Chairman Kim Jong Il attached importance to national heritage more than anyone else. His meticulous care is also permeated in folk dance Tondollari which vividly reflects the optimistic life and sentiments of the Korean people.

   One day in late December Juche 64 (1975), the Chairman saw the folk dance prepared by the South Hamgyong Provincial Art Troupe at the Pyongyang Grand Theatre.

   Originally, Tondollari was created in the Pukchong area in the early 1930s and popularized in many other areas. The folk dance was also popular even in the grim years of Japanese military rule as it truthfully reflected in a light melody and dance movements, the sentiments of the Korean people who longed for the “day when dawn breaks” (origin of the word Tondollari), or the day of national liberation, without losing hope.

   However, due to the aftereffect of the Japanese imperialists’ vicious policy of obliterating the Korean culture and the nihilistic attitudes of some officials towards national cultural heritage after liberation, the dance gradually lost its light and was fading away from the people’s memory.

   At that juncture, Chairman Kim Jong Il forwarded the policy of finding out and collecting folk dances which had been handed down widely among the local people and improving them, saying socialist culture is not created from scratch, but on the basis of carrying forward and developing progressive and popular things out of national cultural heritage in keeping with the socialist reality. He said that it would be possible to discover such dances as Tondollari of the east coastal area and recreate them to the modern aesthetic sense, and assigned the South Hamgyong Provincial Art troupe with the task. Accordingly, he saw the performance that day.

   After seeing the dance, he indicated the shortcomings that were revealed in the representation of the folk dance and the direction of correction.

   Tondollari is originally a distinctive dance in which hand movements are performed to folk music, he said, but it lost its attractive features as they removed the original music and executed hand movements to modern music. To perform Tondollari, it should be done just as the folk dance, he noted, but no one would call it Tondollari if you alter it completely in a modern style by totally neglecting the original.

   You mixed up modern dance music and folk dance movements, you should not to do so, he continued to say. Though we discover folk dance pieces and improve them to suit the modern aesthetic sense of our people, he said, we should not remove the features peculiar to folk dances.

   And he pointed to the need to alter the costumes in a national style and adopt the original tunes and dance movements to complete the piece as a quadrille.

   The Chairman saw Tondollari performed at the presentation of music and dance pieces held in March the following year and told officials to stick to the present music and study dance movements again and create the dance again.

   Saying Tondollari had its original and distinctive dance movements, but those could not be found in the performed piece, he asked the choreographer what did she think were the original dance movements.

   As she could not answer readily, he smiled generously and said that, in the folk dance there had been the way of moving shoulders skillfully while dropping the lifted hands, but it could not be found in the days performance. He added that it was the very movement characterizing the Tondollari of the Pukchong area and therefore the dance would be represented wonderfully when the movement set off.

   The choreographer imagined the dance performance adopting the original dance movement the Chairman discovered. The features of the folk dance stood out marvelously.

   The movement found by the Chairman was indeed peculiar to Tondollari and distinctly reflected the national colouring and rhythm of the dance.

   Thanks to the brilliant wisdom and energetic leadership of Chairman Kim Jong Il who valued national cultural heritage, folk dance Tondollari which was in danger of vanishing forever was born afresh in the flower garden of Juche arts.