Nõo Folk Dance Camp

Last weekend I went to the small town of Nõo for folk dance camp. Over the course of three days we had 4 dance practices and racked up a total of about 13-14 hours of dancing. By Sunday afternoon I was completely exhausted, sore all over, and really, really stinky. I would have killed for a nice long soak in a hot tub but I was too tired to actually go anywhere.

Friday morning I made a million pancakes and made a pancake torte, since all the first-year dancers were required to bring a cake of some kind and I don't have an oven. I was picked up in the evening by an older dancer with a car and we arrived at the Nõo high school at around 6:30pm. After our dance practice, while everyone else was either showering or getting ready to leave, I put on my kitschy-cat accessories and ran around demanding that everyone say "Trick or treat!" and then offering them fun size candy bars. What a first impression. That night I ended up getting to sleep around 4am after having passed a couple of bottles of Vana Tallinn around with the 18- and 19-yr-olds in my folk dance troupe. We all ended up sleeping in the gym.

Saturday morning was rough. We ate breakfast at 9am and dance practice started at 10 and it kicked my butt. Truth be told, it kicked everyone's butt. In Estonia, "folk dance practice" means 45 minutes to an hour of warm-ups, which includes everything from jogging, hopping and polkaing, to sit ups, push ups and back exercises. And only *then*, once we're already sweaty and tired, do we start working on dances.




Saturday afternoon we had another dance practice but it was cut short because a very smart woman came to talk to us about folk dance costumes. Did you know:

• Not all long black folk dance overcoats are "Mulgi" coats?
• Fake flower garlands are not allowed! Only flower garlands from real flowers!
  
• In traditional times girls didn't get their first wool skirt until they started menstruating.... until then they only wore a long white shirt.

Anyways, by this point it was 7:30pm and I was exhausted and cold and hungry and not in the best of moods. After the 2 hour lecture we ate quickly and got ready for the party that night. It was a costume party and the theme was "your very first day of school."

We had been warned beforehand that all of us first-year dancers would go through the traditional initiation on Saturday night. In Estonia this is very common. First year students are called "Rebased", or Foxes, and "Rebaste Ristimine" or "Retsimine" or Baptism of the Foxes is a time-honored tradition. Our folk dance troupe has its own elaborate initiation ritual, but none of us knew what was in store for us. We showed up at 8:30 and waited around expectantly.



Eventually we were all herded into the men's shower room upstairs and told to stay inside "or else." It was a small shower room, and there were about 30-40 of us so needless to say it was a bit crowded and towards the end we were all convinced we'd die of lack of oxygen. Finally they began calling us one by one from the room. I was the second one to go. I was blindfolded, led downstairs, turned around a couple of times, made to kneel, and then shouted at, given directions through an obstacle course, told to crawl or slide in one direction or the other. Finally I was led into the gymnasium, onto the stage, and suddenly told to lie flat on my back. I felt a pair of hands grab my ankles and another grabbed my hands. And as I got swung back and forth I heard the whole room erupt in shouts of "Water! Into the water! Throw her into the water!" ... Thankfully it ended up *not* being water, but soft and fluffy gym mats.



They grabbed me and tore off my blindfold, and dragged me over to a chair. Suddenly there were four pairs of hands on me, one of them spraying me with a horrible-smelling perfume, another messing with my hair, a third and fourth drawing on my face with lipstick. I was then moved to the next station where older folk dancers dressed as doctors and nurses began diagnosing - that is, administering - all sorts of diseases. I got the pox and a big green dot on my nose.




Then I was told to go join the other foxes in a big makeshift pen constructed of chairs and benches. While we waited for all the foxes to join us, two herders were in charge of yelling at us in the pen, and demanded that we "keep moving!" or "sing a song!" or "dance! now!" If we didn't feel like it, or refused to take part in the activities, one of the herders holding a long and evil-looking stick came over to us and began to harass us. The fighter in me wanted to challenge their superficial authority but I made a conscious decision to grit my teeth and bear it. I was having a cultural experience and being a stuck-up angry foreigner wasn't going to win me any friends.

Once everyone had gone through the obstacle course and had gotten their faces painted they had us line up and do the limbo. Under a string of dead fish. Which they lowered as everyone passed so that it touched their face or hair or clothes. We then had to army-crawl through a column where the older dancers whipped us with folk dance belts and beat us with dance slippers, and when we emerged there was a dancer at the end of the line waiting to smack us in the forehead with a shoe.




... and believe it or not, ladies and gentlemen, this is only the first half of the initiation process. The rest is yet to come.

All of us new dancers were separated from those who had already danced for a year. We were then taken back into the men's shower room and given 5 words which we had to incorporate into a dance-troupe-themed skit. ... our five words were "tambourine," "mychorriza," "fur-cramp," "ear-edge," and ... I forget the last one. It's not important. We made an astoundingly awful song using our words and had nifty little dance moves.

After we performed our skit, the foxes had to get up one at a time and stand in front of the older dance troupe, introduce themselves, say where they're from and how long they've danced, and then introduce their tail. ... Each of us had a tail, you see, being foxes and all. ... this process became really boring and seemed like just another opportunity for the older dancers to harrass the youner ones. And I was still exhausted. And now I was hungry and upset at being degraded. I went up and introduced myself and said that I was American, and was asked if I knew Arnold Schwarzenegger. I said that yes, he was my best friend, curtseyed facetiously, and walked away.

So we all went downstairs into the cafeteria, where our cakes and tortes and cookies had been laid out. The foxes were told to stand along the wall, away from the cakes and the tables... and the biggest slap in the face of the night was when we were told to introduce our cakes and then stand and watch as the older dancers ate them in front of us. Once they were done they allowed us to pick over what was left. Load of B.S., if you ask me.



Finally, they led us back upstairs into the gym, where they had turned out the lights and lit candles to form an altar in front of the stage. The older dancers and established memebers of the dance troupe had seated themselves on the stage and there was a podium to the right, behind which stood an older dancer wearing a long black overcoat and hat.

The foxes that had already been dancing with the troupe for a while were all called up one by one and told to kneel at the altar, in front of the older dancers. They were then asked really uncomfortable questions about their experience in the dance troupe over the past year, such as "Does it bother you that the older dancers get more attention than you do?", or "What would you consider to be a good reason for missing dance practice?", or "Have you been unhappy with anything in the dance troupe this past year?" Some foxes were noticeably uncomfortable. One of them even refused to kneel, saying that she wanted to be treated as an equal, and didn't want to be made to kneel in front of the older dancers. ... She got yelled at quite a bit for that one. Eventually the man in the hat and coat turned to the older dancers and asked them, "Tarbatu, will we take this dancer into our troupe as a fox?" And without exception they were all accepted.

Bear in mind that the above process took a good 45 minutes to an hour. I was ready to die by the end. The hazing had started around 8:30pm... and it lasted until 1:30 or 2am.

Finally the initiation ceremony was over, the candles were taken away, and generic dance music was put on. I thought "Well now that we're all a part of the dance troupe we'll do something together, now we'll dance social dances or something. This'll be fun."

But no. Nothing of the sort. The older dancers hung out amonst themselves, and the rest of us ran to the bathroom to scrub our faces. There was no social mixer. There was no final activity to bring us all together. There was just more exlusion and cliqueyness. ... I found a dark hallway at around 3:30am and went to sleep feeling degrated and upset.

If something like this had happened to me in America I would have walked out halfway through.