Gopak is a Uyghur dance revived by Soviet choreographers. Ukrainian hopak is a Uyghur dance revived by Soviet choreographers

Ukrainians always want to be proud of something. Moreover, they are not even proud - they often “puff up”.

But you should be proud. Because how else to exalt a nation? To justify the murder of all sorts of “subhumans” – “separatists”, “vata”, “enemies of Ukraine”? That is why “cyborgs”, “ATO heroes” were invented, as well as fairy tales about the fact that Buddha and Christ had Ukrainian roots, and the ancient Ukrainians founded the entire earthly civilization. And, of course, they are reshaping the history of Ukraine, talking about a state that was not on the world map before the formation of the USSR.

But Ukrainians are somehow violetly proud of ancient Ukrainians, especially since many adequate citizens of Ukraine who have an education and have read smart books understand that this is the most blatant lie that the Ukrainian authorities could come up with. And we need some more real examples. Because you can’t be endlessly proud of just an embroidered shirt and dress up dogs in it.

And so - we found it! And they were immediately canonized - combat hopak officially became a national sport. Previously, the Verkhovna Rada adopted bill No. 5324, which introduces the concept of “national sport” into legislation, and now the Ukrainian parliament has legalized dancing in trousers in the sports arena.

Well, okay, dance has become a martial art, who feels bad about it? Look, Brazil has capoeira, they dance and wave their legs, everyone likes it. But the Brazilians did not call capoeira an ancient martial art; it was originally the dances of slaves who disguised hand-to-hand combat training in their dances. But with the “combat hopak” it is much more difficult.

The author of this style is Vladimir Pilat, who has been developing it since 1985 and even published two books. By the way, he is not only the supreme teacher of combat hopak, but also the President of the International Federation of Combat Hopak, Ataman General (respectively, Colonel General of the KVU), Chairman of the Holy Council of the Union of Sons and Daughters of the Native Ukrainian National Faith (“RUNVera”).

After this listing of titles, any sane person should understand everything. But this is just the beginning.

Ukrainian historians seriously believe that every movement of the hopak carries encoded information. This style is aimed at reviving the harmonious warrior and is still considered exotic. And after the word “esoteric” it is enough to remember another charlatan style - non-contact combat. Experts have heard about it.

But let's return to the combat hopak.

Let's start with the fact that there is nothing national in this so-called martial art. I confidently say this as a martial arts coach and as a person who has been involved in martial arts for 30 years. Let's look at these "combat elements".

The lower level is rotation (mill, barrel, watermelon) - that is, various types of sweeps.

All this has long been in the arsenal of Chinese Wushu, which is much more ancient than the most ancient Ukrainian. These movements are also found in both Korean and Japanese martial arts, which were almost all borrowed from China.

Next - squats (simple, side, with a hand hit on the floor, on the boot, on the sole), stretching down and to the side, crawler, broom, sweep, lay - the same sweeps and kicks from below from a sitting position. Many of these elements are known in jiu-jitsu, and in sambo, and in any other wrestling, when a wrestler sits up to knock out the opponent’s legs or to make throws that grab his legs.

The upper level is jumping (straddle, ring, hawk, toad, etc.). These are elements of jumping strikes, which in hopak are more similar not to strikes, but to beautiful and high jumps. If martial hopak practitioners showed at least once how with such “gops” they can break boards, tiles or something similar, as Korean athletes of tang-su-do or tae-kwon-do do, then THIS could be considered blows . And so - the masters of “combat hopak” simply stupidly copy the blows of Japanese karate-do - mawashi-geri, Maya-geri, Yoko-geri and others.

By the way, the Supreme Teacher of Combat Gopak himself, Vladimir Pilat, claims that he studied Kyokushin karate for 9 years, in 1977 he successfully passed the exams for 1st dan and received a black belt. He opened his own school of Kyokushin karate called “Tiger School”, and at the same time studies other styles of karate-do, kick boxing, and professional boxing.

Any questions?

You can, of course, argue about the combat hopak, but let's talk about the dance itself. Because the fighting style was created, as it were, on the basis of dance, and this dance was mentioned by Gogol, and the first information about it dates back to the 16th century. The hopak melody has been used by many composers. Thus, hopak themes are present in “May Night” by Rimsky-Korsakov, “Mazepa” by Tchaikovsky and many other works.

Mentioned - but no one remembers what he looked like.

The first to describe the hopak in detail is considered to be the Ukrainian composer Vasily Verkhovynets (1880-1938), author of the book “The Theory of Ukrainian Folk Dance”. The hopak described by Verkhovinets included jumps, squats and rotations, colloquially called gopki in Ukraine. But he recorded the dances using only a combination of drawings and descriptions in words. But words alone cannot describe the movements in such detail that a dance can be reproduced from such a recording. Movement, like music, requires a kind of recording system. Today there are two such systems that are used for recording modern dance and ballet (Laban. Method, Benegh Method).

But the history of hopak, that is, that so-called “national” Ukrainian dance, actually began with the creation in 1940 of the Ukrainian Song and Dance Ensemble, which was headed by Pavel Pavlovich Virsky from 1955 to 1975. Even the Ukrainians themselves admit that “It was this choreographer who created an academic folk dance based on classics and traditional folklore, and staged that famous hopak, which the Academic Dance Ensemble of Ukraine named after him still concludes concerts with.”

But the “traditional folklore” was not Ukrainian. After all, Hutsul dances or round dances of Kolomyykas can be considered traditional Ukrainian. As historians write, Ukrainian stage dance existed until then only in the form of insert numbers in performances of the Ukrainian musical drama theater and isolated Ukrainian operas. And so Virsky created Ukrainian folk dance, as they say, from scratch.

The Pravda newspaper of March 13, 1936 wrote: “I must say frankly that the dancing was the best thing that was shown in the performance. In the fourth act, Hopak “brought literally the entire theater to its feet!”

Dancers flying high into the air with sabers drawn in their hands, breathtaking spins, masterful fencing in dance, rapid jumps and various “squats”, also performed while preserving the technical canons of classical choreography (turnout, extended rise, clear positions of arms and legs, etc.) .d.), - shocked not only the ordinary Moscow public, but also K. S. Stanislavsky himself, who enthusiastically appreciated the Kievans’ tour.”

That is, hopak was created precisely by Soviet choreographers in the USSR in the mid-30s of the last century. That is, the national Ukrainian dance, the pride of Ukrainians, was created by the communists who are hated by today’s Ukrainians.

Hopak needs to be decommunized urgently!

But that's not all.

Let me add the last fly in the ointment to the Ukrainian vanity fairy tale. Where do you think the main elements of Ukrainian folk dance were taken from? You'll never guess. From China. More precisely, hopak received its main, so to speak, basic elements from... Uighur folk dance. The video shows this very clearly at 2.26 minutes.

Uyghur national dance

The Uyghurs are a Turkic-speaking people, the vast majority of whom live in a region called Xinjiang in the far west of China. But Ukrainian hopak surprisingly resembles Tajik, Turkmen, and Adyghe folk dances. That is, the basis of Ukrainian dance was the dances of the Turkic tribes.

Thus, not only does the so-called “combat hopak” have nothing to do with the national martial art, but is a weak copy of Japanese karate-do, but the “hopak” dance itself is a symbiosis of the national dances of other peoples.

And the time has come to talk about the nation itself - Ukrainians. Maybe it was also created artificially?

Gopak is a dance of Ukrainian Cossacks that originated in southern Ukraine and Russia in Ukrainian military communities in the 1600s. The Cossacks celebrated their return from battle with victory through a similar impromptu dance. The musicians collected their instruments: violins, bagpipes and flutes and pipes, and joined the dancers in a festive performance called hopak.

In the 16th century, Ukraine experienced a long period of struggle for independence, mainly against the Ottoman Empire (1657-1709) and the Russian Empire (1686-1709). At this time, the Cossacks in the area called "Sich" introduced an unusual tradition of celebrating their victories upon returning home. As a celebration, these ordinary warriors began to dance, reenacting their battle scenes so that everyone could see what they had experienced. They performed dance pantomimes of sorts using their swords and other weapons, and local musicians joined them in dancing. The men then began to improvise, performing acrobatics in the air, as well as other specific movements such as squats, to prove their masculinity and heroism. This style of dance movements gave the name hopak - because of the Ukrainian word “gopati”, that is, “to jump”.

Since the dance was pure improvisation, the Cossacks could change its tempo at any time. The tempo of the musicians was based on the choice of the dancers, because dancing allowed them to express their individuality. Although the music did not have a specific tempo or melody, the musical time signature of the hopak was usually 2/4. The music generally increased in tempo from quite calm at the beginning to almost furious towards the end of the dance. The kobzar, a Ukrainian folk singer-storyteller, usually also accompanied the dance. Classical instruments that were used for the musical accompaniment of hopak are violins, bagpipes, flutes, trumpets, and cymbals. Over time, hopak music developed and began to be included in operas and ballets. Thus, one of the most striking examples is the opera “Mazepa”, written by Tchaikovsky.

Dance has also evolved throughout history. What began as exclusively a dance of warriors in the Sich, over time grew into a festive event for everyone else. Although men still played a leading role in the dance, when the dance began to spread to the surrounding villages, boys, girls, and women soon began to take part in it. This mixed version of hopak became ubiquitous when the Sich was destroyed at the end of the 18th century.

The overall structure of the dance evolved, including by allowing more dancers to participate. Most likely, Ukraine. Today, hopak has changed its appearance to suit a more modern perception of dance. Now it is not only pure solo improvisation. Most dances are performed in unison by a group of men and women. The acrobatic aspect of the hopak is performed mainly by male soloists.

Ukrainians always want to be proud of something. Moreover, they are not even proud - they often “puff up”. Although the word “pykha” is translated into Russian as “arrogance”.

Although, as “Antifascist” already wrote, there is no word “proud” in the Ukrainian language. Where a Russian has pride, a Svidomo has “pihatіst”, which is “vanity” in Russian.

But you should be proud. Because how else to exalt a nation? To justify the murder of all sorts of “subhumans” – “separatists”, “vata”, “enemies of Ukraine”? That is why “cyborgs”, “ATO heroes” were invented, as well as fairy tales about the fact that Buddha and Christ had Ukrainian roots, and the ancient Ukrainians founded the entire earthly civilization. And, of course, they are reshaping the history of Ukraine, talking about a state that was not on the world map before the formation of the USSR.

But Ukrainians are somehow violetly proud of ancient Ukrainians, especially since many adequate citizens of Ukraine who have an education and have read smart books understand that this is the most blatant lie that the Ukrainian authorities could come up with. And we need some more real examples. Because you can’t be endlessly proud of just an embroidered shirt and dress up dogs in it.

And so - we found it! And they were immediately canonized - combat hopak officially became a national sport. Previously, the Verkhovna Rada adopted bill No. 5324, which introduces the concept of “national sport” into legislation, and now the Ukrainian parliament has legalized dancing in trousers in the sports arena.

Well, okay, dance has become a martial art, who feels bad about it? Look, Brazil has capoeira, they dance and wave their legs, everyone likes it. But the Brazilians did not call capoeira an ancient martial art; it was originally the dances of slaves who disguised hand-to-hand combat training in their dances. But with the “combat hopak” it is much more difficult.

The author of this style is Vladimir Pilat, who has been developing it since 1985 and even published two books. By the way, he is not only the supreme teacher of combat hopak, but also the President of the International Federation of Combat Hopak, Ataman General (respectively, Colonel General of the KVU), Chairman of the Holy Council of the Union of Sons and Daughters of the Native Ukrainian National Faith (“RUNVera”).

After this listing of titles, any sane person should understand everything. But this is just the beginning.

Ukrainian historians seriously believe that every movement of the hopak carries encoded information. This style is aimed at reviving the harmonious warrior and is still considered exotic. And after the word “esoteric” it is enough to remember another charlatan style - non-contact combat. Experts have heard about it.

But let's return to the combat hopak.

Let's start with the fact that there is nothing national in this so-called martial art. I confidently say this as a martial arts coach and as a person who has been involved in martial arts for 30 years. Let's look at these "combat elements".

The lower level is rotation (mill, barrel, watermelon) - that is, various types of sweeps.

All this has long been in the arsenal of Chinese Wushu, which is much more ancient than the most ancient Ukrainian. These movements are also found in both Korean and Japanese martial arts, which were almost all borrowed from China.

Next - squats (simple, side, with a hand hit on the floor, on the boot, on the sole), stretching down and to the side, crawler, broom, sweep, lay - the same sweeps and kicks from below from a sitting position. Many of these elements are known in jiu-jitsu, and in sambo, and in any other wrestling, when a wrestler sits up to knock out the opponent’s legs or to make throws that grab his legs.

The upper level is jumping (straddle, ring, hawk, toad, etc.). These are elements of jumping strikes, which in hopak are more similar not to strikes, but to beautiful and high jumps. If martial hopak practitioners showed at least once how with such “gops” they can break boards, tiles or something similar, as Korean athletes of tang-su-do or tae-kwon-do do, then THIS could be considered blows . And so - the masters of “combat hopak” simply stupidly copy the blows of Japanese karate-do - mawashi-geri, Maya-geri, Yoko-geri and others.

By the way, the Supreme Teacher of Combat Gopak himself, Vladimir Pilat, claims that he studied Kyokushin karate for 9 years, in 1977 he successfully passed the exams for 1st dan and received a black belt. He opened his own school of Kyokushin karate called “Tiger School”, and at the same time studies other styles of karate-do, kick boxing, and professional boxing.

Any questions?

You can, of course, argue about the combat hopak, but let's talk about the dance itself. Because the fighting style was created, as it were, on the basis of dance, and this dance was mentioned by Gogol, and the first information about it dates back to the 16th century. The hopak melody has been used by many composers. Thus, hopak themes are present in “May Night” by Rimsky-Korsakov, “Mazepa” by Tchaikovsky and many other works.

Mentioned - but no one remembers what he looked like.

The first to describe the hopak in detail is considered to be the Ukrainian composer Vasily Verkhovynets (1880-1938), author of the book “The Theory of Ukrainian Folk Dance”. The hopak described by Verkhovinets included jumps, squats and rotations, colloquially called gopki in Ukraine. But he recorded the dances using only a combination of drawings and descriptions in words. But words alone cannot describe the movements in such detail that a dance can be reproduced from such a recording. Movement, like music, requires a kind of recording system. Today there are two such systems that are used for recording modern dance and ballet (Laban. Method, Benegh Method).

But the history of hopak, that is, that so-called “national” Ukrainian dance, actually began with the creation in 1940 of the Ukrainian Song and Dance Ensemble, which was headed by Pavel Pavlovich Virsky from 1955 to 1975. Even the Ukrainians themselves admit that “It was this choreographer who created an academic folk dance based on classics and traditional folklore, and staged that famous hopak, which the Academic Dance Ensemble of Ukraine named after him still concludes concerts with.”

But the “traditional folklore” was not Ukrainian. After all, Hutsul dances or round dances of Kolomyykas can be considered traditional Ukrainian. As historians write, Ukrainian stage dance existed until then only in the form of insert numbers in performances of the Ukrainian musical drama theater and isolated Ukrainian operas. And so Virsky created Ukrainian folk dance, as they say, from scratch.

The Pravda newspaper of March 13, 1936 wrote: “I must say frankly that the dancing was the best thing that was shown in the performance. In the fourth act, Hopak “brought literally the entire theater to its feet!”

Dancers flying high into the air with sabers drawn in their hands, breathtaking spins, masterful fencing in dance, rapid jumps and various “squats”, also performed while preserving the technical canons of classical choreography (turnout, extended rise, clear positions of arms and legs, etc.) .d.), - shocked not only the ordinary Moscow public, but also K. S. Stanislavsky himself, who enthusiastically appreciated the Kievans’ tour.”

That is, hopak was created precisely by Soviet choreographers in the USSR in the mid-30s of the last century. That is, the national Ukrainian dance, the pride of Ukrainians, was created by the communists who are hated by today’s Ukrainians.

Hopak needs to be decommunized urgently!

But that's not all.

Let me add the last fly in the ointment to the Ukrainian vanity fairy tale. Where do you think the main elements of Ukrainian folk dance were taken from? You'll never guess. From China. More precisely, hopak received its main, so to speak, basic elements from... Uighur folk dance. The video shows this very clearly at 2.26 minutes.

Uyghur national dance

The Uyghurs are a Turkic-speaking people, the vast majority of whom live in a region called Xinjiang in the far west of China. But Ukrainian hopak surprisingly resembles Tajik, Turkmen, and Adyghe folk dances. That is, the basis of Ukrainian dance was the dances of the Turkic tribes.

Thus, not only does the so-called “combat hopak” have nothing to do with the national martial art, but is a weak copy of Japanese karate-do, but the “hopak” dance itself is a symbiosis of the national dances of other peoples.

Gopak. History of origin, description, types and features of hopak

The Ukrainian parliament recently adopted as a basis a draft amendment to the law “On Physical Culture and Sports”, granting the official status of “national sports” to combat hopak and other exotic martial arts. Apparently, the speaker of the Verkhovna Rada Andriy Parubiy acted as a lobbyist for the “legalization” of combat hopak. He did not hide his joy over the results of the vote (he managed to pass the question, however, only on the second attempt) and even admitted to the 112 TV channel that at one time he personally was involved in hopak. Minister of Youth and Sports of Ukraine Igor Zhdanov, commenting on the decision of the deputies, noted that “over the years of Ukraine’s independence, sports that grew out of Ukrainian traditions began to recover and develop.” But for people who are at least a little familiar with the history of the issue, what is happening today around the “combat hopak” can cause nothing but homeric laughter.

The Ukrainian edition of Wikipedia claims that “combat hopak is a Ukrainian martial art, recreated on the basis of elements of traditional Cossack combat that were preserved in folk dances, and the personal experience of martial arts researcher Vladimir Pilate from Lviv.” Vladimir Pilat is a remarkable personality. According to the same Wikipedia and numerous interviews, on his father’s side he comes from an ancient knightly family, known since 1121. His maternal grandfather allegedly served in the personal guard of the Austrian Emperor Franz Joseph. It was his grandfather who began to teach young Vladimir to fight. Pilate regularly claims that he is of “Cossack descent.” In this case, he is obviously counting on completely ignorant people, since any more or less literate person knows that there have never been any Cossacks in Western Ukraine (or rather, they came, but not for long, to cruelly punish the “former brothers” who had gone to Uniatism, but they were definitely not inclined to start families with Galicians).

After training in artistic gymnastics for four years and freestyle wrestling for two years, Vladimir, who at that time was only 12-13 years old, allegedly began to learn kyokushin (kyokushinkai) karate in 1968. In any case, this is how he tells reporters about it. Where Vladimir managed to find a teacher is a big mystery. The fact is that even in Japan the first recognized kyokushinkai center arose only in 1964. The style was first “brought” to the USSR by Alexander Ivanovich Tanyushkin, who learned about its existence in 1969 and brought it to his homeland from abroad only in the 1970s. So, in order for young Pilate to begin mastering kyokushinkai in 1968, he had to at least have the gift of foresight.

In parallel with Kyokushinkai, Vladimir Pilat, by his own admission, studied goju-ryu, sone, shotokan karate, jujutsu, aikido and kickboxing. In the late 1970s, Pilate began teaching martial arts, and in 1985 he created the “Experimental School for the Study of Martial Arts of the Ukrainian People.” The last undertaking became possible thanks to the support of... the Komsomol, which provided the “sensei” with a gym for the needs of national martial arts. At this time, Pilate announced that the Ukrainian hopak contained encrypted sacramental knowledge about ancient Cossack martial arts, which he was able to “decipher” thanks to the knowledge received from his grandfather.

Soon Vladimir will move on. There are excerpts on the Internet from an interview he once gave to the Rivne newspaper Volyn. The material contains the words of Pilate, who claimed that in fact the combat hopak arose 8 thousand years ago on the Volyn lake Svityaz, from which the Hindu god Krishna and his guards “gopas” originated, who danced the combat dance “hopak”. The legacy of the “gops” was passed on from generation to generation until it was destroyed by the Soviet regime, and then restored by Pilate...

In other publications devoted to Pilatov’s research, one can find statements that the Zaporozhye Cossacks trained with the help of hopak.

And everything would be fine if not for one big “but”. If Pilate had understood the issue more thoroughly, he would have known that hopak in its modern form is a cultural product not of the Zaporozhye Cossacks, but of Soviet choreographers, in particular Pavel Pavlovich Virsky, who worked in the 20s-40s of the twentieth century in theaters of Odessa, Kharkov, Dnepropetrovsk and Kiev, and in 1955 - became the artistic director of the State Dance Ensemble of the Ukrainian SSR. And also Igor Aleksandrovich Moiseev, who has led the USSR Folk Dance Ensemble since 1937. It was they who “recreated” (actually invented from scratch, taking into account some well-known ethnographic features) the “Cossack” dance, which had already been forgotten by that time.

Thus, Vladimir Pilate restored the secret techniques of the ancient martial art based on the developments of Soviet ballet dancers. About who passed on the secret knowledge of deadly Cossack martial arts to Virsky and Moiseev is a mystery shrouded in darkness...

Perhaps the “combat hopak” would never have gone beyond the confines of the Lvov gym generously provided by the “Soviet authorities”, if not for the political factor. The Soviet Union was confidently moving towards collapse; in Western Ukraine, nationalists raised their heads, for whom the “combat hopak” came in handy. In 1990, Pilate had already founded a unique organization called “Galician Sich” (unique because, as we remember, there were never Cossacks in Galicia, and neither were Sichs until the twentieth century).

The newly-minted sensei of the combat hopak began to train fighters for right-wing radical organizations and contacted the Social-National Party of Ukraine (today - Oleg Tyagnibok’s Svoboda). For all its external operetta-ness, the “combat hopak” was to a certain extent applicable in practice. Of course, synchronized jumping kicks with both legs cause only laughter among martial arts experts, but the fact that Pilate was objectively engaged in various types of martial arts is a fact. And under the guise of a “original Ukrainian hopak”, he taught young people a local version of karate.

Pilate was initially skeptical about women's martial arts training, but then something changed in his outlook on life, and he created a “girl version of hopak” called “Asgarda”. What exactly the ancient Scandinavian gods have to do with the Western Ukrainian heroes is unknown...

Following the combat hopak, a school of “Ukrainian national fitness” - hopakrobik - appeared. In the hopak itself, a system of skill levels was formed, similar to the eastern belts - from “yellow” to “magician”. “Magi,” according to Wikipedia, are equivalent to international-class sports masters and can possess levitation, telekinesis and the ability to transform into animals. History is silent about whether these skills will now be tested by Ukrainian sports committees. But it would at least be interesting. The number of people simultaneously engaged in combat hopak in Ukraine gradually reached seven thousand people.

The Maidans became a new chance for Pilate. After the first “revolution”, President Viktor Yushchenko awarded the Ukrainian “sensei” an order, and the leadership of the SBU promised to use his “groundwork” in training special forces. After the second Maidan, the ascent to the stars began for the adherents of the combat hopak. In March 2014, Nikolai Velichkovich, a former Lviv physical education teacher and part-time head of one of the hopak federations, became Deputy Minister of Internal Affairs of Ukraine. And now a strange remake, whose history goes back to Krishna from Volyn and Soviet ballet, is already receiving official status with state support. I wouldn’t be surprised if they soon start teaching it in Ukrainian schools, like taekwondo in Korean ones.

In principle, there is nothing wrong with any physical activity. And the ability to throw a direct kick can be useful to a person in life. But the ideological wrapper in which “combat hopak” is presented today is fertile ground for the growth of Nazi sentiments and anti-scientific irrationalism. Krishna from Lake Svityaz is a worthy continuation of the stories about the “digging of the Black Sea” and the “ancient Ukrainian state of Kievan Rus.”

Ukrainians always want to be proud of something. Moreover, they are not even proud - they often “puff up”. Although the word “pykha” is translated into Russian as “arrogance”.
Although, as “Antifascist” already wrote, there is no word “proud” in the Ukrainian language. Where a Russian has pride, a Svidomo has “pihatіst”, which is “vanity” in Russian.

But you should be proud. Because how else to exalt a nation? To justify the murder of all sorts of “subhumans” – “separatists”, “vata”, “enemies of Ukraine”? That is why “cyborgs”, “ATO heroes” were invented, as well as fairy tales about the fact that Buddha and Christ had Ukrainian roots, and the ancient Ukrainians founded the entire earthly civilization. And, of course, they are reshaping the history of Ukraine, talking about a state that was not on the world map before the formation of the USSR.

But Ukrainians are somehow violetly proud of ancient Ukrainians, especially since many adequate citizens of Ukraine who have an education and have read smart books understand that this is the most blatant lie that the Ukrainian authorities could come up with. And we need some more real examples. Because you can’t be endlessly proud of just an embroidered shirt and dress up dogs in it.

And so - we found it! And they were immediately canonized - combat hopak officially became a national sport. Previously, the Verkhovna Rada adopted bill No. 5324, which introduces the concept of “national sport” into legislation, and now the Ukrainian parliament has legalized dancing in trousers in the sports arena.

Well, okay, dance has become a martial art, who feels bad about it? Look, Brazil has capoeira, they dance and wave their legs, everyone likes it. But the Brazilians did not call capoeira an ancient martial art; it was originally the dances of slaves who disguised hand-to-hand combat training in their dances. But with the “combat hopak” it is much more difficult.

The author of this style is Vladimir Pilat, who has been developing it since 1985 and even published two books. By the way, he is not only the supreme teacher of combat hopak, but also the President of the International Federation of Combat Hopak, Ataman General (respectively, Colonel General of the KVU), Chairman of the Holy Council of the Union of Sons and Daughters of the Native Ukrainian National Faith (“RUNVera”).

After this listing of titles, any sane person should understand everything. But this is just the beginning.

Ukrainian historians seriously believe that every movement of the hopak carries encoded information. This style is aimed at reviving the harmonious warrior and is still considered exotic. And after the word “esoteric” it is enough to remember another charlatan style - non-contact combat. Experts have heard about it.

But let's return to the combat hopak.

Let's start with the fact that there is nothing national in this so-called martial art. I confidently say this as a martial arts coach and as a person who has been involved in martial arts for 30 years. Let's look at these "combat elements".

The lower level is rotation (mill, barrel, watermelon) - that is, various types of sweeps.

All this has long been in the arsenal of Chinese Wushu, which is much more ancient than the most ancient Ukrainian. These movements are also found in both Korean and Japanese martial arts, which were almost all borrowed from China.

Next - squats (simple, side, with a hand hit on the floor, on the boot, on the sole), stretching down and to the side, crawler, broom, sweep, lay - the same sweeps and kicks from below from a sitting position. Many of these elements are known in jiu-jitsu, and in sambo, and in any other wrestling, when a wrestler sits up to knock out the opponent’s legs or to make throws that grab his legs.

The upper level is jumping (straddle, ring, hawk, toad, etc.). These are elements of jumping strikes, which in hopak are more similar not to strikes, but to beautiful and high jumps. If martial hopak practitioners showed at least once how with such “gops” they can break boards, tiles or something similar, as Korean athletes of tang-su-do or tae-kwon-do do, then THIS could be considered blows . And so - the masters of “combat hopak” simply stupidly copy the blows of Japanese karate-do - mawashi-geri, Maya-geri, Yoko-geri and others.

By the way, the Supreme Teacher of Combat Gopak himself, Vladimir Pilat, claims that he studied Kyokushin karate for 9 years, in 1977 he successfully passed the exams for 1st dan and received a black belt. He opened his own school of Kyokushin karate called “Tiger School”, and at the same time studies other styles of karate-do, kick boxing, and professional boxing.

Any questions?

You can, of course, argue about the combat hopak, but let's talk about the dance itself. Because the fighting style was created, as it were, on the basis of dance, and this dance was mentioned by Gogol, and the first information about it dates back to the 16th century. The hopak melody has been used by many composers. Thus, hopak themes are present in “May Night” by Rimsky-Korsakov, “Mazepa” by Tchaikovsky and many other works.

Mentioned - but no one remembers what he looked like.

The first to describe the hopak in detail is considered to be the Ukrainian composer Vasily Verkhovynets (1880-1938), author of the book “The Theory of Ukrainian Folk Dance”. The hopak described by Verkhovinets included jumps, squats and rotations, colloquially called gopki in Ukraine. But he recorded the dances using only a combination of drawings and descriptions in words. But words alone cannot describe the movements in such detail that a dance can be reproduced from such a recording. Movement, like music, requires a kind of recording system. Today there are two such systems that are used for recording modern dance and ballet (Laban. Method, Benegh Method).

But the history of hopak, that is, that so-called “national” Ukrainian dance, actually began with the creation in 1940 of the Ukrainian Song and Dance Ensemble, which was headed by Pavel Pavlovich Virsky from 1955 to 1975. Even the Ukrainians themselves admit that “It was this choreographer who created an academic folk dance based on classics and traditional folklore, and staged that famous hopak, which the Academic Dance Ensemble of Ukraine named after him still concludes concerts with.”

But the “traditional folklore” was not Ukrainian. After all, Hutsul dances or round dances of Kolomyykas can be considered traditional Ukrainian. As historians write, Ukrainian stage dance existed until then only in the form of insert numbers in performances of the Ukrainian musical drama theater and isolated Ukrainian operas. And so Virsky created Ukrainian folk dance, as they say, from scratch.

The Pravda newspaper of March 13, 1936 wrote: “I must say frankly that the dancing was the best thing that was shown in the performance. In the fourth act, Hopak “brought literally the entire theater to its feet!”

Dancers flying high into the air with sabers drawn in their hands, breathtaking spins, masterful fencing in dance, rapid jumps and various “squats”, also performed while preserving the technical canons of classical choreography (turnout, extended rise, clear positions of arms and legs, etc.) .d.), - shocked not only the ordinary Moscow public, but also K. S. Stanislavsky himself, who enthusiastically appreciated the Kievans’ tour.”

That is, hopak was created precisely by Soviet choreographers in the USSR in the mid-30s of the last century. That is, the national Ukrainian dance, the pride of Ukrainians, was created by the communists who are hated by today’s Ukrainians.

Hopak needs to be decommunized urgently!

But that's not all.

Let me add the last fly in the ointment to the Ukrainian vanity fairy tale. Where do you think the main elements of Ukrainian folk dance were taken from? You'll never guess. From China. More precisely, hopak received its main, so to speak, basic elements from... Uighur folk dance. The video shows this very clearly at 2.26 minutes.

Uyghur national dance

The Uyghurs are a Turkic-speaking people, the vast majority of whom live in a region called Xinjiang in the far west of China. But Ukrainian hopak surprisingly resembles Tajik, Turkmen, and Adyghe folk dances. That is, the basis of Ukrainian dance was the dances of the Turkic tribes.