To The Chair LUTSF
10th Sept 2003
Thank you for the travel scholarship
funds towards my attendance at Europeade 2003 Festival in Nuoro,
Purpose of the travel:- I wore two hats
for the festival. Principally to establish if the festival was a safe and
exciting event to take Ashley’s Rise Junior Morris to perform at, and secondly
to see if I felt
In order to see the festival from the inside I volunteered to work with the Regie. They provide all the crew, stage management, and performer ‘control’ for the festival. They pay the same 80€ fee to attend. This covered accommodation and basic meals and management costs.
Highlights:- the entire festival exceeded my expectations. I was aware of the huge national pride in tradition, costume and dance. For me, as an English man working for a Flemish backstage crew the best part was the welcome and the keenness to share. Everyone welcomed everyone, there was no team competitiveness, only pride that they had got there and in showing their best.
Some rich teams stayed in hotels, but they were the losers, team spirit flourished in the makeshift school accommodation as everyone ‘made do’ . This bonded performing teams together. A rehearsal at 2am (it was to hot to sleep) by one team caused most of us to get up and applaud them.
Organisation for the 4000+ performers was good and accurate, only the arrival of breakfast seemed a problem.
If anyone wishes to follow in my footsteps with a view to taking a traditional amateur dance team to perform, then working for the Regie the year before gives you a good overview. They would particularly welcome you if you speak any Scandinavian/Baltic language or Italian.
For a researcher there is the potential to study a dance tradition, but the accommodation is strictly for performers & crew. I met an Italian Dance teacher who worked the festival as a translator to get cheap accommodation whilst she studied the Spanish team she was the guide / translator for. One note, for proposed performing teams is that they must be European and amateur traditional dance or song.
Sharing Information.
I am in the process of encouraging 10 other teams to be performers in the coming years as well as my own youth team. I am working with the UK Europeade Committee to produce a factsheet (in English, not Flemish). This will be freely available with the three Morris organisations and the English Folk Dance and Song Society. I will also send a copy to the LUTSF. Should anyone wish to have a personal copy please email cliffordjohnm@aol.com. I hope to have this agreed with the Europeade committee by mid November.
Report from Europeade 2003 Festival,
Nuoro,
16th -21st July 2003
A huge, excitable melting pot for European Folk Culture by John Clifford
Underlying reasons for Research Project. There were 2 linked projects…………..
1./ For Ashley’s Rise Junior Morris
I act as co-ordinator for the group. We are an independent youth team
established in 1993 to provide traditional dance training and performance
for young people aged 8 to 16 in the
We were invited to attend the Europeade Festival in 2004 in
It's vision is that if groups with their
wide cultural, religious and ethnic origins can dance together, play together
and recognise each other's uniqueness, then the chance of us ever returning to
war in
This year the festival was based in Nuoro Sardinia. Other cities have been, Valencia (S),
My task was to evaluate the festival so that the youth group I represented
could have a smooth attendance at next years festival in
I felt for the security of my group that we needed to know the nature of the festival, it’s strengths and weaknesses before we attended.
2./ The
I have proposed that this festival is
based for the first time ever in the
I have to feedback my research to a
‘Honorary Committee’ for
Basic Structure.
The festival is performance driven. It is divided into 5 major shows (numbers
approx.):-
a. 100 teams (2000 performers) in opening
ceremony in a sports stadium Thursday eve.
b. 100 teams (2000 performers) in
closing ceremony in the sports stadium Sunday eve.
c. 80 teams / choirs (1500 performers)
in concert (This year in an amphitheatre) Friday eve.
d. Procession / Parade For all 200ish dance teams, bands and choirs.
10am to 2pm Saturday.
e. Smaller teams have a 20 min spot in 'The Forum' an intimate
space for the audience to 'get to know' the team during the periods 10am to 1pm
or 4pm to 6pm daily.
All teams will expect to perform at a and
b, or at b and c. Everyone does d. Additionally all teams will work in 2 or 3
small performances in designated areas.
(Residential homes, small parks etc.) More can be done if your team is
restless! We have been invited to dance
at the British Consulate in
There are also two events of a more social nature…
1. a Grand Ball 8pm to 2am-ish Saturday night, sometimes this is private, as is planned for Riga, sometimes very public as in Sardinia. It blends the best of local and national dance bands in a 4hr bop. High energy, lots of alcohol, candy and ‘fraternatie’.
2. Sunday morning there is a Ecumenical and very long multi-lingual Church service usually held in a Cathedral.
Both events are optional, but encouraged.
Accommodation .
Basic. This year at
Food
Is supplied en-mass to either individual
feeding stations or pre-packed to your hostel/school hall. I will say the food
in
From a dancers point of view..................
If you love dance, enjoy the development of international traditional
culture, and would like to see the source of much of our ‘traditional dance’
then this is the place for you. It is expressly
not for modern dance performance …… the one 'modern' dance performance,
honouring, in memoriam, the recent death of the festival's founder and
symbolising his spirit moving on etc was dismissed, politely, as a lot of
wafting about.
The mass Dance Performance surfaces were first rate, although there was some
concern with the road surface in the parade.
The audiences here were very large, typically 4000 in the stadium and
6000 in the amphitheatre. For the
parade, all 4 hours of it, every inch of pavement was covered with applauding
spectators. This year the heat was
intense even by Sardinian standards at 38°C most days and 30°C at
night but we all coped if a bit wilted.
In
The Festival has a very strong culture of pride in the presentation, national
flags, national identity and authenticity of costume and style. It is in the main a high spirited event, with
a renewed focus recently in attracting the younger dance teams (and teams from
the
Each major performance the host nation's teams open the show and the subsequent
year’s national teams present the finale.
From this years performances there will be a lot of fine dancing as
Latvians celebrate next year as host nation.
Money:-
All performers are amateur. All pay 80ε,
60ε of this goes to pay the Food & Accommodation and 20ε
to the management. The Senior Management
(5 Staff) are waged with all other delegates and National Committee members
apparently obtaining funding from their respective National Government (Except
UK).
Stage Crew, Lighting / Sound (collectively called the Regie) all pay to
attend, although like the Management Committee they are treated to
one free 'meal out'.
Everyone pays their own travel fare. There is some travel cost sharing for teams
flying in to a festival… say 2 teams share the hire of a coach. Each venue has it’s own variations depending
on nearness to airport, harbour etc. For
How does a group go to Europeade?
Strictly the festival is open to all
traditional amateur dance groups, in particular youth, but in practice all
submissions are cleared by each nation's committee. The National Committee may act to co-ordinate
the travel plans where appropriate.
There is a shortage of
All music is live and from acoustic
instruments, unless they are a dance band for the ‘ball’.
All instruments are amplified in the large performances.
Where possible teams of the same nation are accommodated together.
It is useful for a team to produce some
information or a Video of the team so that the stage management can best plan
them into the performance schedule. In
the event of there being more teams than spaces put to a national committee,
the better the publicity the better the chances, although it must be said the
For the
He also represents the MacLennan Scottish Dance group.
For a personal observation please contact me on ashleyrisemorris@aol.com or
0117 940 1566.
Europeade Headquarters:- Europeade, baron dhanislann, 20 bus 4 – b2000
-
Best English spoken by Hilda (pronounced Hild)
Ryssart
-
Website : www.europeade.be
- email, info@europeade.be it’s not
really their medium, but they run a good festival!
-
See www.europeade.lv
for next year’s plans and for some digital photo’s of last year’s Latvians at
Nuoro. The site will develop over time.
Where are the future Europeade festivals?
2004,
2007 Spain Mainland 2008
Thank you for the chance to visit the
festival. I hope I can pull it off for
the event to come to the
If you want to see more of our team go to :-
http://members.aol.com/ashleyrisemorris/arpage.html
We hope to add
John Clifford