Anca Giurchescu née Ciortea (19 December 1930 – 4 April 2015) was a Romanian researcher of folk dance, and an ethnochoreologist, one of the founders of the discipline. Born in Bucharest to a family formerly from Translylvania, she lived in that region as a child. Entering university, she studied dance at the National Institute of Physical Education. During her schooling, she participated in competitive target shooting and was a silver (team) and bronze (individual) medalist in the 1955 European Shooting Championship. While still studying, she began working as a researcher at the and in 1962 became a member of the International Council for Traditional Music. The Council established a working group which included Giurchescu, that laid the foundation for the science of ethnochoreology.
In 1979, Giurchescu joined her husband in Copenhagen, after attending a seminar in Belfast, and defected. She continued her research into the cultural, historical, and social context of dance and taught throughout Europe and the United States. In 1989, the family returned to Romania, when the Socialist Republic of Romania was overthrown and remained for four years before returning to Copenhagen. She led numerous international research trips to study rituals and dance traditions among various ethnic minorities with roots in Romania and the surrounding countries. She was chair of the Study Group on Ethnochoreology of the International Council for Traditional Music from 1998 to 2006 and founding chair of their Ethnochoreology Sub-Study Group on Field Research Theory and Methods, leading it from 1990 to 2014.
Early life
Rodica Maria Anca Ciortea was born 19 December 1930 in Bucharest, Romania to Livia (née Mircea) and Marin Ciortea. Her family was Transylvanian, originally from Cața in the Rupea-Sighișoara area. Her mother was the granddaughter of Nicolae Mircea, who co-founded Caru' cu Bere in 1899, when he and his brothers Ignat and Víctor expanded their 20-year-old brewery business to include a restaurant. Her father was an engineer working in the methane gas industry. He owned a farm near Copșa Mică and worked in Mediaș, where he also was a well-known painter and author. The farm was open to many artists and writers, and literary figures like Lucian Blaga often gathered there.
From the second grade, Ciortea studied in Sibiu until her father was transferred to Bucharest to manage a gas plant there. She began her university studies at the National Institute of Physical Education in 1949. That year, the Romanian government nationalized her family's business, assuming the ownership of Caru' cu Bere. Her mother wanted her to study medicine, but Ciortea was interested in studying dance. During her schooling, she joined the national shooting team, as the only woman on the team. She won the national shooting competition for the eight kilo rifle, several times. In 1955, she was part of the team that won the silver medal in the European Shooting Championship and she won an individual bronze, before being dismissed from the team for having bourgeois ancestry. She was also removed from classes for similar reasons, but continued her education by taking night courses, until she was allowed to be readmitted.
Career
While she was in school, Ciortea began working in an electrical appliance factory, fine tuning mechanical equipment. She had an aunt who suggested she should work in the dance research department of the recently established Folklore Institute in Bucharest (then Institutul de Folclor, now known as ). Hired in 1953, Ciortea worked there until 1979, advancing to become a senior researcher. She conducted fieldwork, documenting rituals and dances in rural areas, trying to analyze the structure and development of various dances. She also conducted research into how traditions were used by officials as propaganda to develop and justify their power, and how they formed the identity of minority groups, such as the Romani people. She married Lucian Giurchescu, a Romanian stage director, and in 1959 the couple had a daughter, Ileana.