If ever I was led to take on a project, this was it.

 

My introduction to the Janosik Polish dance ensemble began on a steamy summer day last year while watching, of all things, vintage baseball played by 1860s rules. Sitting next to me in the little spot of available shade in the bleachers was the shortstop's wife. We struck up a conversation which eventually turned to her hobby of Polish dance and my job as a grant writer.

 

This dancer, Ann Louise, is the business manager for the Janosik Dancers. She speaks fluent Polish, makes trips to the mother country and bakes a delicious kolocz slaski, an eggy, rich bread stuffed with sweet cheese filling. I am half Polish, but with little knowledge of my roots other than a vague awareness that my maternal grandparents immigrated to the United States from a village near Krakow some 100 years ago.

 

Once Janosik signed on as a client, I dove into the sub-genre of philanthropy that is the preservation of cultural and folk traditions. A prime resource that rewarded the sheer joy I find in unearthing highly relevant, if obscure bits of information, was a 1996 National Endowment for the Arts report on folk and traditional arts.

 

"When thinking about the folk and traditional arts," wrote then-NEA chairman Jane Alexander in a forward, "one automatically thinks of community, or traditions passed down through generations, or ... art that is remembered and loved, renewed by the living and the dead, arts in harmony with our instinct to create."

 

Although not much of this passing down of Polish tradition had come my way, the research, the costumes and the music that Janosik members have shared with me over the past year all seem strangely familiar.

 

In late winter, the group invited me to attend a rehearsal. A storm was passing through and at one point the power went out, cutting the lights as well as the cd player in the studio. With only a brief pause, creative director Monique and the ensemble agreed to continue. In the soft glow of emergency lighting, dancers quietly singing the tune together, the ensemble proceeded to  complete the traditional Polish dance suite.

 

It was magical. And I felt very much at home.