Exercises in Patience

Herräng has been practically a non-stop exercise in patience and acceptance for me.  Sharing such a small space with so many other people when I’m so used to living alone has been a challenge.  What do I mean by “small?”  Well, I’ve been staying in a classroom (literally, it’s a classroom – they rent out the Herräng elementary school for the camp during summer holiday) with 28 other dancers.  They’ve piled 14 temporary bunk beds into the classroom to house us all.  There’s hardly room for all our stuff.  There’s only one bathroom – a toilet and sink – in our school house.  There are two other school houses with similar accommodations, and a larger gymnasium with even more people in it.  The gym houses the men’s and women’s showers – bay showers with just 3 shower heads – and an additional men’s and women’s toilet.  There is also the sauna, which has 2 showers and a toilet, and there are men’s and women’s hours, as well as unisex hours, for that.  All in all, there are about 18 sinks, 13 toilets, and 8 shower heads for the ~250 or so people staying in the school area, not to mention all the campers – another couple hundred dancers or so.  There’s almost always a line for bathroom and it’s rare to get a warm shower.

If you need to change clothes, you pretty much need to go the gym locker room or the sauna.  There’s no such thing as privacy or “alone time” here – there are people around you always.  You can pull up a piece of grass on the lawn if it’s warm enough (it’s mostly chilly and even rainy here), but even then you’re not really alone.

Then there’s the rigid rules.  They don’t want anyone putting anything on the floor anywhere in the Folkets Hus, where the nightly social dancing goes on. I’m guessing this is a fire hazard issue and probably a legal requirement.  They’ve set up a “luggage storage” area outside to put all your stuff – all of it – while you’re dancing.  This means your purse, your jacket, your phone, your wallet, and your non-dance shoes.  This means you have to walk back and forth between the luggage storage and the dance hall outside in your dance shoes.  And, by outside, I don’t mean a nice clean sidewalk, I mean wooden pallets that have been set up over a dirty, muddy lawn area.  For you non-dancers, nothing ruins a pair of dance shoes like walking around outside in them, especially if they have suede soles vs. hard leather.  Add to that the fact that it’s been raining a lot, which means walking on wet ground and rugs, and your night of dancing is ruined – wet dance shoes don’t dance.

So many things have irked my ire around here…  I despair of ever letting go of that judgment.  Perhaps being sick and tired doesn’t help.  With 2-4 dance classes every day, and social dancing until the wee hours of the morning every night, sleep-deprived is the status quo around here.  On top of that, after touching 30-50 other people all day every day (who have touched at least as many other people themselves), I came down with “Herräng flu” on Thursday – sore throat, congestion, nausea, chills, body aches, and skin that’s sensitive to the touch.  Sleep has been difficult the last couple nights, and social dancing wasn’t even an option.  It’s probably for the best, since I was ready to rip the face off a “security” volunteer who I twice had run-ins with over leaving my belongings in the hallways…

Herräng has certainly been an experience.  I met some lovely people and was challenged to step up my dance game.  The accommodations were problematic and the dance conditions were less than ideal.  Would I do it again?  Maybe.

TL;DR:  Herräng Dance Camp might actually be a long-running experiment to study the effects of overcrowding and over-exhaustion on the human mind and body.