Trac, the Welsh folk development agency, decided some time ago to take ten young musicians to the Ethno Camp at Falun in the Dalarna district of Sweden, writes Geoff Cripps.
Ethno is now in its 14th year and each summer hosts around 90 young people aged between 15 and 25 from Europe and Africa. The participants are encouraged to demonstrate their own musical traditions and to share them with their peers. Group leaders assist them in teaching tunes, songs and dances to each other and there are several opportunities for informal performances.
We appointed two freelance project directors, Huw Williams and Cass Meurig, to help recruit our young players and develop their talent. They are both professional musicians with a very wide experience and had attended our training programme for tutors, entitled ?Handing it on?. Importantly, they also had the necessary Criminal Records Bureau checks. They undertook one rehearsal in north Wales and one in south Wales before everyone met in mid-Wales on the weekend prior to flying out to Sweden.
From the Swedish side, it was easier to find a group of young traditional musicians from within one region, indeed primarily from the one town, Falun. The Swedish group, named Granit, came to Wales first for the week of the National Eisteddfod and quickly took in its stride three live performances plus one for television on the same day. The itinerary for the week included a ceilidh in Llandinam Village Hall, a foyer concert in the splendour of Cardiff?s Coal Exchange (where we recorded a live CD of both the Welsh and Swedish bands), two performances at the Museum of Welsh Life in Cardiff and a performance outside the offices of Cardiff 2008 ? much to the surprise of shoppers, tourists and football fans arriving early for the Community Shield match at the Millennium Stadium.
As with all projects, this international exchange has taught us much ? some of which may seem obvious. First, we underestimated just how much it would cost to transport 15 project participants plus two leaders, and accommodate and feed them for a week in two locations in Wales. Furthermore, as our own project participants were spread out all over Wales, from Pentraeth in Anglesey to Cwmbran in Torfaen, the total bill was somewhat higher than originally envisaged. We soon found out that it was worth ringing 15 bus companies (and hassling them to reply) as quotations varied by up to £850. The same also applied when looking for accommodation for big groups, particularly as the Eisteddfod was held in rural Wales. The Arts Council of Wales Lottery Funded Development Programme, together with additional late funding from Cardiff 2008 and Wales Arts International, made it all possible!
Staff time was another key issue. It was all too easy for a small organisation like ours to be swamped by the logistics of a project that involved young people still in school performing at venues ranging from rural village halls and city centre locations to huge events like the National Eisteddfod of Wales, which has 120,000 visitors and costs £2.5m to stage. For example, to fix the outdoor performance in Cardiff involved two days of phone calls and confirmatory letters, including liaison with city centre management and traffic wardens! This project also coincided with us needing to complete our ?New Initiative? project in Gwynedd, to negotiate with the Arts Council of Wales over future revenue funding, and to produce the summer edition of our newsletter. Hopefully, some of our supporters realised why we may not have been on top of some of the other day-to-day tasks during this period!
Our strapline is ?the future of the tradition and the tradition of the future?. Happily, that future now seems much more certain as we have just signed a three-year partnership with the Swedish company Musik I Dalarna.
Geoff Cripps is Development Director of trac. t: 01495 230730; e: trac@trac-cymru.org; w: http://www.trac-cymru.org and http://www.musikidalarna.se