Buza
Russian folk close-combat art from the Novgorod region, where dance and rhythm cannot be separated from technique. Revived in the nineties.
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Organisation & Competition
What the style is built from
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About Buza
Buza is a Russian folk close-combat fighting art in which combat and dance are so intertwined that they cannot be separated. It is often described as a men's dance-battle: the movement grows out of the traditional dances tropak and hopak, supplemented by spinning kicks and leg sweeps. Practitioners perform in traditional Russian dress and to the accompaniment of folk music, so the rhythm is not mere decoration but part of the technique itself. Buza has its roots in northwestern Russia, in the area of the Novgorod Slavs. In the second half of the twentieth century it experienced a revival and spread through villages of the Tver, Novgorod, Vologda, and Pskov Oblasts. In substance buza is not merely fist-fighting: it includes strikes and grips and also works with traditional weapons, above all the stick and the knife. Its present form is a reconstruction. In the nineteen-nineties it was reassembled from surviving styles by Grigori N. Bazlov of Tver, and it is from his work that current practice descends. The founding-year field is left empty in the record, because buza as a folk tradition has no founding date, and the sources do not give the year of Bazlov's reconstruction more precisely than by decade. Regular full-contact competitions are reportedly held among schools from different regions; buza is not an Olympic sport.
Similar styles
Selected by overlap in the style profile, not by historical lineage.