Fascinated by spade dances, man had nothing else in his head. Francisco worked at the Brno Museum, but his passion for swords dances crossed his field of work and began studying them on his own. It is said that, by this obsession, he had dissipated his wife ' s property. His curiosity began in 1907, when he saw the first spade dances. For the following years, he had no rest, always from here to there, seeing and researching the dances of swords. I did photographs, but I couldn't get the whole dance through them. One day he found out about the cinema and, paying a fortune, bought a 35mm camera. He filmed the swords dances of Moravia, but he knew that they were also out of Czech, and he picked up the instruments and started walking back and forth. Croatia, England, Basque Country...

In 1927, the Basque Parties were held in Baiona. From England, with Violet Alford at the head, a delegation from the English Folk Dance Society of London arrived. From Czech, Frantisek Pospisil, with the movie camera “under his arm”. After 80 years, we were able to see them thanks to Juan Antonio Urbeltz. The images show dancers from Gipuzkoa, Baja Navarra, Zuberoa and England, among others. It's exciting to see the zamaltzaina dancing with master antrixatas in front of the camera. Pospisil recorded the brokel-dantza and the Dantzari dantza of the Duranguesado at Donostia. We don't know if swords and dances had anything to do with it, but Pospisil ended up wrong. Exhausted by domestic wealth, he was indicted by the Nazis and lost his job at the museum. With his head revolved, he died in a mental hospital in 1958.

Jeremy Carter-Gordon is also passionate about swords dances. He has studied ez🚫 -dantzak in England, in his town of Boston, and after finishing his studies in ethno-choreology, he has decided to investigate the dances of European swords. Take the backpack and the banjo and come to Europe to see and learn the swords dances. It has a little scholarship, but it feels really tight to get from one side to the other, and when it has a completely empty pocket, it takes the banjo out, it does the function and it passes the txapela. In France, he has analyzed in recent weeks the Bacchu-ber ezek and the swords dances of Fenstarle and Bagnasco in Italy. Despite what was said, Jeremy says that he still travels well by hitchhiking in Europe.

He has come to Euskal Herria and wants to know the dances of Basque spades. Who knows if in the next century some crazy romantic will try to revive the dances of Basque swords, and then the recordings of the American who played the banjo and passed the txapela will be a treasure like those of Pospisil.