Just A Whirlwind of Activity

Sorry about the paucity of posting. We've been fairly busy for the last four days, and haven't had a lot of time to relax.

Anyways, I believe I left off from Thursday afternoon. After leaving the Ethnographic Museum (in a slightly dampened state), we made our way to Turaida for the official start of the Baltica Festival. Turaida is east of Riga in the Gaujas River valley, and happens to be some extremely pretty country--driving down to cross the river I was reminded of parts of West Virginia.

There were quite a few traditional Latvian folk clubs present, and all of them were dressed in traditional costumes. Opening ceremonies were held in a natural ampitheatre, and the singing and dancing went on for some time. Towards the end of the evening, it turned into one big social dance with a wide variety of different dances -- Latvian, Ukrainian, Estonian, Swedish, etc. We played a couple of dances. Ann called a Virginia reel which led into a gånglåt (what we call a snake in America), and then we played a waltz. A lot of the other dance traditions have a lot of dance figures in common with square dancing, so everybody was able to pick up on everything very quickly. It was a pretty impressive sight to see over 200 people out there whooping it up.

On a side note, Matt and I went up to what we thought was a beer tent, and ordered a "Kvass" -- we thought we were in hogs' heaven, as it was only 0.5 laht for a half liter. It was very sweet and malty, and we didn't think much of it, but we still had a few. It was only later that we found out that it almost borders on being considered non-alcoholic, and is more similar to root beer and is often served to children. It's basically fermented pumpernickel bread and water.

On Friday the festival was held in Riga. We marched in a parade from the town square to where the Freedom monument is located. Streets and alleys were lined with people. At the Freedom monument we performed one dance, but the PA stopped working right before we were to go on so we had to play acoustically (there were probably six hundred people in attendance). The crowd loved it, and they really show it. They almost immediately started clapping along in time, and that just pushes the energy of the dancers to these high levels when there is such a receptive audience. In fact, all of our performances in Latvia have been like this, and I'll step out on a limb and say that this is probably the most clogging-ist loving group of people that we have ever encountered.

Anyways, we had some time on Friday afternoon before our main performance, so we just hung out in the park. We got hit with another down pour, but the sun soon came out again and dried up all the rain so the itsy bitsy spider went up the spout again so were soon back on track. We performed in a bandshell that had a nice wooden floor, but there was a very substantial slope to it, so most of the dances ended up quite a bit downstage from where they started. People also really packed it in for this particular show, and afterwards met us backstage to talk to us and take photos. One could get used to this star treatment.

I'll post some later, and will also throw up some more pics after they get sorted and uploaded.

Adam