Dancing Yourself, Dancing for Others: Performing Identity in a Transylvanian-Romanian Folkdance Ensemble

started, ironically, when I began learning Hungarian-Transylvanian dances in high school and college. My mother has been an avid international folk dancer [1] since before I was born, and I was always interested in the hobby. When my mother and stepfather became fasci-nated by Transylvanian couple dancing in the early 1990s, I started to learn these dances too. We attended monthly practice sessions and special workshops, to learn couple dances which were categorized under the name “Hungar-ian dancing. ” The regular dance events were organized by Americans who were not of Hungarian extraction and who attended because they loved the dances and music, while special workshops were usually taught by Hungarians from Budapest. [2] I eventually realized that some of these dances were from Romanian and Romany communitie