Copyright

Anna Björk and Petri Hoppu

Published On

2024-04-25

Page Range

pp. 481–496

Language

  • English

Print Length

16 pages

18. Minuet Constructions and Reconstructions

Chapter of: The Nordic Minuet: Royal Fashion and Peasant Tradition(pp. 481–496)
The chapter analyses contemporary forms of the minuet in Sweden and Finnish-speaking Finland. In both cases, the minuet traditions disappeared a long time ago, but since the late twentieth century, the folk dancers created minuets for different purposes. In Sweden, the minuet was reconstructed by Börje Wallin, using old documents from Sweden and comparing them to Danish and Finnish-Swedish minuets. As a result of his work, the minuet became a part of today’s repertoire of the urban folk dance communities. In Finnish-speaking Finland, folk dancers composed new minuet choreographies for the stage with Finnish-Swedish minuets as the most important example. Opposite to the Swedish minuet reconstruction, the Finnish minuets were not created for social dancing but performances.

Contributors

Anna Björk

(author)
Research Archivist at Centre for Swedish Folk Music and Jazz Research

Anna Björk MA is a research archivist at the Centre for Swedish Folk Music and Jazz Research in Stockholm, where she works with the dance collections, for instance ‘Arkivet för Folklig dans’ (Archive for popular dance). She holds a degree in Swedish folk dance and an MA in Contemporary Dance Education from Stockholm University of the Arts. Her master thesis Folkdansaren och arkivet: traditionsbärande som kritisk arkivpraktik (The folk dancer and the archive: tradition bearing as critical archive practice) investigates the knowledge transmission in the interchange between dancer and archive, where different folk dance bodies understood as archives – both living dancers and bodies in text and image – meet. She also works as a dance teacher, teaching Swedish folk dance and folk dance pedagogy.

Petri Hoppu

(author)
Principal Lecturer at the Department of Media and Performing Arts at Oulu University of Applied Sciences
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6394-5210

Petri Hoppu PhD studied ethnomusicology at the University of Tampere, Finland, and graduated in 1995. He continued his studies in Tampere and wrote his doctoral thesis (1999) on the minuet in Finland. Today he is a Principal Lecturer at the Oulu University of Applied Sciences and Adjunct Professor (Docent) in dance studies at Tampere University. His areas of expertise include theory and methodology in dance anthropology as well as research of Skolt Saami dances, Finnish-Karelian vernacular dances and Nordic folk dance revitalization. He has been a project manager of several research projects, including Dance in Nordic Spaces (2007–2012) and KanTaMus (developing common pedagogy for folk dance and music, 2021–2023). He has written several peer-reviewed articles and co-edited the book Nordic Dance Spaces: Practicing and Imagining a Region (2014) with professor Karen Vedel and Dance Research Journal 52 (1) Special Issue In and Out of Norden - Dance and the Migratory Condition (2020) with professor Inger Damsholt. He has been the editor of the only annual Nordic folk dance research journal, Folkdansforksning i Norden, since 2002. He has been on boards of international dance scholars’ associations and giving lectures at universities in Europe and the US.