Bulba is a concert dance

Concert dance

Concert dance is dance performed for an audience. It is frequently performed in a theatre setting, though this is not a requirement, and it is usually choreographed and performed to set music.By contrast, social dance and participation dance may be performed without an audience and, typically, these...

 based on Belarusian folk traditions, choreographed, among several others, by Igor Moiseyev

Igor Moiseyev

Igor Alexandrovich Moiseyev has been widely acclaimed as the greatest 20th-century choreographer of character dance, a dance style similar to folk dance but with more professionalism and theatrics....

. The word means "potato

Potato

The potato is a starchy, tuberous crop from the perennial Solanum tuberosum of the Solanaceae family . The word potato may refer to the plant itself as well as the edible tuber. In the region of the Andes, there are some other closely related cultivated potato species...

" in Ukrainian

Ukrainian language

Ukrainian is a language of the East Slavic subgroup of the Slavic languages. It is the official state language of Ukraine. Written Ukrainian uses a variant of the Cyrillic alphabet....

 and Belarusian language

Belarusian language

The Belarusian language , sometimes referred to as White Russian or White Ruthenian, is the language of the Belarusian people...

s.

Moiseyev created the dance after visiting Belarus

Belarus

Belarus , officially the Republic of Belarus, is a landlocked country in Eastern Europe, bordered clockwise by Russia to the northeast, Ukraine to the south, Poland to the west, and Lithuania and Latvia to the northwest. Its capital is Minsk; other major cities include Brest, Grodno , Gomel ,...

 in late 1930s. He masterfully recreated the Belarusian folklore, so that the dance has become Belarusian national dance, featured by all national folk dance

Folk dance

The term folk dance describes dances that share some or all of the following attributes:*They are dances performed at social functions by people with little or no professional training, often to traditional music or music based on traditional music....

 ensembles.

The dance was choreographed to the vivid tune of the Belarusian folk song with the same name, Bulba (Potato), Moiseysev overheard during his visit. The dance and the song humorously portray the whole process of potato production.

In his memoirs, Moiseev wrote:

"When in 15 years I visited Belarus again, I've noticed that my Bulba was being danced everywhere. I would ask them: 'Where have you got this dance?' They would answer: 'It has always been around.' At the same time, folklorists assured me that this dance appeared in Belarus only after my choreography. If your creation is accepted by folk so as to consider it to be their own, this would be the highest form of the recognition!"