Vojtěch Duda

 

Hey! Look at the little girl go. Swirling like a little folksy ballerina. It totally takes me back to the time when I was a kid and went to a folklore troupe in order to learn the proud traditions of my forefathers and foremothers of the quirky region of South Moravia such as dancing to dulcimer music and excessive underage drinking. You know, my parents thought it was really important for traditions to be passed onto the next generations and stuff.

 I was never that serious about it. If something, all the folklore stuff was a good excuse to go crazy while counting on the gracious benevolence of the grownups. Under what other pretext could good citizens of South Moravian pudibund little habitats tolerate things like a bunch fifteen-year-olds from the neighboring village sneaking into their village square in the middle of the night and cutting down their proud fifteen meters high maypole in order to humiliate the locals and finally destroy their own rather expensive folk costumes during a wild escape from the scene of the crime through the woods. It was a respected sport of our ancestors, so no one even began to think about calling the cops. Well, good times, not that I did it.

But shortly after I turned sixteen I somewhat grew bored by all that and eventually decided to ditch all the folklore stuff, but some of my friends from those days have proudly carried on. And now that I see this little girl dancing in the half decomposed movie shoot, I feel kind of proud of them. Even though I am not a great folklore fan anymore, I’ve always felt that the traditions helped me realize where I came from and I can’t help beginning to think it’s really important for them to be passed onto the next generations and stuff.

Otherwise they might only end up being a video recording someone made and put into an archive and left it there to rot. And eventually some fancy pants intellectual dude might find it and use it as a piece of footage for his avant-garde film with a totally hip title like “Decasia” or something like that just to show us how evanescent things are.

That really shouldn’t happen. When I have kids someday, I’ve got a lot to teach them.