I have a new bow and am in awe of what a wonderful difference it is making in my playing. The bow I had at the ESI was pretty good, but very stiff. Olov saw me struggling with something and tried my bow and said, “It is very stiff, but it should work.” I tried my best. But I ordered a bow from Jean Claude Condi, with the help of Emilie who knows him and spoke to him in French. It took about 5 months once we had his attention. I was able to have him ship it to friends in Sweden, since it was not ready until after I had returned to the USA and he didn’t want to ship it to the USA. Then I picked it up when I returned to Sweden and visited them in Furudal in late July.

But what a difference! There are several things I have played where the difference was remarkable; specifically some 16th note passages are now clearly heard where before with the stiff bow they were muddy. I noticed it first on Polska på Överväningen. The other thing is that now I can do gungstråk after some years of trying to do it. I’m sure the ESI training is contributing to this, but the new bow has really been a boost. I am also more consistently getting the sound quality I am aiming for when we worked on “tonstarter” with Olov (the initiation of the note).

In most endeavors preparation is key, and that is particularly true for “dancing up” or medal testing in Swedish Polska. We do a lot of preparation here in the States, with teachers invited from Sweden and with American teachers. But a very special thing to do is attend the Training Camp that Leif and Margareta Virtanen have been operating for 20 years. This is the week just before the Uppdansning weekend, which is always the first full weekend in August. For the past 17 years it has been held at Furudals Bruk. There is a lovely dance floor and hall and places nearby for housing.

Leif and Margareta hold four sessions a day and the schedule is divided between two groups, those doing Märke testing, and those doing Diplom. I have described the Märke testing in previous posts. The Diplom program is for people who have previously earned Big Silver medals. Every year the organizers designate a regional area of Sweden and choose a set of 7 to 10 dances from that region. Participants need to practice all the dances but will perform only four of them for the judges, without knowing which four in advance. They dance in groups of four couples at a time.

At 9 AM at the start of the first session, Margareta leads a warmup set of exercises to a group of three short tunes. We have come to love her moves and those tunes and enjoy warming up together. After the warmup we usually do a mixer, a schottis or polska dance in which we progress to dance with each man in the circle (if you are a woman).

 

 

 

 

 

For Märke practice, Margareta develops a schedule ahead of time and calls up couples to perform the dances for teaching purposes. As many as four couples will come up at a time if that many are doing a particular dance, but it can also be a single couple. The couple or couples do the dance, followed by comments and suggestions by Leif and Margareta, then another attempt at the dance. There will be more comments, and the dance may be repeated a third time. Margareta has a table full of CDs and a tremendous knowledge of that music so she can play appropriate music for each dance. She is masterful at varying the tempo and using different examples of music so that by the end of the week you have become more adept at doing the dance to different tunes and at different speeds. Leif and Margareta are also very astute at figuring out what to suggest to each partner to improve the dance. Their criticism is very gentle and positive and helpful.

 

While a particular dance is being critiqued in a cordoned off area of the dance floor, the other 2/3 of the hall is available for practice. This practice space is always full of couples trying different things. The Diplom dancers often come just to enjoy dancing to the music, especially in the evening sessions. There are tables around the hall where others sit and work on their computers, or knitting, or writing or talking, or just watching the dancers. It is a congenial and happy group of incredibly nice people and a very pleasant way to spend some summer days.

After the final evening session, around 8:30 PM, people go out to the shore of the lake and make a fire and grill food, usually hot dogs. There is talking and singing and laughing. One evening we do a singing game called “fattig man” (poor man). The sun sets about 10:30 PM or so and the twilight lasts a long time after that. Mosquitoes enjoy coming to the bonfires too.

 

 

 

 

I got my Stort Silver (Big Silver) medal on August 2, 2015, dancing with Stig Eriksson!

Here was our program:

Bakmes från Hede – Backmans variant, hambo och bakmes
Polskdans – Springdans från Hogdal-Lommeland
springdans, polsksteg med- och motsols, vigheter fordras ej
Polska från Östra Jämtlant – senpolska

and small dances:
Polska från Södra Dalarna
Polska från Ore
Polska från Alfta eller Arbrå (we did Arbrå) — this was the dance selected

I have been extremely fortunate that Stig Eriksson offered to be my partner for this testing process. He is one of the best dancers in Sweden. He and his wife Helen completed their Stort Silver in 2000. With Stig I earned Bronze in 2008, Silver in 2010, SSI in 2012, and SSII in 2014. I”danced up” for SSIII or Stort Silver this summer in 2015 and was successful!

 

Uppdansning (polskemärkes – Uppdansning or Swedish bygdedans medal testing) is a program that was created to maintain the tradition of Swedish polska dances from regions and villages around Sweden (bygdedanser).

Dances were carefully collected and written down in books, some from old videos or from older couples who still remembered and did their regional or village dances. A program was created with point values for the different dances based on difficulty, and a series of medals progressing through the program. 103 dances are eligible, with point values from 5 to 10 points. Bronze is the first level, with 3 dances with total point value between 21 and 24. Then silver, with at least 27 points. Then there are 3 stages required to get to Big Silver (Stort Silver), the highest level. Each of these 3 stages requires 3 big dances totaling at least 27 points, and 3 smaller dances of 8 or fewer points. Completion of the Big Silver thus requires mastery of 24 dances.

The testing consists of a performance for the judges and audience with live music of your chosen dance list. You are not competing with any other dancers, but being judged based on your proficiency and correct execution of the appropriate dance, in time with the music. Each couple is announced with their names and costume and local dance group. They also announce each dance. At the Big Silver level, after your 3 big dances the judges choose one of the 3 small dances for you to perform next. You need to be prepared to dance any one of the three, but will only actually perform one.

The audience applauds and is very supportive of dancers, especially at the bronze level. You don’t find out if you passed until the final ceremony on Sunday. If you fail and don’t get a medal, you will still get a certificate. It can be difficult to tell who passed or failed during the ceremony itself. But you can count the number of Big Silver medals on the table and compare it with the number of people trying to get Big Silver in the program. One recent year there were 13 trying and only 7 medals on the table. If you fail, you can come back another year and do it again.

Doing this program is something that the best dancers of Swedish polska do, and it is exciting to come to Sweden and dance with and among the best dancers of Swedish polska. Several visiting Swedish dance teachers urged us to do it, as did American dancers who have done this program previously, so we plunged in. The first time, in 2008, we had 7 dancers from the DC area who went for bronze medal testing together. And we all passed! It is really fun, a real rush to perform for this audience, and very good for our dance skills to go through the practice and training and the event itself.

During the Uppdansning weekend there are 3 evening dances for fun, Thursday, Friday and Saturday evenings. The first few nights many people are practicing their chosen dances for upcoming testing, but everyone gets more relaxed as the weekend continues. These dances have become more enjoyable as we have gotten to know people, and are a real highlight of the weekend. In this knowledgeable crowd instead of a last waltz, the evening is more likely to end with a final Gammalpolska från Föllinge or Bingsjö Polska!

We had a lot of encouragement to go through this program, and people to show us the ropes as we went along. It has been a lot of fun, and very good for our dance proficiency.

I am grateful to Ross Schipper for practicing with me in Furudals Bruk before each of the last 4 events, and to both Ross and Linda Brooks for practicing with me in Washington, DC during the intervening years.

There is more information at www.scandiadc.org under dance and Uppdansning.

One of the key ways that we learn and enjoy Scandinavian dance and music in the United States is by going to weekend or week-long dance camps. This is also true of many other interests in the US, so there are fiddle camps and chorus camps and klezmer music camps and Balkan dance and music camps.

 

 

For the Scandinavian dance camps we invite really good teachers every year from Norway and Sweden, as well as fiddlers for the dance traditions to be taught, and a nyckelharpa teacher. Camps have been conducted in the Mendocino Woodlands north of San Francisco, California since 1981 or so, and in the East Coast (Nordic Fiddles and Feet, first at Buffalo Gap, West Virginia, now  moved to Ogontz, New Hampshire) since 1985. Each year about 100-120 people come together during specific weeks in the summer and spend the week learning new dances and/or tunes, or reviewing dances or tunes learned before, and eating wonderful food and having concerts and dance parties.

It is a bit like in the movie Brigadoon, where a community and place comes together and exists only for that week of the year. Each year people return who have been there before, with 20-30 new people trying camp for the first time. It is a lovely community, and is delightful every time. But each year is also a bit different. We think of the analogy that when you put your foot in the river it is never exactly the same twice as the water is always changing as it runs past.
People take the dances back to teach locally in their communities, and recruit and teach newer dancers to come to camp next year.

I have found it is a really good vacation for a single person. People are there to have a good time and to socialize. There are lovely people to eat with and dance with. But many who come are there as a couple, and others come with or without their non-dancing spouse.

I had an amazing experience at the Eric Sahlström Institute. I’m really glad I did it, and also very happy to be home in the USA.

I have been gradually adapting to life at home. What has been most helpful is the many opportunities I have had already to play nyckelharpa. The first three were the first weekend home!

1. The Washington’s Spelmanslag, which I have played with for several years, performed on June 6th at the Swedish Ambassador’s Residence for Swedish National Day.
2. I played two sets for Swedish dance at our Mid-Atlantic Norwegian Dancers monthly house party and will play again next weekend.
3. I played for a hambo workshop at Glen Echo Park near Washington, DC led by Lisa Brooks and Dan Kahn. 
4. I attended the wonderful Nordic Fiddles and Feet Scandinavian Dance and Music Camp in New Hampshire. We had nyckelharpa classes with Ben Teitelbaum, another former ESI graduate, and six of us who were former ESI students jammed for a happy hour audience. The next post has more information about this dance camp.

We had two final concerts, one of which was sold out and the other almost full, on Thursday (21 May) and Friday (22 May) of the last week. Once again we students chose everything that would be in the concert, and then were very well prepared by our teachers in a series of rehearsals.

 I have included photos from both concerts. I appear in photos from the second night, when my daughters were in the front row with my camera.

Both concerts ended with dance evenings with wonderful music.

It was such a joy to have my daughters come to Sweden and see our final concert. We also enjoyed traveling around together in the week after the end of school. We spent time in Stockholm and in Dalarna, then flew home together on June 2.

It was an amazing year of study at the Eric Sahlström Institute. I am really glad I did it, and also very happy to be back home in the USA.

A couple of weeks before the end of school we had a musiklära (music learning) assignment to form groups and perform a “cover” of any song that is NOT folk music. I have been asked to share the results. It was quite an interesting and improbable assignment, but we had a lot of fun with it.

We had ABBA:

Other tunes:

I was in a group doing a heavy metal cover (what? in nyckelharpa school?). We did Manowar – Metal Warriors, “Wimps and posers, leave the hall!”. Apparently I have good hair for head banging.

Swedish has a great word, avslutning, to describe what we did on our final day. They are special final activities, but may or may not include a ceremony. On our final morning of school we met for the first time in the upstairs music classroom. Music students in all prior years have used the larger upstairs classroom. But this year we have been downstairs in what was the library, to be away from the hammering sounds on the roof.  Our class has never seen the building without the scaffolding over it.

We met for an hour with our three main music teachers, Ditte Andersson, Olov Johansson, and Sonia Sahlström. We played tunes together, one from each teacher, and talked about the year we spent together. It was really lovely. The dance students met at the same time with their teachers in another room.

Then we gathered in the big salon with the dancers and all teachers for a final ceremony with diplomas. Teachers played and sang and danced for us all. We played Schubert’s March Militaire together, which we had played in Musiklära ensemble. This is a school tradition for avslutning.

After that we enjoyed a really nice lunch together. I ran off to meet my daughters coming on the train, but came back and had some.

Music and dance students at the ESI are encouraged to bring additional instruments if they have them. I brought my clarinet to Sweden at the urging of Cajsa Ekstav, who said it would be good to play in musiklära (music learning) classes while I am here. Musiklära includes music theory, but goes beyond just theory. In musiklära we sight-read music and practice together in ensembles. We have two levels to accommodate those who have never read music before and those who have done it for many years. I have used sheet music for clarinet for a long time, both when the music is notated for B-flat clarinet and when it is written in concert pitch and I need to transpose. I can also read sheet music and play nyckelharpa, although I am more accustomed to learning by ear on nyckelharpa.

I originally thought I would practice both nyckelharpa AND clarinet while I was here, but that was too ambitious. With all the homework for both musiklära and arranging class there wasn’t time for clarinet practice too. My focus has been on nyckelharpa and I have been practicing every day. For the final day of arranging class we were encouraged to bring alternate instruments. We had a really fun time creating an arrangement together of a tune that was new to us, Svängrumpa from Skåne. Now we are playing that in the final concert. The first part is in A major, which puts it in B major (5 sharps) for me. I had to get much more comfortable with B major!

We also plan to play Schubert’s Marche Militaire together with the teachers on our final day together, the avslutning. So in order to get my lip muscles in shape for all that playing, and not embarrass myself, I am practicing my clarinet daily. There is a long tradition of Uppland clarinet players, including Curt Tallroth, Olov Johansson’s teacher. I bought a couple of booklets of Swedish tunes for clarinet at the Oktoberstämma, and have been playing through some of those. They are unfortunately written in concert pitch, so require transposition if I want to learn them in a key that others might play. So I am again practicing sight reading while transposing.