First CONCERT of the tour. Thank you Kragujevac for being an amazing audience. We loved being immersed in so much culture and talent and we loved the reception we received from our performances. It was very nerve racking for us to perform back home for the first time, but we did it and we feel like we did it well!! We also got to perform the New Zealand Dalmatian Kolo in the motherland for the very first time. It was amazing having so many friends and family from New Zealand and Serbia in the audience too. An emotional night all round – Mara Blucher.

The first performance of the trip was in Kragujevac and it was a real honour to perform at Nenad’s folklore club, and to see him perform too. We had a practice at the club in the evening and saw Nenad practice with his old Kolo teacher (we got to see where we got his teaching style from). Additionally, we got a taste of the temperatures that we will be preforming in (very hot).
For the night we performed three dances: Glamuc, our own old Kolo and Šumadija. Initially we were going to perform Šopsko as well but Andras was sick. Although there were some nerves, the feedback was great and we all felt adulation and a sense of achievement – Pero Garlick.

More about our location and our day
The beginning of our day was a visit to ’21 October Museum’ in the Šumarice Memorial Park, which is a memorial to an event in history. During World War Two there were reprisal killings happening throughout Eastern Europe. The Kragujevac massacre was the killing of between 2,778 and 2,794 mostly Serb men and boys by German soldiers on 21 October 1941. It was a reprisal for attacks by the resistance in the Gornji Milanovac district that resulted in the deaths of 10 German soldiers and the wounding of 26 others. The number of hostages to be shot was calculated as a ratio of 100 hostages executed for every German soldier killed and 50 hostages executed for every German soldier wounded.

One special memorial in the park was to students and teachers from the local high school. Though some escaped there were about 300 students killed. One teacher whose students were killed was offered an escape but refused, saying “Go ahead and shoot, I am still  conducting my class.” We were then taken to the school and shown a classroom where some of the students were, which is set up as a memorial.

Walking around the back of the school we were shown a model of local area, and at the back was the house of the uncle of Prince Miloš Obrenović, who led the Serbs in the Second Serb Uprising. Leaving there we walked back to the hotel through a market, buying blueberries, blackberries, peaches and nectarines.

The evening concert was a cultural hall full of visitors and locals, many of whom were old friends and colleagues of Nenad’s. They were incredibly complimentary of our young people and their dancing. Once Belgrade visitor who lives in Auckland was astonished that they did so well, even though they didn’t ‘grow up there’! The concert was huge success and thoroughly enjoyed by everyone. After the concert our hosts provided dinner and drinks for our dancers at a local restaurant, together with young dancers from the local area and more senior dancers that Nenad had danced professionally with in the past – who were still stunning! A surprising highlight was our wonderful dance teacher Nenad being the centre of a very entertaining dance. He looked right at home amongst his own people!!