Karin Eriksson “is an ethnomusicologist and a postdoctoral researcher with the project Embodying Traditions: Exploring Gendered Spaces in Traditional Dance and Music in Norway and Sweden (2023-2026). Her main research interests are traditional music in the Nordic countries and the intersections towards popular music and dance, with special focus on issues of musical and cultural belongings, intangible cultural heritagisation, gender and queer research”.
She is returning to Högskolan Dalarna after working in Norway in the department of Traditional Arts and Traditional Music, Faculty of Humanities, Sports and Educational Science at Campus Rauland of the University of South Eastern Norway
It is of great interest and considerable curiosity on my part about how her consolidation in folk music traditions meets my eternal quest to put a stake into the heart of every traditionalist vampire that I happen to meet! However, it also occurs to me that without folk music I would not be where I am today. Let me explain…
Everything grows from the roots of the Great Comberton Flower show when the annual traditional country dance (what I would now call English Social Dancing) was the only thing that for an hour or two helped the village forget the iron laws of the english class structures and dance together for the fun of it!
Without that early and formative experience I may have never continued to work with Gas Mark 5 after the first gig in Bristol. Without Gas Mark 5 and the interest in their crowd had for traditional Swedish dance and folk music I would never have toured in Sweden.
Without the Swedish tour I would be in some other possible future (“what might have been is an abstraction remaining a perpetual possibility only in a world of speculation”) and not here, where I am now. Without the move to Sweden no live sound engineering for Hedningarna. Without the friendship I formed with Hedningarnas Sven Klang, no involvement with the education I have been involved with at Högskolan Dalarna for the last 20 years.
And without that experience – the visceral foundation of the text I plan to write – no questions to be answered about the best way to think about Media Producton Education. So there must be something of value in the old ways!
And then there is the whole question of my birth as a dance caller in the English Social Dancing tradition after moving to Sweden. But maybe that is a story for another day!
