Most immigrants to the United States arrive with few possessions but with a cultural memory bag of language, stories, songs and dances.
A generation passes, then a second; the old languages, memories and stories disappear. Occasionally, songs and dances are carried through the generations when a group steps forward to shoulder the responsibility.
Enter the four generations of Vela Luka Croatian Dance Ensemble and Ruze Dalmatinke (Dalmation Roses) Orchestra, which performs Feb. 26 in Edmonds.
They have been featured in two national TV documentaries, including ABC’s “Children of Ellis Island,” and will sing in the open-throat style of interior Croatia as well as lyrical Dalmatian and Bosnian melodies.
Costume changes occur throughout the show with costumes copied from originals down to the last button.
Lake Forest Park resident Maria Plancich Kesovija is the artistic director; her mother, Alma Plancich, directs the orchestra with her sister, Binki Spahi. The sisters, along with a third sister, Maria Petrish, executive director of the ensemble, fled Croatia after World War II with their parents.
Turned away at Ellis Island because of a quota, they wandered from Haita to Venezuela, back to Ellis Island and eventually to Anacortes.
The ensemble and orchestra started in 1975 when Kesovija was 8 years old to perform the music from Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina. Since then they have performed around the world.
“Quite frankly I can’t imagine being without it,” said Petrish’s mother, Alma Plancich, of the group.
The music was a part of her parents lives whether they were around the kitchen table, at church or in refugee camps.
“The music was the thread, and religion, too, that bound us together” on the long journey to America, said Plancich, also a Lake Forest Park resident.
Cultural preservation is a very fragile act.
“All it takes is one generation for the whole thing to be lost. … It’s a good feeling that (the children) are carrying it on. But at the same time I know how fragile it is. It hinges on such a passion for what you’re doing,” Plancich said.
“So much of the culture is present within the dances themselves, a wedding, a harvest, a celebration,” said Kesovija, who spent three months in Croatia learning the language when she was 20.
“When I went to the coast, and I went to Vela Luka, all of a sudden I heard them speak this dialect that my parents had spoken. All of a sudden the circle connected,” she said.
“I get choked up about it … it’s like having have a Texan dialect in New York; not until you go down to the town where your mom was born that they carry this language. It’s such a specific dialect from a specific village.”
Her mother also returned to Croatia when she was a young woman.
“It was beautiful, absolutely breathtakingly beautiful, but I could hear the donkeys braying and see the isolation and I was so grateful that my parents were able to leave and give us a different life in America.
“But I was also grateful that they imbedded in us where we came from and why we left,” Plancich said.
Talk to us
> Give us your news tips.
> Send us a letter to the editor.
> More Herald contact information.
