DEAD PUPPETS DANCE By Philip Thornton
Mr. Thornton is a good traveller. He is a linguist, a good mixer, an expert musician, folk-dancer and photographer, and he has humour and patience—most important of all. His talents were proved in his first book, The Voice of Atlas, and they are even more evident in Dead Puppets Dance (Collins, Dos. 6d.). The main object of his journey was to study the music and dancing of the Balkan peasants, but of course he stopped to see whatever else was to be seen. The result is a brilliant account of a journey through Albania, southern Yugoslavia, Greece, Turkey, Bulgaria and Roumania. The high spots are his descriptions of the arna7ing dance festivals at which the peasants perform dances whose origin is often lost in the mists of ancient magic. His account of the ritual orgies of a self- mutilating religious sect in Roumania— the Skoptzi—is the first to be given by an Englishman. He analyses, sometimes with diagrams and musical illustrations, the music and steps of some of the more interesting dances, and many readers will wish that he had concentrated on those subjects, which certainly inspire his best reporting.
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