07.30.06

Herräng

Posted in Hollidays, Lindy Hop at 8:16 pm by tesstess

This week I have been in Herräng, the Lindy Hop Mecca. Except during four weeks in summer Herräng is a small, sleeping village an hour above Stockholm. Then suddenly thousands of dancers invade the place and makes it alive. To be there is for me as being in a totally different world, not connected to my everyday life.

Me and Magnus attended the camp the fourth week and did the “competition and show” course. It is the first time we do this course which focus much more on show and on aerials (acrobatics), but it is my fourth year in Herräng. I longed to get here again from the last day of last year’s camp.

The first day of the course the comp & show people has to be divided into two groups. I was nervous for this audition weeks before the camp. First they (the three teaching couples of the course) taught us a short routine which I think we made quite ok, but then came a solo charleston routine, which both me and Magnus had some troubles with and in the end we didn’t manage to get into the best group which we had hoped for. I was really affected by this. I had thought I would be disappointed, but not totally depressed for a whole day! I seem to be more of a competing person than I thought. What was good is that they taught the same material to both groups. Next year, I tell myself, then we will have practiced much more and we will be in the best group, so that I can get to know more good dancers and dance with them at nights. Of course I can dance with them anyway, it’s just to ask them, but it is so much more fun if it’s a wish from both sides to dance.

One class each day we did aerials on a big football field. This is what I and Magnus love the most, and this year we learnt three or four new aerials and got more theory on some we knew from before.

Here is what my schedule looked like most days:

09-10 Breakfast

10-17 Three or four classes a 1 hour and 20 minutes, and breaks in between where we had sandwiches and chocolate. One kilo of chocolate we ate this week, half a kilo each.

18-19 Dinner

20-00 Sleep

01-05 Dance

05-08 Sleep

This way I missed the evening meetings where the whole camp gathers and Lennart, who is one of the key persons at the camp sits at the stage and tells stories, shows old movies and people comes up on stage to perform or talk. It’s always lots of crazy things going on at those meetings. I’m sad that I missed them, but this year I really wanted to dance as much as possible. The dance floor is too crowded between ten and midnight and most often I have the best dances very early in the morning when most people are gone to bed and only the most lindy loving dancers are left.

Next year we’ll go for more than one week, so that I can focus on social dancing one week and on courses the next. Some people spend the entire four weeks in Herräng. I think people from abroad get a pretty strange picture of Sweden when Herräng is the only place they see. There are lots of people from the US, France, Germany, Russia, Spain, Italy, Norway, Denmark, Finland, and more. Everyone speaks English at all times. Sometimes it takes quite a while before you notice the person you’re speaking to is actually from Sweden and you don’t have to speak Swedish at all. I must say it’s much better than in France, because as soon as one in a big group of people are from somewhere else, English is the given language, whereas here in France as soon as there is more than three French people in the same group, the given language is French…

There was a pool at the camp area this year, Marcus and Ellen jumped in after some hesitation. I also saw couples doing aereals from outside the pool, into the pool which was really cool, but unfortunately I didn’t manage to catch them with my camera.

This year my entire body was acing after just a few days, and after four days I caught a cold and slept one whole night and did no courses the next day. This is normal at Herräng, I get it every year. Fortunately this year I got better again and could dance from one o’clock at night until half past nine the next morning of my last day. Then two hours later, after breakfast, packing and cleaning I managed to drive two hours of the way home before I got to dangerous and have to hand over the driving to the others.

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