Balkan dance music

The "Vupros" ensemble

When we started

The "Vupros" ensemble was formed by dancers from the Martisorul Romanian dance group and the Oxford Balkan dance group to play for the Balkan evening dance at the Eastbourne International Folk Dance festival in 1994. The early programme drafts had a question mark in place of our band's name so we started to use the Bulgarian for "question", which appears unpronounceable in English when written in Cyrilic, Bbпpoc.

The band

We play a combination of traditional Bulgarian instruments such as the Tupan (large drum), Darabulka (small drum), Tamboura (long necked lute) together with the accordion, clarinet, sax, electric guitar and electric bass.

Our repertoire is based around dance music from Bulgaria with the addition of dance music from the neighbouring countries of Romania, Serbia, Macedonia, Greece, Albania and Armenia.