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Written in fRoots issue 331/332, 2011
 

DVD

JENSEN & BUGGE
Projekt Dialekt
GO’ Danish GO0610 (2010)

Active young Danish fiddler Kristian Bugge, of Baltic Crossing and more, and accordionist Mette Kathrine Jensen, of Zenobia, went to four places in Jutland with surviving distinctive local forms of folk dances and music – Fanø, Thy, Læsø and Western Jutland – and played with local musicians as a small band for dancers invited to a local hall. The four videos simply show the event in each place: the band sits playing and the dancers dance, intercut with an interview one of the local musicians or a dancer.
     The inspiration for the project is admirable, making sure it isn’t just the tunes that survive in the present-day folk revival but also their connection with their raison d’être, the dances, and presumably its main aim is to show these different local dances in action, partly as a document and partly perhaps to encourage others to dance them, or for players to get some sense of how the music fits with the dance. The steps and sequences aren’t really shown clearly or continuously enough to follow, though, and the booklet contains just transcripts of the interviews and a glossary. Dance descriptions on the video or in the booklet would have been a help. The viewer is in the role of wallflower, just watching the musicians sitting playing and people getting up to dance with varying degrees of amiable inexpertise.
     I’m probably not the target audience, but I would have appreciated a lot more in the way of scene-setting and contextualising, such as film of the villages themselves, interactions between the musicians, something of the people’s homes and lives, perhaps some archive shots, and, if the objective is to pass them on, more depiction or description of the dance moves. It feels like a missed opportunity; there would have been plenty of room on the DVD for a more vigorous and engaging, documentary-style approach.

www.gofolk.dk


© 2010 Andrew Cronshaw
 

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