Dance in Sweden - Gröna Lund and Skansen

Gröna Lund resumed their summer dance a couple of years ago. They now offer an extensive dance programme. The price for the entrance to all the dances for the summer season 2007 was just 99 SEK!

The dance contains mainly modern dance, at some occasions swing dance, and - new from this year - tango and salsa dance Mondays and Tuesdays with recorded music.

At our first visit to Gröna Lund for this season, Claes Lövgrens were playing.

The open-air dance-floor has this year been renewed, and has resulted in a very smooth and danceable floor.

The nice weather this day had inspired me to expand my jogging track, something that unfortunately led to to that one of my knees signalled that it had done it´s duty for that day.

The problem was most obvious when dancing common foxtrot, while it felt somewhat easier to go slow in bugg and swing dance.

For this reason I could not fully enjoy the dance, and we left before pause, despite nice music and good atmosphere.

According to a report from another dancer, we missed thereby some Swedish gammaldans, that was played just before the pause.

Skansen in Stockholm has provided an extensive dance programme for many years. The content has however changed over time.

In former times the dance contained both jazz and Swedish gammaldans. When I joined these events, about 1975, the events contained however only the usual Swedish gammaldans mix, with waltz, schottische, polka/snoa/pariserpolka, hambo and mazurka, and occasionally some tango and polskor.

The dance was going on for five days a week during the summer season, Wednesdays till Sundays.

Gradually the dance mix has changed, mainly modern dance and jazz has taken over, but also some tango evenings.

The last years there has been a few dance evenings with polskor during August, but not this year.

Currently the remaining Swedish gammaldans events at Skansen are at the Midsummer weekend, and on Wednesdays in July.

The Tuesday dance events contains also usually about four dances with gammaldans.

When we visited a such Tuesday dance, Gideons played. The audience was not so numerous this evening.

Fortunately the jogging after-effects had disappeared, something that made it possible to utilize the space on the floor.