Dance Dialects: Traces of Local Development or of Processes of Diffusion

Abstract

This paper is based on a research project at The Norwegian Council for Folk Music and Folk Dance: Structures of Tradition and EIistorical Layers in the older Couple Dances of Norway.l I do not intend to present the project as such, but in the first part of my paper I will present some points from our methodical discussions. Erling Flem will later discuss other themes from the same project. One of the most focused aspects of our old couple dances are the rich patterns of variation on different levels. They are particularly important for one of these dance types: The springar/pols. Springar and pols are the most important names for variants of what I here consider to be one dance type. This dance type has been documented from a11 parts of our country. The variation between different geographical areas has been particularly focused by the folk dance and folk music movement. The variants on the geographical level have been referred to as dialects of the dance type. Example of another level of variation is the variation between individuals from the community. (Bakka 1973, 1978, Bloml981) In the title of our project we refer to variation patterns on different levels as structures of tradition. We try to analyze and describe these patterns for the dance type springar/pols within a chosen geographical area. In dance research, analogies to linguistics have earlier been used and discussed. (Kaeppler 1972, Lange 1981) We have tried to adopt thinking and some terms from the linguistic research of dialects in our project. I shall first try to sketch some of our attempts in this direction. The project also tries to spot processes of change in the history of our dances. We try to discern between results of different processes, which we refer to as different historical layers.