telespringar

Here's a video of the main Norwegian dance I do, although I don't do it anywhere near this well:



This is from March of this year - it's the same competition I went to (as a spectator!) last year. Some of you know the male dancer. (I think only Miss Shirley knows the female dancer.)

not so good guys

Holy cow! Tonight I was driving to Norwegian dancing and a bunch of firetrucks and police cars passed me, and it turned out Wisconsin Ave (major thoroughfare) was closed off. There was a big ol truck with its ladder up and everything. These things are usually way less dramatic than they seem, of course, but when I went by again three hours later, there were still lots of emergency vehicles. Turns out it was this. Yikes!

dancin'

Yesterday I was waiting for a friend outside a restaurant and this guy was totally gettin' down on the sidewalk. The whole time I was there, just dancin'. It was no particular surprise that he didn't have any music, but I thought at least he could put out a cap or a cup or something for quarters. He had about 100 people within 50 feet, some of them would have given him something. (Apologies for the photo quality - all I had was my phone.)

show us how you bungalow

This was my weekend:


Some of the young folks in the Christmas Show community performed at the renaissance festival this weekend. Once we got through our on-stage dress rehearsal in front of an audience on Saturday, the Sunday show was great! Also, it turns out that 90 degrees is really a whole lot more comfortable than 98 degrees. Especially if you are wearing a renaissance-y costume. (Mine was not bad at all, but there were people in velvet and leather.)

Anyway, this particular picture isn't of anything in the show - not very renaissancey, this dancing - but from sometime when we were waiting. Good times.

dancing in the streets

Twenty years ago, you didn't go to downtown Silver Spring after dark. It wasn't that it was dangerous or anything, it was just dead, and it felt kind of sketchy if you happened to wander through. This evening I stopped by downtown to pick up my new Marimekko bag. This was the scene:

There were hundreds of people watching this band, in 90-degree heat, and, what are those 60 or 70 people doing in the middle of the blocked-off street?

Oh yeah. It's the electric slide. Even one of the security guards was doing it. So, yes. The new downtown development has got a lot of chain stores. It's a little sterile, sure. But every time I'm there I'm amazed at all the people wandering around, eating, or dancing in the streets. (Ok, this was the first time I'd seen dancing in the streets.) So...yay, hometown!!

more keywords

Ok, I have a new favorite search term: someone found me by googling "bum shaking." It gets you to this post about learning Bollywood dance at the folklife festival. Now, you'd think a person who wanted to read about bum shaking would be pretty disappointed when they found my blog, but no - this person (in Brentford, England) spent almost 10 minutes and looked at five pages.

Thanks for the info, Google Analytics!

hardingfele

This workshop I went to last weekend centers on one instrument: the hardanger fiddle or hardingfele. It's the Norwegian national instrument, it has extra strings, it's totally cool-looking. No, I don't play fiddle, but I love the dances that are done to the fiddle and the songs I was learning are mostly fiddle tunes. Every night at the beginning of the dancing, the fiddle students did something called "lagspel" or "group play" in which they play together and we dance around the outside. See those three couples at the top left? They're doing a waltz or a reinlender or something.

The hardingfele is really a solo instrument, and when you have a bunch of them playing in one room, it's a bit cacophonous. It is not a sound of which the hardanger purist would approve, and it's definitely not as good for dancing as a solo instrument. But I still love it. The tunes are cheerful and the students are having a good time, and it's one heck of a joyful noise.

embarrassing photographs

I submit to the fashion police this evidence of my crime:


Yes. I wore crocs outside of the house. However, since I wore them at a weekend workshop filled with people who think it's ok to wear shorts with dress shoes and white sport socks pulled halfway up your calves, no one was really in a position to judge. These are the shoes I wear for dancing, and I think their awesomeness makes up for the crocs:

(I got them in Norway in February, and I love them.)

wisconsin again

In the morning, I'm off to Wisconsin for the same workshop I went to last year, although Miss Shirley is not accompanying me this time for some silly reason. Something to do with the fact that her baby is due in six weeks. I know, it's a totally lame excuse. I just found out I have to take my own sheets and blankets, and I'm carrying a fiddle for the local fiddler, so basically I'm going to be drowning in luggage tomorrow. Nothing I love like riding the metro at rush hour when I'm drowning in luggage!

I'll be back Sunday. Between now and then, entertain yourself by leaving comments. I love comments. More comments! More! More! Give me something to read when I get back so I can put off unpacking!

shake your bum

This morning Dr Roo and I got to the big Northern Ireland tent at the Folklife Festival just as the nice lady was starting to teach a new dance. We did it, it was fun - ok, it was a disaster, we were in the idiot set - and it ended, and I was like, ok then, next reel! But no: the lady said, now we're handing it off to Nisha! Turns out the nice Indian lady I'd seen hanging around was not a Smithsonian staffer, as I'd assumed, but one of the presenters. (Ohhhh, they have immigration in Northern Ireland, too....)

She was teaching "Bollywood dancing." Apparently it's all the rage in Northern Ireland these days. She taught us complete routines to two Bollywood songs on a CD. We did lots of shimmying and a little salsa and several moves that involved making our hands into peacocks that talked to each other. She said things like "shake your bum!" and "do yous want to do some more?" It was really, really not what I expected from a dance demonstration representing Northern Ireland, and it was awesome. If somewhat embarrassing - there was a whole audience watching.

I totally did something to my hip on one of the bum-shaking moves. I'm just not that funky in my daily life. I had to take major NSAIDs when I got home.

dancing...in Norway!

After the competition was done and all the prizes had been given out, the fiddlers started playing for dancing. Fiddlers have varying ranges of awesomeness - sometimes apparently some of them are really *on* for dancing. Me, I can't tell the difference, but I did notice that the party got a lot better when this one guy started playing after midnight.

The woman in red in that picture is an American from our group - she competed in couple dance and won her category, which is totally awesome. She's dancing with an old Norwegian man, which is basically what the evening was about. And lemme tell ya, those old guys, they're good dancers. The dancing went on til about 2, when we all stumbled back to the hotel for the after-party, in the room of a retired fiddler (retired not voluntarily, but because of a terrible accident that damaged his left hand).

This picture is, like, total Norwegian party. There are way too many people in that room. There are especially way too many people on that bed. Two people in the picture are wearing bunad. And there's not only a guy playing the fiddle, there's a couple dancing. Also, somehow not captured in the picture, there's a very high alcohol-to-person ratio and a lot of salty snacks.

compete

So part of the market in Kongsberg is this day-long folk competition. Anybody can enter - a few of the Americans in my group competed in dance, and the fiddler would've competed if she hadn't been totally sick. So there's fiddle, singing, couple dance, halling (the fancy men's dance), and the occasional competitor in mouth-harp, accordion, or langeleik.

This is the lady dancer's daughter and one of the star dancer boys, competing in couple dance. I think they're doing a telespringar.

How awesome is her skirt?? The Telemark bunad has a few different skirt options, and one of them is this absolutely enormous skirt that weighs a million pounds and spins almost straight out. Apparently it's quite a job to manage when you dance - if the guy gets in the way, there's the danger of the thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip effect, and you can't start or stop turning too fast or you'll get totally wrapped up in it.

In my vague fantasy dreams, I'm going to compete in the vocal category in a few years. This is a vague fantasy in which I have somehow gotten over my fear of standing on stage in front of a bunch of foreigners, in their country, singing unaccompanied in their language. Right. So, we'll see about that. To at least get over the singing alone part, I'm taking every darn solo opportunity that comes my way. In a little over a week, I'll be singing a big ole Handel piece with a nearly two-octave range (middle C to B flat) and many enormous jumps in church. Yowch. Cross your fingers for me.

oh yeah, we danced, too

It just occurred to me that, in all these pictures of the ski-dance week, I haven't actually included any pictures of, you know, people dancing. That's because most of it occurred late at night in dark rooms, so the pictures are totally blurry:


I may not have much photographic evidence, but you'll have to believe me, there was plenty of dancing. As you'd expect for a dance workshop, there were more women than men. But several of the better women also dance the men's part - better than most of the men who were there. So it was all good. I still didn't dance as much as I wanted to, mostly because I was shy about asking the Norwegian visitors to dance.

my meez

Me too, me too! (See Sophist's meez here.) I'm doing the samba. Oddly, they didn't have a "Norwegian folk dance" animation.

UPDATE: J.Bro made one, too. His is kinda smug.

valdres

It's February, and that means it's time for adventure. Here's the picture you'll be looking at every time you visit my blog for the next two weeks:


And, if you'd like, you can imagine me doing the dance in the picture while you pine for me. Technically, you'd be wrong, because I don't do that dance, and I'm going to a part of Norway where I think no one else does it, either. But, uh, whatever. I'll be spinny and swirly and the fiddler on the left will be playing, so this is reasonably accurate. See you March 5! With pictures!

P.S. If you'd like to imagine me geographically, for the second week anyway, stick me somewhere in this map with cross-country skis on. Or my dance clothes. Or drunk. Or maybe all of the above.

spelekvinne

Tonight was my last chance to get in some Norwegian dancing before I go to Norway. (I leave two weeks from today! Gack!) This month the local Norwegian dancers were trying out a new dance floor in this one dude's basement. Check out how shiny it is. The fiddler was totally sick, so she only played for an hour or so, but here's a picture I took. This is probably while she was playing a valdresspringar, a dance that I Do Not Do.

telespringar

Look, people dancing the telespringar:



It's not the best video ever, but this is the dance I'll be doing in Norway in six weeks!!

ballet and disability

I read the sweetest article in the New York Times today. It's from May - I got to it from a link with today's editorial about little girls doing creepily sexy dances in a middle school talent show - but you should go back and read it even though it's old.

And, for the record, I totally might have blogged this even if I wasn't trying to get in 11 (now, 10) more posts by the end of the year.

christmas unhappy

So, as you know, I loooove the Christmas show, and it totally makes me happy. But there are less happy moments! Here's the short version of something that happened tonight: it was a small group rehearsal, a classic Christmas-show situation with too many bossy people, and one of them was totally picking on me for singing flat. Which I don't think I was doing, but whether or not I was, she was soooo going about it the wrong way. (The correct way would be to sidle up to the music director and say, hey, yknow, I think Towwas might be having a little trouble in that one part, could you listen and see if you think so, too?) I burst into tears (out of public view, dignity intact, score!!) and it generally got sorted out that I sing fine and the other chorus member was outta line. And she apologized later, which was good of her. She didn't mean to pick on me, she was just being bossy.

But enough about me! Let's look at some pictures!!

Look at the people dancing! Don't they rock, with their swinging swirliness??

Ok, ok, you can have one more:

j.chu is the bomb, I said

Who's that white blob just right of center? Why, it's J.Chu! She's appearing in the role of "adult party guest" in the same production of the Nutcracker that she was in as a kid. Which I think is totally cool. And by "adult party guest" I do not mean a guest at an "adult" party. I mean a grown-up at the party.