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Rating: The park is crowded, the light cuts the stage in half, on one side the dancers will ascend in their lush Balkan costumes, on the other, in the shadows, the musicians of the Mankovica Orkestar will make their appearance. They have chosen to start their rich (but humble) Italian tour here, from Casatenovo, from the gentle and sinuous hills of the green and leafy eastern Brianza, in the prestigious setting of Villa Facchi; an estate villa splendidly nestled among the soft shapes of an English garden, usually rich in shadow and distant sounds but transformed for the occasion into an arena, a dance hall, a bustling tavern on the Kazanlak.
They seem like a great early 1900s internal combustion engine, these members of the Mankovica Orkestar, they start with a bang, warm up slowly, and then, who can stop them? And so the colorful and sparkling skirts, vibrant and radiant, the dancers, strong as iron, wooden and boisterous, lift circus-like exercises of tonic vigor to frenzied rhythms, distant dances from lost lands. Behind those reddish beards, behind those eyes full of elsewhere, lie divided and intoxicated men capable of drawing moments of scenic power from a harmonic chaos, where timpani violate the Anglo-Saxon calm of the facade, and slower and heavier dances, loaded with that melodramatic quality, can only be found in certain forlorn places abandoned even by old communism. It’s pleasant to watch, listen, and participate with great involvement and wonder from everyone, an hour and a half of great folklore that revives Balkan tradition with taste and innovation, without unnecessary commercial trivializations and without falling into easy stereotypes. Ninety minutes that you can also find with the same good quality on a CD that no one will ask you to buy but that will be waiting for you under the stage at the end of the show if you want it.
Esteemed listeners, I therefore urge you to direct your important attention to the Mankovica Orkestar should they pass through your hometowns, your lands. Their “grand tour” includes stops almost everywhere from here to the end of winter when the artists, now shipwrecked by music, sensations, and splendor, will return to their cold lands, to their families, like veterans from an exhausting campaign of notes and emotions and probably alcohol. A long tour that will only pass through minor locations, avoiding big cities, to meet the territory, to meet the provincial people, our taverns, and the folk that we also hide beneath the folds of the sheet.
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