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Madeline Uraneck, left, captures the attention of the visitors to Folklore Village on a Saturday night potluck. Hungarian and German folk painting decorate woodwork, and a harvest wreath hangs from the schoolhouse ceiling. (Photo compliments of Folklore Village, by Roger Turner, STATE JOURNAL) [original picture appeared on p.1 in a State Journal article on November 30, 1975] By Madeline Uraneck If you happen to be wandering the back roads of Iowa County, between the Wakefield Cheese Factory and the Old Military Ridge Road, you would discover an 84-year-old school house standing stately and well-kept on a wind-swept hill. A heart shaped sign designates the place "Folklore Village Farm.” As it stands there in its simplicity, so quiet amidst the fields of corn and alfalfa, you would not guess that it is one of the country’s best loved and most unique folk art centers.

Superb folk musicians from Norway and Denmark have made its walls quiver with sparkling, foot-tapping fiddle music. Dance groups from the very folk heart of Sweden and England have delighted dancers and audiences there. Its rafters have been shaken by the throb of drums from Turkey, Israel, and Rumania. Here have thousands of children spent afternoons of laughter, - 2 exploring games and dances of the world’s children. Teen groups have danced there following toboggan parties and taffy pulls, and senior citizens have been welcomed in for sing-alongs, shadow plays and rosemaling workshops.

The secret of its conversion from empty school house to internationally known dance center lies in the fantastic warmth and energies of a single woman, Jane Farwell, who alternately dons grubby workpants and folky dirndls in her roles as director, custodian, hostess, cook, gardener, and teacher.

Folklore Village philosophy runs directly counter to the view of individual-as-spectator, individual-as-number, as factory-cog. The brochure states:

“In today's transient, insecure world of constant change, roots are hard to put down, and one’s work life seldom gives a complete sense of worth as a person. . . .Our human yearnings for roots and worth can often be eased by identifying with traditional celebrations, the re-creation of which can give life greater meaning.”

Very early she hit upon a simple formula for bringing people closer to these roots and to one another – through participation in games, crafts, and drama, but mostly in folk dance.

How many thousands of times has she witnessed the joy in the eyes of a person discovering for the first time that he can dance? Without even seeming to, she coaxes reluctant feet to the floor, smiling with a nod as the person protests he “only came to watch.” Nervous laughter greets her first little joke and roll of troll-like eyes, but within minutes the room takes on an almost visibly kinetic energy. People are laughing, relaxed, fully alive – a joie de vivre shining in their eyes.

Simplicity of the Dance

We grow up largely without dance in our daily lives. in this country, it is something for The Beautiful People in Hilton ballrooms, for teens in bass-vibrating school gyms, for ballerinas who start when they are 3 – something to make us look ridiculous and feel awkward clutching a perfect stranger in our arms.

Dance among peasant people was a part of every celebration. Fat old men bounced at the front of a long line; women joined in, singing; and children tagged along at the end of the line, not knowing the steps, but feeling welcome. Women had dances to symbolize their harvest motions, birth-giving. Men had dances to show their prowess, to symbolize combat. In many communities, dance functioned as the sole time young men and women were allowed to socialize.

It was for everyone – old people, fat people, children. Folk dances were simple . . . the music rich.

Jane Farwell’s teaching repertoire is committed to simple dances, and her life to being a catalyst – introducing the non-dancer to an expressiveness within himself, creating in rooms full of strangers a feeling of community and belonging.

But Folklore Village's distinguishing feature is as a place where there is dancing-PLUS. In the - 3 realm of folklore, dance is only a part.

Jane Farwell

Jane Farwell, the organizer and moving spirit behind Folklore Village. (Photos – left, Emily Osborn, right, L. Roger Turner, State Journal).

Jane Farwell epitomizes a folk person who somehow strayed into a modern world. Her thinking is intuitive, her organizing non-directive, her relationships warm, caring, manipulative; her rapport immediate. In her twinkling eyes, you see how young she really is.

Graduating with a self-designed major in rural recreation from ’s Antioch College, she got her first taste of ethnic folk dance from Russian and Greek groups in “Hell’s Kitchen,” 1940’s and 50’s ethnic neighborhoods of City. As a freelance recreation specialist, she logged thousands of miles in the Midwest, Southwest, and , leaving in her wake the nation's first folk dance camps and many recreation leadership laboratories.

Also left behind wherever she went were new additions to the ever-growing “Jane Farwell legend” – anecdotes of her mischief, warmth, and of her reputation for going to ridiculous lengths both to see that people had fun and to insist certain things were “authentic.” Christmas trees HAD to have real, lighted candles. Smorgasbord tablecloths HAD to be white linen. Festival invitations HAD to be handmade and hand-addressed, even if there were 500 of them to be mailed.

A marriage to an agricultural German exchange student working at her family’s farm took her to to live for 12 years, from 1957-1966. Failing to conform to the image of a German house frau, despite assiduous gardening and house-cleaning attempts, she began carrying her

- 4 unique recreation work through Europe, teaching workshops in the Alps’ ski chalets, German and Austrian beer gardens, Scandinavian festivals, and for the YMCA of Japan.

Saddened by the news of the approaching death of her poet-farmer father, she returned to the family farm, her birthplace, in 1967, to establish Folklore Village, a dream which has been growing.

The Farm

The Farwell farm, on County BB seven miles west of Dodgeville, is one of Wisconsin’s “Century Farms.” Jane lives there with her 88 year old mother, a regal character who commands respect. She herself travelled by horse-and-buggy all over Iowa County in her youth with her mother, Alice Cape, who was famous for presenting “entertainments” at the one- room schoolhouses, evenings of dramatic readings and declamations, for which they were paid $5-10 per night.

A love for schoolhouses must have been passed by blood to Jane, for in 1967 she purchased back the old Wakefield School and its one half acre of land which her grandfather had donated to the county in 1893.

Now the schoolhouse is ornamented with Norwegian rosemaling and German and Hungarian folk painting, and curtains sewn from material imported from Germany. A scarred bass fiddle and a washtub bass stand silently in the corner, waiting for Saturday nights, when they are thumped to life by anyone willing to give them a try.

Two bunk houses, both designed by Jane in the style of Swiss and Danish hostels, can accommodate 25 on week-ends. A large outhouse boasts a copper bathtub, copper wash basin, and the beginnings of a sauna. It has that folky smell, too.

Younger people who try to work at the Farm are taken aback by the boundlessness of Jane Farwell Energy. Breakfasts at the house are late, beginning too often with the persistent ringing of the telephone or small-salaried “employees” banging in through the kitchen door. Amidst burning toast and supervising the garbage pick-up, she makes telephone calls organizing a citizen's highway meeting, dashes off a reply to a group which has invited her, months ago, to teach dancing next week in Alabama, and then begins calling mothers to re-start her children’s afternoon folk dance classes. Highway calls get mixed with mother calls. The staff’s lunch is fixed while the ponies’ water over-runs.

Only late at night can she begin her own correspondence, research, and planning. An early morning hunter who drives by at 4 a.m. may see the light burning at her desk.

Saturday Nights

Most people who meet Folklore Village are introduced on any Saturday night of the year. A pot- luck dinner, by candle-light, precedes several hours of dancing and a midnight snack.

As the food is pot-luck, so are the people. Regulars who come muse on its unpredictability – one evening will bring only 8, the next, 60. One Saturday night might be full of Madison freaks; on

- 5 another, a busload from a senior citizen’s club will arrive from Dubuque.

It is on these Saturday evenings that the old schoolhouse comes alive again. The music of a couple young fiddlers lifts your heart as you throw open the door from the windy, cold outdoors. Smells of fresh bread tantalize the nose, and you are thrust into a cloak room of smiling strangers – in the process of removing your galoshes, managing to meet half a dozen others, all also apparently there for their first time.

Isn’t anyone in charge here? The dinner is running late, people appear to be just starting to bring in iced-over tables from the snow, for covering with red-checked tablecloths. Someone starts the coffee and gets pots of water heating on the stove for dishes afterwards. Finally, a bell is rung, a few words of self-conscious welcome are mumbled, and serious eating, talking, introductions, and laughter can get underway. The meal is leisurely, itself some important part of creating community.

There is an imperceptible change when Jane Farwell walks in. You’ve never met her, yet there’s no doubt she’s the one. Dressed in a hand-woven Swedish skirt or embroidered dirndl, she pauses to speak with almost everyone, a hug here, and exclamation there, then dashes back to the house for cream for the coffee which, it appears, is essential to the meal, despite the fact that everyone’s nearly finished eating.

Tables are cleared and volunteers coaxed in for dishwashing (some appear a little too willing). The fiddlers re-tune. Accordions and recorders appear from cases jammed beneath piles of coats; and the dancing begins.

Simple things any child could do, yet somehow fun and exciting. Mixers – no partners needed. Regulars at Folklore Village Saturday nights become flirtation artists. Everyone catches on to this fast, however, and with giggles, blushes, befuddlement, half-tripping over your own feet but not particularly minding, the evening proceeds until 1, or 2, or sometimes 3 o’clock.

Festivals

If Saturday night is a full experience for $1.50, leaving one pretty much wasted for Sunday, a Folklore Village festival is nothing less than intense.

Eight times a year, on the occasion of special holidays of various countries (e.g., a Polish Easter Festival or Israeli Purim celebration) or the beginning of seasons (e.g., a German Harvest or the English May), Folklore Village takes a giant breath and plunges into a weekend of madness: eating, dancing, recreating traditions, processing by midnight torch light, and being taken out of one’s mundane life by the slow timelessness of the Folklore Village clock.

These weekends are unique. There are few experiences with which to compare them, except perhaps the real celebration which they are emulating. On different occasions, a Polish and a Norwegian visiting dance instructor even called them “purer” than the real event in the native country, “for after two days, in the old country, one usually got drunk and passed out in a stupor, but here at Folklore Village, the celebrating continues two more days.”

The excitement and exhaustion of these three, four, and five-day festivities is that they are - 6 created by the participants themselves. From three or four states arrive unlikely combinations – - a hefty Iowa farm lady, a suburban Cleveland engineer, a van full of high school students, a couple with a four-month-old baby.

A few staff people are bustling about, but nothing looks prepared, nothing is happening. Is this it? A festival? Over supper, the themes of the festival are explained, but just briefly, more a mood created than research presented.

Then, after a morning of intensive dance instruction, a project is undertaken, for example, the building of a gigantic harvest wreath or the construction and garlanding of a midsummer pole. Foraging expeditions take off into the rolling hillsides and across the cornfields.

The challenge becomes using the ancient tradition as a steppingstone and creating, with others, a facsimile, which then becomes central to celebrations – e.g., dancing around the midsummer pole beneath a full moon – or seeing the Padstow ‘Obby ‘Oss come crashing through the forest to dance alongside the English Morris dancers.

However rinky-dink or removed from the “real world” the project initially sounded, it soon envelopes everyone. Arguments begin over how to best hang the harvest wreath without using any twine. People are IMPOSSIBLE to work – with, and the art of committeeing and compromise seem long lost. But the wreath gets risen. Tolerance is born, allowances made, friendships bud, and laughter begins.

Each festival is different because the people creating them are induplicable individuals. Jane Farwell will never grow stale creating year after year of festivals because she taps deep wellsprings of creativity in people, and provides them a place and time for eloquent expressions of body and imagination.

The Folklore of Food

The real heart of the Farm, of course, throbs in the Farwell garden, up at the farmhouse. Almost two and one half acres, it grows kale, parsley, dill, ears of red corn for the September husking bee, rutabagas, rows of rhubarb, raspberries, strawberries, plum and apple trees, and a thousand Dutch tulips.

In the summer the usual chaos of Folklore Village runs riot. Forgotten ladies clubs are forever arriving just as Jane gets thoroughly muddied transferring pepper plants. Passers-by who just wanted to ask a question get persuaded to stay all night, freezing beans, before the bus load of Swedish folk-dancers arrive.

This nonsense escalates during canning season, particularly when it involves carrying out armloads of blankets, towels, washcloths, and dirty clothes at midnight to protect the thousands of plants from a descending frost.

Because of or despite these endeavors, food at the Farm is remarkable. Cooked with an old- fashioned simplicity, it speaks for itself. From her years in Germany, there are recipes for venison liver and kale. From her travels to Denmark, raspberry røt grøt med flød.

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Jane Farwell introduces a Cornish pasty supper, with its homemade chili sauce, pickled beets, saffron buns, and a baked cornucopia. (Milwaukee Journal Photo).

The pantry shelves sag with home-canned sauerkraut, preparations of Cornish chili sauce for pasties, pickled beets and peaches, end-of-the-garden relish, and preserves labeled intriguingly “Chinese lantern,” “gooseberry,” “plum apple.” The wine cellar has carrot and beet wines, elderflower champagne and fermented delectables of wild grape.

There is no compromise when it comes to food. No stick of margarine dares appear at the door; no commercial additives or hamburger-helper need apply. Food served at the Farwell farm is hearty, real, and always delicious – often helped along by dollops of rich whey cream from the neighboring Wakefield Cheese Factory, one of the last two in the township.

An Invitation

A traditionalist espousing no rhetoric of women’s lib, Jane Farwell is nonetheless a marvelous example of a self-made professional woman. She has created a small empire which celebrates some of the world’s richest folk traditions. If she works hard and largely without salary, one nonetheless envies her for her complete involvement in a labor of love.

- 8 Folklore Village becomes even more unique when compared with other contemporary dance centers in this country. The community of people it includes is far-flung. This community counts the 15 Danish fiddlers who stomped and bowed non-stop for four days there this summer, and the 3rd graders from the near-by elementary school, who screamed with delighted laughter all morning, playing centuries-old games from France and Appalachia.

In the end, any definition of Folklore Village is only personal. Its excitement lies in the seeds of community, creativity, and heritage it sows, seeds to be nurtured and transplanted.

Spring whispers beneath the snow. At Folklore Village it will be not just welcomed, but celebrated. As the brochure says,

“Whether you come as an individual or with a group, whether for training, dancing, or the smell and feel of the country, you may find, as some of us have, something quite unexpected: the realization that keys to what we are in some sense lacking in our lives lie in the traditions we once so unself-consciously celebrated in our dim past.”

Come join us . . . . Photo – Bill Hanley

Coming Events...

SATURDAY NIGHT POT-LUCK SUPPERS AND DANCING. Starts between 7:30 and 8:00 p.m. Bring a dish to pass, and instruments if you play them. Lots of good people to meet and food to eat. Any Saturday of the year. Note some Saturdays below have special events rather than pot-luck suppers.

GREEK EASTER FESTIVAL, April 7-l0 with Sartorius (Sam) Chianis, ethnomusicology professor at the State University of New York, Binghampton, and Greek folk dance instructor. Sam will teach music and regional dances of Greece, and share with us the rich and colorful traditions and food of the Greek Easter.

ENGLISH MAY FESTIVAL, May 13-15 or May 27-30. Foraging for garlands, rites of spring, the Padstow ‘Obby ‘Oss, Morris stick dancing, English country dancing, and Appalachian clogging all appear in this lovely spring weekend.

MIDSOMMAR FEST, June 30-July 4, 30 Swedish folkdancers from Dalarna, often called “the folk-heart of Scandinavia,” will share this long week-end of fiddling and dancing and raising the midsommar majstang.

MONKSEATON SUMMER FESTIVAL, August (dates to be set), 20 young men and women from Northumbria, England, will share five whole days, giving demonstrations and instruction in stick and rapper sword dancing, English clogging and the rich folklore of England.

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