"Kartveli" Performance

My niece and I went to see this performance on December 20, 2025. Kartveli is a young Georgian folk group that created a wonderful program sampling dances and songs from various regions of Georgia ("Kartveli" means "a Georgian person," both in terms of the geographic origin and identity, the umbrella term covering many different ethnic groups calling Georgia home).

The program is excellent and the group tours with it a lot internationally. Right before the beginning of our concert, a Tbilisi Mayor representative awarded them with a plaque for popularizing Georgian folk music, song, and dance around the world.

Unfortunately, I was not able to find professional clips of their performances on the Internet. There's no shortage of videos from other Georgian ensembles, but not this one. My niece took a couple of clips on her phone, and I'm including them here for you to get a taste of the breathtaking skills the dancers exhibit, especially the mail dancers who do a lot of moves on the upper part of their foot. Not even the toes, like in ballet, but the entire upper foot. You can see the feet bending in this video:

I hope you enjoyed and appreciated the physicality of the foot work in this dance from the region of Svaneti that I visited recently and wrote a story about our glacier hike (sorry for the shameless plug but I love that story).

Here is another video from the concert, a sample of world-famous Georgian polyphonic singing:

The entire concert was absolutely remarkable. What I liked about it as well was that it was in a very small, intimate venue. I was at first concerned that the dancers would not have enough space for all the expansive traditional dancing runs and moves, but it worked out alright.

I'd bought the tickets almost a month in advance and managed to get good seats, in the 8th row (total of 14), seats 8-9 (total of 22). We had a good view, close enough to see the performers' faces, even though the clips I included here make it look as if we were much farther away. I guess that's the camera's illusion.

When we got settled about 15 minutes before 7 pm, the venue filled up quickly. It was entirely sold out. I was a little annoyed that the only two empty seats right in the middle (10-11) were next to me because it meant the latecomers would have to go through us.

The concert started at about 19:05 (I have yet to attend anything in Tbilisi that starts on time, including my own classes where I almost always was the only one in the room on the hour) and went on for about 1 hour and 20 minutes. You can't even imagine how many times I wanted to shift into those two empty seats in the middle, for my niece to have a better view to take videos. She refused, "What if they come?"

They did come, at 8:20 pm during the last spectacular wedding dance. It was a young couple in their late 20s-early 30s, and while they were coming through and settling in, the wife was fussing with her coat and scarf, mumbling that she couldn't believe they were late by 20 minutes. She was totally and utterly confused when the dance was over and we all got up for a standing ovation.

And then she looked at the tickets on her phone and I could see the blood draining from her cheeks. She slapped herself on the forehead and showed the tickets to her husband. He just plopped into his seat in frustration.

"Can you imagine, they thought the concert started at 8 pm?" I whispered to my niece while the standing ovation still continued. She gasped and said, "Omg, I don't know how I'd feel if that happened to me. They missed such a wonderful concert!"

As we were leaving, the couple still sat in their seats. I want to think that perhaps they were related to someone in the group (center seats, and they had a big bouquet of flowers with them) and saw the performance many times before. Otherwise, I feel so bad for them.