Schönperchten – Pinzgauer Tresterer

With contributions by Ernestine Hutter, Michael Malkiewicz, Günter Mayrhofer, Lukas H. Schmiderer, Manfred Seifert, Susanna Vötter-Dankl and Christian Vötter.

The Pinzgau Tresterer dance is unique. Part of a rural custom with theatrical elements and unusual costumes, it takes place during the winter season. The custom culminates in wishes for a good, peaceful and happy new year for house and farm. As it mostly took place in large farmhouse parlours, the good wishes were also linked to a bountiful harvest. A fixed element and the highlight is the complex sequence of the Tresterer dance. Also unusual are the dance steps developed by farmers, farmhands and rural workers, which have no equivalent in this form in Bavarian and Austrian dance traditions.

An interdisciplinary team of researchers, together with those involved in the custom and other informants from the Pinzgau region, has succeeded in tracing its oral and written transmission chronologically and without gaps, from the earliest records to the present day. The historical record of texts and images is complemented by a look at the present. Besides the Tresterer dance in the Pinzgau and its special form in Unken, the book also covers the Pinzgau Tresterer dance of the Alpinia Salzburg.