Nexhmije Selca closes her eyes wistfully and tries to find the words to say that most of the history of opera and ballet in Kosovo is just a sound. The first three decades of the entire repertoire of the Kosovar opera and ballet troupe have been burnt, and Selca, one of the first three ballerinas in Kosovo, says that all that remains to be told are some sounds and oral stories of those who have survived. Selca recalls the year of when she was a child, when she would dance in the beautiful garden of her house in the city of Peja for years.
I would hear sounds and make movements in the air. Almost a year later, she had heard about a dance school in Skopje but did not understand what kind of dance was taught there. Her parents disagreed with their year-old daughter at the leaving home. Can I try it? Three years later, in , Selca became part of the first generation of ballerinas in Kosovo. However, there were only three women, and there were not enough ballerinas for the troupe, so they had to hire seasonal ballerinas from Macedonia, Romania, Bulgaria, Britain, and even the Philippines.
The initial disappointments of an audience unaccustomed to watching ballet performances still linger in the echoes of her memory. She says she still gets goosebumps when she hears those sounds. More than five decades later, none of the performances from the first two decades of the ballet troupe exist anymore, as the ballet archive was taken earlier, and another part was lost along with part of the archive of the former Radio Television of Pristina.
Without archives to dig into, the first generation of Kosovo ballerinas, through their oral histories, provide vocal remnants that, when combined with what they have to offer, create strong entry points into a bygone experience.
Rrustem Bajrami, one of the first ballet dancers of the Kosovo opera and ballet troupe, says the described sounds are the only non-archival documents that can provide insight into the scenes of the early Kosovo ballet production. Going forward more than four decades into modernity, nothing can be used from the recordings of the dancers, the stage settings, and ballet mechanics.
