in, and toes were mashed by Nikes, cowboy boots, clogs, stilettos, Birkenstocks, loafers, and ballet flats alike. One 50-something-year-old woman, who wore Betty Boop socks and a mismatched pair of sequined Mary Janes, appeared indefatigable despite her beet-red face. She dripped with sweat. It’s fair to say the hall no longer smelled quite like a place where dreams come true, even if it looked it.

1:27 am

In the ballroom, the festival’s final group, What Cheer? Brigade, had not slackened their frenzied pace for a moment. A hard-rocking street band, they turned the crowd into a fist-pumping mob. Suddenly a pair of feet were visible in the air and brief episodes of crowd surfing punctuated the set, just long enough to freak out the Grand Prospect Hall’s security guards, conspicuous in their suits. Of course not everyone was at a fever pitch. A few of the musicians who had finished performing hours before lay passed out in the balcony, curled up asleep on the floor, invisible to those below.

The Brigade, in a triumphal finale, marched brightly, still playing, toward the exit, taking the crowd with them. They joked loudly about bringing down the house, which is to say quite literally crashing through the floor, but that fantasy will have to wait for another year’s Golden Festival. And anyway, those still on their feet had to save some of their strength for the afterparty a few blocks away at the Black Horse Pub.