O, who can hold a fire in his hand. By thinking on the frosty Caucasus?

My glorious friend B enticed me out on Wednesday (a November night, cold and rainy) to a concert of Georgian polyphonic singing and dance by Zedashe. She’d spent a week with them in the Caucasus a year or two ago, learning songs.

Hey, they had me at whole-goat bagpipe. Blaaaaat!

I love unadorned voices, and the Georgian style is splendid: strong-throated columns of sound, plangent interweaving melismata, outcall and response.

What I knew nothing about was the history and folklife. I caught myself thinking, “This is wonderful world-building ... No, wait.”

If I’m not misremembering, there was a Christian chant enwoven with a midsummer fire ritual, invoking sacred cattle bringing light on their horns. And they did it as a circle dance, like a Faroese ballad.

Wine has been made in the Caucasus since the Neolithic by burying grapes in earthen jars overwinter, and digging them up metamorphosed.

And Tamar, King of Kings and Queen of Queens is waiting to be fantasy.

The dances were amazing. Besides the stamp-and-shuffle proper to a ballad circle, there were virtuoso displays. I can only describe the style as body polyphony: a swift stiff scissoring of legs—something between a galliard and a Charleston—with serpentining arms; or a martial salute or a priestly (almost hierophantic) benediction, with the legs unbraiding like clay coils. There were versions of that squat-kick that we think of as “Cossack,” but done by two men, spiralling about a handclasp. Pairs of men or pairs of women danced challenges or unions; men and women never touched. Mixed dances were rivalries, two of one gender competing for one opposite. In one courtship dance, a man flirted back his tunic, to reveal his breeches crotch. Guess who triumphed? I only wish they’d done a sword-dance.

Here are some fierce little children from Tbilisi, spinning like Charybdis (dancing starts at 3:44, after the drumming). Sadly, the girls are backdrops here. I hope they got a chance to shine.

Here in Venice they aren't! I love that it's spontaneous.

Nine