Dancing the night away.

Right now I'm doing both a balboa course and a lindy hop course. Great teachers, I enjoy their classes so much. Anni and Gasper are great dancers who teach balboa, they also feature as photo models in my song book! Claudia and Davis are guest teachers from Canada and they teach lindy hop, super nice and so skilled dancers.

It's like trying to make up for all the weeks I didn't dance at all this autumn. Due to book release, cd recording, touring and working irregular times, a wounded shoulder. It's just been too little space for dancing. But I know how much energy it gives me to dance!

To plan for future dance events can be real fun.
Here's a good site where you can plan when and where to go to dance: http://www.swingplanit.com/

Some days....it's time to try something new I've never done before.
To give myself an energy boost I tried out how to make soft finger waves, hairstyle from the 1920's and 30's.

Here's a vidoe showing the technique:





Yesterday....Swedish Lucia for dummies, now spreading fast on the social networks....


Did you see any stars falling yesterday? Our earth is now passing through the Perseid comet tail. We saw a number of falling stars!

Eva

Lucia, welcome with light

Good Lucia-day to everyone!

Please let me show you one of my favourite designers, Täpp Lars, Lars of Scandinavia.
I borrow this Lucia-photo from his web-site (if anyone dislikes me borrowing, please contact me). It's a wonderful picture!

Täpp Lars makes exclusive clothes of fur from sheeps, the most beautiful jackets I can imagine. He also makes design for a various number of home style, like candle decoration, christmas decoration, wedding decorations.

To me Lucia is about having fun, make someone surpriced, sing for the sake of the singing. And on a deeper level, bring light in the dark season.

One of my best Lucia memories is from Uppsala and I guess it's when I was 20 years old. Some friends and me talked to the rail road company SJ to be allowed to sing Lucia songs on the commuter train between Uppsala and Stockholm. They said yes as long as it was only singing and no spreading of pamphlets or anything. Perfect, the only thing we wanted to do was to sing and surprice people early in the morning going to work. It was truly a very happy thing to do. So many happy smiles!

Someone who have never seen Lucia or heard Lucia songs? It's a quite local tradition we have here in the north. It includes a special set of songs, white dresses, candles, either electric or real candles, all big shops sell the electric ones. Imagine this is a childrens tradition most of all and no one whats a fire tragedy when small children celebrate Lucia.

The surprice-traditions in Lucia has its roots in much much older traditions. Long ago, and not on the 13th of December, rather after Christmas, children and youth where visiting neighbour homes and farms and singing christmas songs about the star, the child, the holy family fleeing to Egypt to escape Herodes. This has very little to do with Lucia, but it has been a mix of two traditions when we still sing about Staffan and his horses, and boys in a Lucia event might be dressed to star-holders.
 

Go well into the day!

Rock this Christmas

Christmas and rock n roll.
Enviken in my heart!
Fanny Mae plus John Lindberg Trio are booked to Tängergården on the 25th of Dec.


Here's some pics from 2010.

Poster 2010.

DJ-ing old style.

A little bit too cold for the invasion of vintage cars
that we usually see in summertime.

Music from one of the many local bands.

On this beautiful day of 121212 I will go to Ljungskile to meet friends in music, talk a future possibility of brand new music that is in the pipeline of creation. Leo the teenage dog will go with me, perfect for learning to follow his person on her work-meetings. It's -16° so I guess I will have to dress him in both a knit-wear AND a jacket, poor little dog, he doesn't like his clothes. Well, he doesn't like the cold either. I do like the cold. It's breathtaking beautiful with all this snow and frost, and the air is fresh. Woke up this morning with a clear star sky, now seing the yeallow tones in the sunrise above the dark green-blue horizon line of forrest.

Why is the sky so beautiful in winter? Every day I marvel at the colours of the sky.


All the best wishes to you out there! Eva

Sing by ear, sing by heart and Teaching Tolerance

Goodmorning!

Today my choir Lei-La will meet and sing our last rehersal before Christmas. Time flies! We have now had our first 10 rehersals and it goes super fine! So far we haven't picked up one piece of paper of music notes, we sing by ear and by heart.

Lei-La choir is open to anyone who wish to participate, women, men, teenagers. You may join us after Christmas or in August 2013. Just contact me on email.

"....to face and conquer our own prejudices, no matter what they are."

This is from an article I read this morning. Talking about how teachers can help the natural instinct young people have in compassion, willingness to make a change, tolerance and courage.

This teacher used to teach in a relatively poor area but change to another job where she tutored fairly rich children. In the beginning she faced her own prejudices that the rich children would be ignorant and selfish towards the rest of the society. She found out they really cared, and just had to broaden the horizon to understand more of the diversity. I especially like the way this teacher describes how she thought she was trained to look beyond clothes, skin colour and see the presonality instead. But she realized she's never fully trained in this ability, it's a constant journey to not judge and make labels of people.
Please take a look at the full article at Teaching Tolerance.

Time to move on into this beautiful day!

Eva

Bilderbok för vuxna. My friend made a book

Smart and deep, fun and thoughtful.
My friend Per Fenger-Krog has made a book from of his collections of drawings with deep thoughts of daily life, politics and human communication. Since it's written in swedish I will switch to swedish.

Jag blir så glad av att läsa denna bok.

Rolig och djup, med eftertanke och humor. Måste återkomma och läsa långsamt för den innehåller så mycket.

Per Fenger-Krog har gjort en bok av sin fina samling tecknade figurer. Han har under årens lopp gjort finurliga och tänkvärda anteckningar i filofaxer och anteckningsböcker. Dessa tankeord har han nu illustrerat så varje uppslag bildar en helhet av text och bild. Som en bilderbok för vuxna. Det handlar ofta om hur vi kommunicerar med varandra, att både hitta sig själv och ett vi.

Per är animatör, illustratör, musiker och kompositör. Multikonstnär med andra ord.

jättefin julklapp....jag köpte en till mig och en att ge bort....

undrar vem som ska få den......

Vill du beställa en bok, kontakta Per via hans hemsida.Opus Animo
Här kan du se hans animationer, höra hans musik, kika på illustrationer han gjort.

Snöiga hälsningar på 10 dec!

Eva

My favourite photo blogs and some more vintage dresses

Today it's the day when we light the second candle before Christmas. Happy 2nd advent to you!

Going out now makes me so happy with all the snow, white and clean and fresh. Everywhere I see things I want to make a photo of. My photo eye-glasses are often on. I'll share some winter photos here for you.
Leo is not that keen on going out when it's too cold. He's running fast like if he doesn't want to put his feet down.
Leo has a dog-friend, Boogie, who sometimes come visiting our neighbours. If Leo sees Boogie from the kitchen window he starts to cry to get out to greet Boogie. Yesterday we just saw Boogie leaving and we were too late to get out. After this Leo cried for about 15 minutes until we went out to make sure Boogie was not hiding behind the piles of snow.

When I want to get inspired I sometimes look at theese two amazing photo blogs.

Photo by Tekla. The young and talented Maja, visit her blog.

Drömma. The dreamer in Göteborg, Lottas blog.

Lotta has a great interest in dresses, writes about her life with children and many interests and dreams. Her blog is somekind of very poetic, I just love the way she writes.
Oh, about dresses, I found no less than five dresses yesterday at the local second hand, all five for less than the price on one dress in an ordinary shop. Two of them for sunny hot summer weather, but why not? One will be for my balboa parties, a tight grey slightly shiny In Wear-dress:

This is my newest 70th-dress, real vintage.
Transparent nylon with silver threads.

Today we stay at home. Friends coming, we'll bake some ginger bread and create fantasy ginger bread houses.

Eva

Following the star

Good day dear reader,

today I want to put the light on why art is an important part of society progress.

A very interesting result I've heard of is the systems for upholding free culture with free lance artists in a country will indicate how this country have it on economics over all. Countries in Europe with exsisting systems of support for their free artists also see a better economy in business and society. Countries with non-exsisting systems for free artists face some serious problems with the same. Today it's about Italy and Greece in Europe who don't support arts like some other countries do on a national level. Italy focus only on their historical buildings and call that supporting culture. But it's not that we are talking about, it's the possibilities for artists to live and work as artists without being forced to be commercial. Experimental art has to have a place too. Arts has to be diverse, otherwise it dies from mono-culture starvation. The same as in ecological systems, each spieces has a place in the network.

The interesting question is if it's culture itself that make a country flower? Yes, many researches has been done in this, and it's quite well known that culture helps us a long way in the democratic processes and most of all, to understand ourselves and others. What it is to be a person, a human. To feel what our history was, and to get courage to move forward.

I think of the democratic process in South Africa. Songs and dance kept the whole process going forward in times of big trauma. It made people not only survive, but to be able to create one of the finest revolutions ever happened. Yes, many died, but it could have been a much worse scenario with war on another scale.

Pussy Riot is another example. They have put a snow ball rolling, and Putin is terrified and has banned Pussy Riots music. Wich probably only will feed the democratic process even more. It will be interesting to see what's coming up next there.

The Arabic Spring is yet another example where many artists play an important role to be the voice of the people when the powers oppressing are trying to silence that voice.

Who said arts is just for amusement? Go ask theese brave artists who are risking their lifes.

Like the three wise men who followed the star.....there is no other way but to follow the light.

I can recommend you to visit Alfons Karabudas blogg on artists role in democratic process.

On the web site of Freemuse I read: All that is banned is desired.



Warmest wishes from a beautiful winter-Göteborg.  -8°C out doors, but in my heart it's a fire for the love of arts.

Eva

(the picture I've found on facebook, it doesn't tell who made it, please contact me if you have any wishes with my borrowing of the picture.)