Sydney Swedish Community | Swedish Council of NSW

Swedish Folkdancers

The Linnea folk dance group has now become part of the Borealis Nordic Folk Dancers and is based in Canberra.

For further information contact Graeme Traves +61-2-9874 4194 or linneafolk@hotmail.com

Background and brief history of Linnea

Linnéa Swedish Folk dancers ('Linnéa Folkdanslag' in Swedish) was an amateur folkloric group based in Sydney, Australia - performing traditional and modern folk dances from Sweden and its Nordic neighbours. It was the only Swedish folk dance group in Australia and was founded over 25 years ago by Dr Gullan Kjellgren-Cyriax, who named the group after a Swedish wildflower (in turn named after the Swedish botanist Linnæus).

Over the years, the group appeared regularly at Swedish community gatherings, such as National Day, Midsummer and Lucia celebrations and at various multicultural festivals. Linnéa also visited Swedish communities in Canberra and Melbourne and performed at numerous Swedish business functions - dancing at corporate events for IKEA, Volvo and OM Technology and performing Swedish Christmas carols at IKEA. The group also hosted several visiting Swedish folk dance groups.

In 1993, Linnéa met Canberra's Revontulet Finnish Folk-Dancers and this led to combined performances in both Canberra and Sydney over subsequent years. The connection with Revontulet later led to Linnéa performing with the same musicians - Salmiakki Pelimannit from Newcastle.

Linnéa travelled to Linköping, Sweden in 1994 to participate in the massive triennial Nordic folk dance and music festival Nordlek. There the group joined dancers and musicians from Denmark, the Faroe Islands, Iceland, Finland, Norway and of course
Sweden in a week of dance displays, concerts and workshops.

These collaborative experiences were in a sense the beginnings of what became a regular activity for Linnéa - the staging of an annual Nordic folkloric festival in Sydney. The first Nordfest held in 2000 was a resounding success and the festival became a two-day event. At Nordfest 2003, Linnéa welcomed the first overseas participants to the festival - Kitka Finnish Folk Dancers from Uplands Väsby in Sweden.

In recent years, Linnéa collaborated with the Estonian dance group Vitalised and joined with other communities to stage a Scandinavian-Baltic dance performance called 'Dances of the North' in 2001. The following year, the group co-hosted the visiting Finnish dance and vocal groups Pitko and Akkasikko from Helsinki and staged a further combined Nordic performance.

From 2001, Linnéa took taken part in the National Folk Festival in Canberra, presenting Swedish folk dance displays and workshops. In 2002, the group collaborated with Virmalised, Salmiakki Pelimannit, the Estonian vocal group Lõke, and the Norwegian and Finnish singers Marit Sehl and Elina Juusola-Halonen to present a 90-minute Nordic olkloric show entitled 'Northern Lives' at both the National Folk Festival and Nordfest.