Posted on the Imperial War Museum’s website is a film from 1944 called Kit Bag Songs which features the Polish Army Choir. In one section , Pola Nireńska dances while the soldiers sing an old Polish dialect folk song ‘Kiedym jechał do dzieweczki’.
This song is about a man about to leave his village to go to war who tells his sweet heart about the hardships of a soldier’s life. Nireńska dances the role of the village girl, the film intercutting between the singers and the dancing.
In 1940 there were about 17,000 Polish troops based in Scotland. They had fought the Germans when Poland was simultaneously invaded by Germany and the Soviet Union in September 1939, and then fought them again in France before evacuating to Britain. They were quartered in the Scottish Lowlands.
The choir in the film was started to give performances to local people near where they were based. After one performance in August 1940 in Coatbridge near Glasgow, Captain Jan Sliwinski explained ‘that the choir was composed of officers from various regiments now stationed “somewhere in Scotland”. In giving such concerts free of charge in aid of charities … they hoped in some little way to repay the people of Scotland for the great kindness which had been shown to them’ (Coatbridge Leader 17-8-40). Sliwinski first met Nireńska in Vienna in 1935 and it is possibly through him that she ended up working with the choir.
photo from Kostyrko Tancerka Zaglada (2019)
As I noted in the previous video, Nireńska had been dancing to Polish folk songs since her teens in Warsaw, and her repertoire during the 1940s included some Polish folk song themed pieces. A review from 1942 notes Nireńska’s Village Beauty ‘is the beauty of the village and she knows it, and postures and struts and is coy in turn’. Nireńska’s performance in the film seems similar. Another review perceptively observed that Nireńska was not dancing authentic folk songs. The writer commented on the theatricality of these which convey ‘the atmosphere and style of the particular types of dances by her own choreography and apt costumes rather than by performing actual folk dances and using actual costumes’.
Nireńska – photo by Lee Miller
The writer here was probably more familiar with the revived English folk songs and dances collected by Cecil Sharp and others. Such revivals were surely in part motivated by fear that industrialisation and modernity were leading to the loss of some essential, supposedly pre-industrial Englishness.
Nireńska and her Polish peers were coming from a very different place. After the First World War, Poland had become independent after more than a century as a divided country ruled by Prussia, Austro-Hungary, and Tsarist Russia who in 1795 had carved up and annexed what had been the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth. In the early twentieth century folk songs were used in a modern way in dance schools like that of Janina Mieczynska in Warsaw where Nireńska first studied and then taught. Taking songs and folk steps from different parts of Poland and using them in new ways suggests a creative approach to folk culture that was very different from that of the more conservative ethos of the English folk song collectors. The choreography Nireńska performed with the soldiers may express nationalist sensibilities. But the fact that Nireńska was Jewish and had been living and working outside Poland for over a decade shows that it does so in a liberal, inclusive way.
In the film Nireńska and the soldiers never appear in the same frame. The editing cuts between singers and dancer so that we don’t see the choreography all the way through, only a few phrases of it so that there’s little sense of the form of the piece as a whole.
screenshots from Kit Bag Songs
In what we do see of Nireńska’s dancing – her hand gestures, her foot work, the way she turns on the spot – it is clear that she is not a ballet trained dancer. Instead there are resemblances between her movements and the way her teacher and mentor Mary Wigman danced.
[discussion comparing clips of Wigman and Nireńska]
There is a folk dance quality to Nireńska’s solo and a joyfulness that is very different from the powerfully emotional expression in Wigman’s solos. This is true of some other dancers who trained with Wigman.
Andrea Amort has observed that the Austrian dance artist Hanna Berger, who trained with Wigman a year or two after Nireńska, ‘no longer had to concern herself as much [as Wigman had] with liberating dance from the fetters of tradition and was free to incorporate aspects of many different styles and art forms in her works’ (Amort 2009, 133). The same could be said of Nireńska’s use in this dance of folk steps, costume and facial expressions to convey emotions.
So, what can we learn from this?
This section of Kit Bag Songs does not show Nireńska’s most significant choreography of the period. It would be really useful if there were film of some of the pieces Nireńska was touring later in the 1940s. Her repertoire then included a piece about the Virgin Mary danced to an old Breton hymn Disons Le Chapelet. Reviews suggest that her Homeless Child was tragic, ‘Felina’ – Catty Woman slightly sarcastic and A Scarecrow Remembers wistful. These reviews suggest her choreography and performance were powerful and well received.
What the film of Kiedym jechał does show however is a confident experienced performer with a strong presence who was clearly trained in modern dance rather than ballet. Recent research into mid-twentieth-century dance in England is based on the assumption that the only serious artistic dancing at the time was by ballet companies. The fact that Nireńska became hidden from history poses the question whether there were more modern dancers living and performing in Britain at the time who have also been forgotten. The dance scene was surely more complex and interesting than we currently think. Certainly Nireńska is an artist whose work deserves more attention.
The full film of Kit Bag Songs, in only part of which Nireńska appears, can be seen on the Imperial War Museum’s website at
ramsayburt 