Éva Fábián is one of the most versatile figures of the dance house movement [a 1970s grassroots revival of village music and dance traditions]. She is an outstanding folk singer, storyteller, folk-music pedagogue, and children’s dance house leader.

She was born on 2 February 1959 in Szekszárd and grew up in Györe, Tolna County, in a family of Bukovina Székely origin. On both her father’s and mother’s side, her ancestors came from Andrásfalva (Măneuți). Her Bukovina Székely background has permeated her entire life and art.

…odaküjjel Andrásfalán... (lit. ...out there is Andrásfalva…)

The Bukovina Székely community left its original homeland, Székelyföld in Transylvania, at the end of the 18th century, fleeing Habsburg oppression, and found a new home in Bukovina beyond the Carpathians. Living in relative peace and under favourable conditions, yet in ethnic isolation, the Székelys preserved in many respects an old-fashioned, traditional culture. During the more than one and a half centuries spent in Bukovina, the culture they brought with them from home, combined with new influences, shaped the distinctively coloured Bukovina branch of Székely culture. Their special culture can still be most tangibly detected today in their richly idiomatic speech, their distinctive humour, their folk poetry, customs, and mentality – anyone who knows Éva Fábián can hardly doubt this.

The ordeals of the Bukovina Székelys continued in the 20th century. As their circumstances in Bukovina became unlivable, they were again forced to flee: a smaller portion settled in villages near Déva (Deva) in present-day Romania, while the majority moved to Bácska (Bačka). At the outbreak of the Second World War, they were resettled to Hungary. With the exception of three Székely villages that have survived to this day on the Lower Danube, they have since lived in the counties of Tolna, Baranya, and Bács-Kiskun, and around the town of Érd.

This repeatedly uprooted community finally found a permanent home in Hungary after the Second World War. The trials of flight, wandering, expulsion, and resettlement are preserved in the memories of every Bukovina Székely family. Whole generations had to relinquish, often several times in the course of their lives, their painstakingly re-created homes and belongings; during the enforced change of homeland in the war years, many also lost loved ones along the way. The burden was aggravated by the fact that, upon arriving in Hungary, they were housed in the homes of Swabians destined for expulsion [the post-war deportation of Hungary’s German minority], a policy that caused decades of tension between the local population – the Swabians who remained – and the newly settled Székelys. A long time had to pass before the hostility towards them began to ease…

“My father’s tailor’s shop was an island of peace…”

…in which a population of fundamentally different traditions and cultures, forced to live together, gradually grew accustomed to one another: sharp tensions softened into humorous anecdotes, teasing, and gentle banter.

There were two children in the family, Éva and her older brother. Her father, Lajos Fábián, was a master tailor, while her mother, Rozália Kolozsi, from whom she may have inherited both her beautiful voice and her love of singing, worked at home. Her childhood was filled with affection. Her father’s tailor’s shop was the venue of a lively social life. In the evenings, the native Györe villagers, Székelys, Swabians, and Hungarians from Upper Hungary [Hungarians resettled from present-day Slovakia] often gathered there to chat, tell stories, and share jokes, while the children listened and peeped in with delight for as long as the adults allowed. “I really lived the life of a peasant child,” says Fábián Éva. She recalls with particular fondness her Székely relatives, especially Aunt Enci, famed for her eloquence, from whom she heard countless Bukovina stories, and ‘bitang Marcika’ (lit. ‘rascal Marcika’) – her father’s uncle, Márton Fábián – from whom she learnt beautiful ‘keserves’ [slow, highly emotional lament-type] songs.

She began her musical studies – thanks to her own persistent determination – at the music school in Máza, the neighbouring village to Györe. She studied solfège and piano. Her fine singing voice was already noticed in primary school. She became a regular participant in county folk-song competitions, where, at first, she mostly sang popular magyar nóta [19th-century Hungarian parlour songs, distinct from older folk songs] learned from her mother. Encouraged by her teacher, she began to question her relatives, asking them to teach her ‘their own’ (Székely) folk songs. It was then that she discovered the talent for singing and the valuable folk-song repertoire of her uncle, Márton Fábián, mentioned earlier. Among other songs, she learned from him the beautiful Bukovina Székely ‘keserves’, Bujdosik a kicsi madár… (lit. The Little Bird Wanders in Exile…). At that time, the lively, spirited little girl – daring and full of verve, with good coordination, excellent musical sense and an open mind – was not yet aware of the true value of her community’s traditional culture. The Székely families strove to blend into their surroundings and did not flaunt their differences, which, in any case, were obvious. In those years, the value of Bukovina Székely folk art was appreciated above all by a relatively small circle of intellectuals, mostly ethnographers and ethnomusicologists. On their initiative, the Székely heritage groups were formed and developed, able to present their folklore mainly on stage. As a primary-school pupil, Fábián Éva regularly won the district and county folk-song competitions; it was thanks to this that, at a very young age, she herself became a member of the Izmény heritage ensemble (Izményi Székely Népi Együttes), with whom she took part in numerous performances and, in the process, learned a great deal from the older generation, rich in outstanding singer-dancer personalities.

As a small child, once she learned that nursery schools existed where children played together, she longed above all to attend one. In her native village, Györe, however, this was not possible. When her slightly older brother enrolled in the music school in nearby Máza, little Évike could no longer be kept at home; to her great delight – and her mother’s anxiety – she, too, was allowed to attend the music school at a very young age. In retrospect, however, it was the lasting absence of nursery school and the constant yearning for it that channelled her, as an adult, towards becoming a nursery school teacher. A fortunate opportunity arose: at the county seat, Szekszárd, a teacher-training track for nursery school teachers had just been launched, and she was admitted. She remembers her secondary-school years with great joy. She speaks appreciatively of the high-level training she received, which laid the foundations of her musical knowledge and culture and thoroughly prepared her for her vocation as a nursery school teacher. (It is well known that from the 1970s until their eventual abolition, these vocational secondary schools were excellent teacher-training institutions.)

During her secondary-school years, preparation for the nursery school teacher profession was not the only new source of joy in Fábián Éva’s life. She was also affected by another important, lifelong influence. Alongside the Izmény heritage ensemble, she joined the Szekszárd-based Bartina Folk Dance Ensemble (Bartina Néptáncegyüttes). At a Bukovina Székely gathering held in the county seat, the talented young folk singer caught the attention of Rozália Kóka [folklorist and storyteller], herself also of Bukovina Székely descent, who at that time was already organising folk-art camps and was a committed collector and promoter of Bukovina Székely traditional culture.

“Basically, I think my life turned there.”

She recalls that in 1975 she took part in Rozália Kóka’s folk-music camp in Szigetszentmárton, where she attended ethnographic lectures, among others by Bertalan Andrásfalvy [ethnographer and former Minister of Culture] and Imre Olsvai [ethnomusicologist]. At Rozália Kóka’s prompting, she began to learn Moldavian Csángó folk songs from original field recordings, met tradition-bearers, and discovered dance house – as a form of entertainment – thanks to the dance house movement, which had been underway for three years by then. In the camp, the evenings were spent learning dances and attending dancing house sessions, with musical accompaniment provided by the group that would later become the Kalamajka Ensemble, then performing under the name Mákvirág. By her own account, it was through this camp that she came to understand her Bukovina Székely origin and to recognise the value of her own community’s traditions and, more broadly, the significance of folk art. It was there that she finally committed herself to the dance house movement, which – under the professional guidance of György Martin [dance ethnographer] and his colleagues (including camp organiser Rozália Kóka) – aimed at the deepest possible understanding and acquisition of the traditional culture of the peasantry throughout the Carpathian Basin. She could not yet suspect that she herself would become one of the outstanding performing-artists and pedagogical personalities of the later ‘great’ generation: the cohort that placed emphasis on fieldwork, on getting to know the older generation still carrying traditional culture, and on ethnographic scholarship, in order to gain as authentic an understanding of folk tradition as possible – thereby providing a model (and a specific methodology) for the rising generations even today.

In this spirit, she joined the Mákvirág ensemble as a singer. Two years later, after personnel changes, they founded the now-legendary Kalamajka Ensemble. In the meantime, she passed her school-leaving exams and, at the invitation of Rozália Kóka, took up work as a nursery school teacher in Érd for two years, before committing herself to a nursery school in Angyalföld, a district of Budapest. She married the three-stringed viola player of the Kalamajka Ensemble, Péter Dövényi, and their shared life unfolded in Budapest. They lived through the legendary years of the dance house movement alongside contemporaries such as Béla Halmos, Ferenc Sebő, the Muzsikás Ensemble, Márta Sebestyén, the emerging Téka Ensemble, and others, while their vocation as folk musicians was shaped under the professional guidance of folklorists and collectors whose influence on the entire movement was decisive: György Martin, Jolán Borbély, Bertalan Andrásfalvy, Zoltán Kallós, the Pesovár brothers, and others.

With the Kalamajka Ensemble, they became the accompanying band of the Kertész Dance Ensemble (Kertész Táncegylet), and took over from the Muzsikás Ensemble the dance house in the Belvárosi Ifjúsági Ház (Inner City Youth Centre) in Budapest’s 5th District. This dance house became known simply as the ‘Molnár Street’, and developed into the most important and longest-running dance house in the Carpathian Basin – a kind of intellectual workshop. As a popular concert ensemble, they conducted folk-music fieldwork, continually researching and studying the extant repertoire, and it was in this spirit that they prepared their own folk-music albums. They were indispensable participants in the Táncház Festival, held annually from 1981 onwards, and on the dance house LPs associated with the event. They gave lectures, concerts and dance house sessions across the country and abroad. They became widely recognised figures in the Hungarian folk music and folk dance scene. Through Béla Halmos’s persistent collecting work, they became discerning interpreters of the folk music of Szék (Sic); thanks to Tamás Petrovits's collections, Transylvanian Székely music also played a prominent role in their repertoire, as did the folk-music heritage of the Bukovina Székelys. Legendary records were made, first among them the 1986 album Bonchidától Bonchidáig (lit. From Bonchida to Bonchida), with a cover depicting a Hungarian coat of arms embroidered on a ‘szűr’ cloak…

“Táncház-néni” (lit. Dance House Aunt) – folk-music teacher – storyteller

Today, we can confidently state that Fábián Éva has become a school-founder across several genres. Alongside the continuous collecting, learning, training, and development associated with her work in the band, her innate talent and sensitivity first led her to lay the methodological foundations of children’s dance-house management, then of folk-song teaching, and of teaching traditional storytelling – in short, the pedagogy of transmitting tradition. The actors of the dance house movement – musicians, dance teachers, dance house managers, craftspeople – which was steadily strengthening, professionalising, and becoming institutionalised, did possess ethnographic collections and an ever-expanding body of folk-music and folk-dance recordings. What they lacked, however, was a methodology for teaching, transmitting, and mediating folk tradition in settings different from its original milieu, which were typically urban. This knowledge and these skills were shaped by individual aptitudes, by acquired learning, and by a vast accumulation of practical experience – in dance teaching, instrumental folk-music teaching, folk-song teaching, storytelling, dance house management, running extracurricular groups, working with ensembles, and courses and camps. It was this ‘school’ that Fábián Éva attended, along with others.

The Kalamajka Ensemble’s dance house on Molnár Street was not only a model of the adult dance house but also of the children’s dance house genre. It would be hard to estimate how many children received a lifelong formative experience from Fábián Éva’s genuinely complex, live-music sessions, built on her nursery-teacher training, her practical experience in nursery education, her exceptionally beautiful, stylistically assured yet natural singing, her carefully chosen games and songs, her dance skills, her tradition-faithful storytelling and her charming, humorous personality spiced with Bukovina Székely ‘flavours’. For the families who attended Molnár Street, it undoubtedly provided a defining experience (the author has personally heard many fond recollections), and for the increasingly professionalised session leaders, it offered a model to follow and a yet-unwritten methodology. (This example itself clearly shows how many tasks still await us in documenting the good practices of the dance house movement.) The fact that Éva’s sessions became exemplary and filled a gap is attested by the large number of invitations she received to lead children’s dance houses at events throughout the country.

In parallel with the dance house practice, she regularly taught folk songs at the Inner City Youth Centre within the framework of extracurricular groups, at regional courses, and in arts and folk-arts camps; she has long been a regular participant as an instructor in further-training courses and camps for Bukovina Székely heritage groups. The number of professional forums at which she has appeared as teacher or guest lecturer is virtually impossible to list.

“The birth of the Egyszólam Ensemble was like a great feverish love. That was when I truly became a folk singer…”

In 1985, the year her son was born, she co-founded the Egyszólam Ensemble with András Berecz, Zoltán Juhász, and Kálmán Sáringer – thus, another legendary group was born. They undertook, in a unique way within the Carpathian Basin, to collect, research, and, above all, perform the most archaic strata of peasant song and instrumental music. Within dance house circles and among the intellectuals and artists who sympathised with the movement, ‘Molnár Street’ became a byword. Exactly the same phenomenon accompanied the work of the Egyszólam Ensemble. The band, which – in Éva’s words – dealt with the ‘thick’ of Hungarian folk music, burst into the Hungarian music scene with its revelatory sound and novel choice of themes. (One of the era’s leading jazz musicians, György Szabados, who shared a concert with them, said of the ensemble: “It is a miracle, a miracle simply that they exist, a miracle like the sight of a beautiful tree-lined avenue.”) This achievement alone would be remarkable. In 1993, however, they launched the now-legendary Egyszólam Camp (Egyszólam tábor), first in Síkfőkút and later in Váralja. This marked the start of a pedagogical work that has continued for more than three decades and remains unprecedented: in addition to the popular string-band music, the camp has led many young people to commit themselves to the recorder and bagpipe, and to the discovery and cultivation of regions whose folk-music heritage is less ‘fashionable’ or familiar but all the more weighty: Southern Transdanubia, the Palóc region, the Mezőség, the Küküllő region, and Gyimes. Just as an intellectual workshop and circle of admirers grew up around Molnár Street, so over the past decades the large ‘family’ of those who love the Egyszólam Ensemble and the Egyszólam Camp has steadily expanded.

Like her children’s dance house, the Egyszólam Ensemble has developed its own distinctive methodology – a specific camp pedagogy. According to the founders’ ars poetica, teaching each year is organised around a chosen region. A genuine curiosity of the camp is that tradition-bearers from the given region are not only invited to demonstrate their knowledge on an occasional basis; they also take part as integral participants in the teaching process. (The constraints of this article’s length make it impossible to list the roughly sixty tradition-bearers who have contributed to the camp over almost three decades.) Over time, fellow musicians who shared a commitment to the tradition represented by Egyszólam, such as Pál Dsupin, Gergely Agócs, and Marianna Nyitrai, also joined the camp’s work, as did students – among them Áron Dóra, Dominik Császár, and Róza Borzavári – who have since themselves become excellent musicians and teachers.

Since 1999, Fábián Éva has been a folk-song teacher at the Óbuda Folk Music School, where she continues to teach. Just as in the Egyszólam Camp, the presence of tradition-bearers plays an important role; she attaches great importance to music-school teaching, a method based on listening to and analysing original field recordings. One of the sure foundations of her pedagogical success is undoubtedly this methodology, complemented by her exemplary performing career, the deep knowledge of folk music acquired from tradition-bearers and, beyond all this, by her distinctive, endearing personality. She enjoys teaching in small groups: she believes in the effectiveness and success of communal singing, and maintains that, beyond all forms of skills development, the key element is the (communal) experience lived through singing. Her students are regular participants in prestigious folk-song competitions, where they consistently receive the highest distinctions, not only in solo but also in group categories. Many of them have gone on to become performers or teachers (among them Viktória Havay).

Although she is not an enthusiast of competitions, she accepts that qualifying systems remain, for the time being, an indispensable element of the educational structure. As one of the foremost experts in folk singing and traditional storytelling, she is regularly asked – despite her reluctance – to serve on juries; she is also a frequent lecturer at professional forums, further training courses, masterclasses, and conferences. From 2008 onwards, she taught for almost a decade as an adjunct lecturer at the Department of Folk Music of the Liszt Ferenc Academy of Music.

In 2013, after some thirty years, the Kalamajka Ensemble definitively drew its dance house activities to a close. This brought an emblematic era to an end not only in the band's life but also in that of the dance house movement itself. As active music-making and performing gradually receded, teaching increasingly moved to the centre stage of Éva’s life. She still teaches at the Óbuda Folk Music School, but her favourite activity has become storytelling.

“I spread like a folk tale: from mouth to mouth…”

Fábián Éva is one of today’s finest storytellers, who tells tales in richly flavoured Bukovina dialect, with relish, and in a manner faithful to the traditional storytelling genre. She teaches the craft and techniques of traditional storytelling in courses at the Hungarian Heritage House, as well as through lectures and other workshop formats. Respect for her Bukovina Székely forebears, the deep and thorough folkloric knowledge inherited from heritage-bearer masters, her outlook, her distinctive and original performing personality and her cheerful, warm character all make her an example to follow for us all.

Her talent for storytelling first unfolded through her work as a nursery-school teacher and in the children’s dance house sessions on Molnár Street. These two spaces were her most important training grounds. It became increasingly evident – to herself and to those around her – that she enjoyed and relished telling stories in the traditional way, orally. At one of the Egyszólam Ensemble’s concerts, it was the already accomplished storyteller András Berecz who first persuaded her to tell stories on stage for children. It was essentially at this point that her ‘storyteller career’ truly began.

She is not merely talented; she tells stories with an instinctive sense for what is folkloristically authentic – that is, in a way that corresponds to the documented content and stylistic criteria of traditional oral storytelling as practised in peasant communities. It is important to note that, in the 1990s, ethnographic research initially focused solely on the dance, music, and craft revivals of the dance house movement. Storytelling featured primarily as an increasingly popular and valued form of refined entertainment in ‘folk life’ – and, largely thanks to Éva’s growing popularity, in children’s culture: in the programmes of libraries, nursery schools, primary schools and cultural centres. It was through the activities of the Hungarian Heritage House, founded in 2001, that the study and promotion of the traditional storytelling genre, and the development and teaching of a methodology for storytelling based on ethnographic scholarship, became truly important. It was essentially at this time that it was recognised that the traditional storytelling genre had a few early popularisers (such as Rozália Kóka) and a few truly authentic performers, among them András Berecz and Fábián Éva. Thus, she came into the field of vision of the newly established Hungarian Heritage House, with which she has been connected through numerous professional programmes. For more than twenty years, she has been a permanent storyteller in the educational programme Találkozás a néphagyománnyal (lit. Encounter with Folk Tradition), and serves as presenter, singer, and storyteller in the Rendhagyó tánc- és drámaóra (lit. Unconventional Dance and Drama Lesson) series. She is a regular contributor to the institution’s children’s camps; the Népi énektanfolyam (lit. Folk-Song Course) was launched under her professional leadership, and since 2007, she has been a permanent instructor on the Hagyományos mesemondás képzés (lit. Traditional Storytelling Training). Thanks to more than two decades of human and professional collaboration, the Hungarian Heritage House has produced an educational and cultural animation publication presenting Éva Fábián’s storytelling: …odaküjjel Andrásfalán. Fábián Éva mesél (lit. …Out There in Andrásfalva – Stories Told by Éva Fábián). To date, this is the only publication which, following in the footsteps of the ethnographic series documenting the knowledge of peasant storyteller personalities, attempts to present, with ethnographic rigour, the art of a contemporary storyteller.

In recent years, Fábián Éva’s many-sided work has been recognised with major awards. In 2022, she received the Martin György Prize for her outstanding achievements in folk art; in 2024, she was awarded the Liszt Ferenc Prize, and that same year, she was elected a corresponding member of the Hungarian Academy of Arts.

This exceptionally rich career is unquestionably intertwined with an outstanding period in Hungarian culture, characterised by the emergence, expansion, consolidation, and, encouragingly, flourishing of the dance house movement. Fábián Éva is one of the movement’s most versatile figures, whose unique knowledge, sincere enthusiasm for, respect for, and love of traditional culture, and entire career to date offer a model to follow.

[2024]