Penel - Posted - 09/07/2010:  09:30:05

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Up until recently I had no idea that there are huge festivals in Europe where young people get together to folk dance.
I'd always thought of that as a thing people in their 30s and up might do.

I stumbled upon an internet radio station from Belgium that quickly replaced all others in my clock radio.
I share
canardfolk.be/tradcan/introEN2.htm

Now to find a couple hurdy gurdys, a bellows blown bag pipe, and some kind of squeeze box willing to let me play fiddle with them.

ajisai - Posted - 09/07/2010:  09:56:46

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I folk danced when I was in college and our club had a traveling team that went to Europe every summer to participate in festivals. (Looks like their first trip was in 1964.) I never thought much about the age of the people dancing there though. Is it changing? It seems like a wonderful thing for people of any sort and it's great if young people are embracing it.

If I had a hurdy gurdy, I'd play with you!

coelhoe - Posted - 09/07/2010:  10:27:58

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Romantic revivals, be they art, music, religion or politics, are usually driven by the same cultural uneasiness about the present. The fear of homogenization in the new European Union is, I think, one factor. Likewise, a revived sense of cultural uniqueness in the collapse of Soviet domination in eastern Europe. Future historians might point to the Tanzhaus movement in Hungary in '73 as a harbinger of the events a generation later in '89. Anxiety generating an ideal past. I was in Budapest in the spring of '74 and heard a lot of pan-Magyar cultural revival, much of it connected to the suppressed Hungarian populations in northwestern Romania, but also New Brunswick, New Jersey (!).

Today, you can find regional ethnic revivals all over Europe that have a linguistic rather than political foundation, for example: Catalans in Spain, Occitan and Breton in France, Swabian in Germany, Friullians in northern Italy, Valmalenco above Lake Como, and so forth, including the huge number of revived ethnicities in the former USSR.

It is ironic that a Belgian radio station would become a source for all this since Belgium itself is an invented country, a result of British desire to insure a neutral port in Antwerp after the defeat of Napoleon. Dutch (Vlamish) in the north, French in the south. It is an even bet that the country itself won't survive this ethnic bifurcation another two decades.

Penel - Posted - 09/07/2010:  18:49:22

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quote:

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Originally posted by coelhoe


It is ironic that a Belgian radio station would become a source for all this since Belgium itself is an invented country, a result of British desire to insure a neutral port in Antwerp after the defeat of Napoleon.

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But not a stretch of imagination to anticipate if you understand the nature of the peoples of Belgium.

And this site, listing various folk groups found in various countries, folksylinks.it/ is presented by a guy in Italy.

DownYonder - Posted - 09/07/2010:  18:49:55

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The Scottish and Irish each have their own version of a square dance. They usually dance a square to an accordion rather than a fiddle I believe.

fiddletree - Posted - 09/17/2010:  13:23:48

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They have a lot of traditional music in dance where I live, in Aosta, Italy. It is mainly traditional French Alpine music and dances (we are on the border with France), but I have gotten them interested in old time music and contra dancing lately!

We also have crazy numbers of hurdy gurdies and boxes.... the last dance I went to had a band that consisted of at least 15 hurdy gurdies, a few accordians, and at least one piper. Sounds like heaven to you, Penel! It is to me, anyways.

Minim Miser - Posted - 09/17/2010:  13:38:22

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Thanks for the internet radio link Penel, that's definitely found a place in my favorites.