CATEGORY: NORWAY

In the summer of 1982, I accompanied the Liekaringen Dancers of Seattle, a Scandia dance group, on a trip to Scandinavia to go to dance festivals.  The main attraction was the Nordleik Festival held that year in Turku, Finland. This festival is held every three years and includes the countries of Norway, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Iceland and the Falkland Islands.  There were over 6000 dancers there wearing their national and regional costumes.  The Seattle dancers went two weeks early in order to also attend two festivals in Norway.  We stayed first with other dancers and their families in Oslo.  We were treated with great hospitality, partially in recompense because the Seattle Liekaringen had done the same for the Oslo dancers the year before.  After our warm welcome, the Oslo dancers accompanied us to the festivals.  The first one was in Otta, which is north of Lilihammer, and the second one was in Ferda on the west coast.

When we were in Otta, we were amazed at how many drunken people there were at the festival.  One of the things I enjoyed about Scandia dancing as opposed to ballroom dancing, was that no one smoked or drank.  But in Otta!  I had never seen so many drunken people–and not just a little drunk, but literally staggering, falling down drunk.  Most of them were young people.  When the Seattle dancers talked about this situation, their conversations were full of rationalizations about how drinking was a Scandinavian problem because the winters were so long and cold and because Scandinavians were taught to smother their emotions, and so they drank to escape, etc, etc, etc, etc.  One fellow John, who had lived for several years in Norway said, “Norwegians drink differently than other people in Europe.  They drink with a purpose.  They drink to get as drunk as they possibly can.”  To believe him, all we had to do was look around us.

One afternoon in Otta, I was lounging outside in the shade because it was too hot to dance in the hall.  I watched as a very intoxicated, muscular young man was denied entrance at the door due to his condition.  He got into a rage and kept coming back demanding to be let in.  The two men at the door were calm but firm: no entry.  Ready to fight, this young bull put his fist through the window in the door.  Now, on top of his bellowing, there was his blood and broken glass all over the entry way.  Four men managed to get him face down on the graveled parking area, and sat on his back and arms while he continued to struggle.  One of the men went into the hall and came back with a pretty young blonde woman.  She knelt down and talked to the captive, and it was as if he had been touched by an angel.  He became calm.  He got up and she led him away as meek as a lamb.

The next festival, after a dramatic drive over the mountains and down a fjord, was in Ferda.  Miracle of miracles, there were no inebriates to be seen.  Where was John’s theory now?  We had three days of peace and quiet and good dancing.  It was only later we discovered that until that year there had been only one dance organization in all of Norway, but the previous year they had split up. The issue over which they had split was–guess what?  Drinking!  Unknown to us we had danced with the drinkers in Otta and the non drinkers in Ferda.  

The Norwegian dancers did a charming thing at the end of every evening.  They would happily start doing “song-dances,” and then keep doing them on and on until the musicians finally said they must stop playing.  Song dances are simple dances that are taught to children.  The dancers sing a song and do steps that act out the words.  Dancing them must have brought back childhood memories–the Norwegian version of Americans singing Home on the Range or My Old Kentucky Home at the end of a “down home” party.

Other things that happened were not so charming.  It is to the credit of the Sons of Norway in America that anybody, regardless of nationality, can join the lodge.  One of the best dancers in the Seattle Liekaringen was Chinese: Jeff Chang.  Sadly, he was poorly, even rudely treated.  Some of the Norwegian girls refused to dance with him.

The rudeness was not all on the side of the Norwegians.  The female leader of the Seattle group, after being so hospitably treated, would not even sit at the same table in restaurants with the Norwegian dancers because they smoked.  She was not nice about it either.  Smoking is much more common in Europe than in the U S.  I thought that breathing a little smoke would have been better than such an insult.  When we returned to Oslo, the people in who’s homes we had originally stayed, and with whom we were to stay again on our last night, were quite cool to us.

On the other side of the coin, the Norwegian woman who guided our tour to the festivals, took us out of the way to see as many wonders of the country as possible.  We saw several stave churches, the architecture of which I thought especially miraculous.  When she found out I was interested in birds, she was also most accommodating in pointing out all she could although most of them were as common there as robins are here.  I was impressed by other common things, like the access that was allowed across private property when we went for walks to stretch our legs, and I was intrigued by the hillside farms.  The little bright green fields cut out of the darker green trees on the mountain sides were so steep they looked like green handkerchiefs hanging on a clothes line.  It was hard to believe that any animals could possibly graze on them without rolling downhill like a bowling ball and striking others of their kind, causing an avalanche. Midsomer Eve came when we were in Otta.  The custom in Norway is to light fires instead of erecting a pole.  However, since it is daylight all night in the middle of summer, the fires were like coals to Newcastle: hardly visible.

One of the most memorable experiences of this trip was the ferry ride from Stockholm to Turku.  The ferry was eight decks high.  The forward end of the two top decks was devoted to the most luxurious aspects of viewing, eating, drinking—-and DANCING!  On the next to top deck, below a two-deck-high wall of wrap-around glass at the very front of the boat was a marble dance floor. A platform for the orchestra was at the bottom of the glass wall.  The top deck was a bar overlooking the dance floor.  Beneath the bar, and three steps down from the dance floor, was a restaurant with pink tablecloths, pink stand-up napkins, and brown velvet carpet.  Even though we all had state rooms and were really tired, we danced most of the night.  It never got dark; the sky turned pink, like a diaphanous version of the pink table cloths, and formed a rosy kind of half-dusk as we danced, seemingly in the outside air, through misty mauve islands.  We were living in a fairy tale.