A traditional
sword dance which once extended across the entire Christian Mediterranean, but now only survives on the
Croatian island of
Korčula. As the name suggests, it has many affinities with the
morisco dances of
Spain, the
Moors and Christians festivals which still take place in
Spanish villages today, and even English
morris dancing, a corruption - or so they say in Korčula - of the original form.
The Moreška is likely to have reached the
Adriatic islands while they were under the domination of the Republic of
Venice, to where it had spread from Spain; the first known instance of the dance took place in the Catalan town of
Lleida in
1156 to celebrate the
expulsion of the Moors from
Aragon.
The name of
Ruger given to one of the phases of the dance may be a corruption of Ruggiero, a Norman prince who ruled over
Sicily at much the same time and ferociously battled the
Saracens like any
self-respecting Catholic prince.
The dance is performed by eighteen men and a woman, and, ever since
1947, a rather incongruous
brass band. However, not all Moreška companies seem to use the band, and some stick to the whining accompaniment of the pig-shaped
bagpipes commonly heard in the folk music of
Istria somewhat to the north.
As performed in Korčula - versions elsewhere have differed, so that
Corsica had a cast of 160 guards and
Ferrara, for instance, threw in a
dragon trying to devour the
princess - the Moreška tells the story of the White King whose promised bride is abducted by the King of the Moors, or, as custom has it, the Black King. (Subtlety in
folk dancing tends to be thin on the ground.)
Bula, the fiancée in question, is dragged on stage in chains by the Black King in the Moreška's opening scene, and remains fettered throughout the entire dance, making it far from the ideal part for a village girl who wants to slip off after the first ten minutes with the lad on second
trombone.
The Kings cross swords and their eight-man armies then join in the fray in seven phases, or
kolaps, each soldier thrusting and parrying against his opposite number or even two of them at a time. At the end of the fourth
kolap, Bula attempts to intervene and offers her life in return for that of her beloved White King, but there's too much
horn-locking going on by that point for either of them to back down now.
Needless to say, by the end of the seventh
kolap, in which the Black guards are forced into an
ever-narrowing circle around their King by the White advance, Bula and her man are reunited, and according to the Moreška's spoken passages - most of which have been trimmed for modern audiences - she is rewarded for her faithfulness with a 'chaste kiss'. Surely Bula must start to wonder if it was all worth it.
Several towns in Korčula maintain Moreška companies, to which it's something of a local honour to belong, and the crowns of those men lucky enough to play one or the other King are likely to become
family heirlooms. Many of the swords, costumes and so on had to be replaced after
World War II, although nobody thought fit to interfere with the tradition that the White King and his men are always clothed in red.
The companies take turns to visit
Dubrovnik on summer Sundays and perform in front of
St. Blaise's Church, a piece of unashamedly tourist-oriented
pageantry which nonetheless doesn't detract from the skill needed to pull off the intricate manoeuvres of the
kolaps.
West End fight arrangers would love to meet some of these men, who at their best could almost show certain
screen swashbucklers a thing or two.