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Kari Tauring D i g g i n g D e e p n o r D i c r o o t s by DaviD De young n December of 2003, Kari Tauring was teaching a rune Coming from primarily Norwegian stock, Tauring has workshop at a Norse shamanic event in Minnesota made it her creative mission to mine the roots of Norwegian focusing on the völva, or staff carrying women of Norse culture in Minnesota. And this past March, she released her tradition. During one session, the event host suggested that third studio album, a collection of songs and spoken word Ishe chant the runes rhythmically using a staff for percussion. inspired by Norwegian myth called Nykken & Bear on the Tauring added a second smaller stick that she called a tein Omnium label. In exploring her roots, Tauring says her intent (based on the Norwegian word for the sucker tree that grows is “to go deeper than lutefisk, lefse and Lutherans,” but she’s from the stump of a tree that’s been cut down) to tap the shaft quick to point out she still respects those things. She works of the staff while pounding it on the floor to create a unique with the “preserved material” of Norway, songs, poetry and rhythmic experience. This was the birth of what Kari calls arts which were forced underground during centuries of “staving,” and over the next few years she developed it into a Danish rule from 1349 to 1814 when what is now Norway fully-formed spiritual practice called Völva Stav, a system of was ruled from Copenhagen, a period of cultural oppression ritual performance that helps her reconnect with the traditions the Norwegians call “The 400 Year Night.” and folkways of her Norwegian ancestors. Norway’s suppressed culture began to resurface in Tauring’s musical roots are steeped in Celtic as well as the 1800s when the romantic nationalist movement started Norwegian folk tradition. She learned hymns and prayers in to rebuild Norway’s identity. It was no accident. Those Norwegian from her Lutheran grandmother and American responsible for helping to bring back the old ways purposely folk songs both in school and at home. As a child, Tauring went out and sought the forgotten material of the folk would watch the singing and dancing in her homemade folk traditions, music poetry, dance, costume, and language. costume and wish she could join in. Her musical education Norwegian composer Edvard Grieg (1843-1907), wrote many started with church music, then classical, then Celtic folk, pieces of music based on Norwegian traditional music, and for which she had a strong inclination. “I didn’t know why writer Arne Garborg (1851-1924), whose poem “Haugtussa” I had a strong urge to sing Celtic material,” she says. “We formed the basis for a song on Tauring’s latest CD also helped thought dad was all German but he isn’t really German at reshape Norwegian identity by writing a play in Nynorsk (one all, but rather Latvian, Luxembourgish, French-Canadian, two official standards for written Norwegian) and translating Celtic and some kind of Indian.” These diverse influences Homer’s Odyssey into the language. all surfaced in the songs Tauring wrote with her first It was during this renaissance that Tauring’s great- group, Rose Absolute in the early 1990s, including a song grandparents were among the nearly 800,000 Norwegian series called “7 Songs of Me” in which she explores each immigrants to Minnesota. The newly re-discovered material piece of her lineage. was vitally important to Norwegian identity at the time, and 4 Sing Out! • Vol. 55 #3 Kari Tauring D i g g i n g D e e p n o r D i c r o o t s many immigrants preserved it, the Norwegian-American community in the Midwest becoming something of a time capsule. According to Tauring, because of the mass exodus from Norway (in some cases entire towns relocated) there are some Norwegian dialects that exist only in the US, and killed was the environmental trauma leading up to the 400 Norwegian linguists often travel to Minnesota to study them. Year Night. Then the Danes took over, replacing Norwegian One piece of Norwegian culture that came to Minnesota was music, money and dance with their Danish equivalents. the specifically Norwegian Hardanger fiddle used primarily What makes this personal for Tauring, or for the purposes in dance music. And Minnesotan Karen Solgård, a major of healing what she refers to as her Ørlög (hereafter, oorlog, proponent of the instrument in the United States, has served as which means something like fate or karma in Old Norse), one of Tauring’s mentors over the years. is that her mother and her mother’s clan grew up the only Kari explains the importance of drilling down to extract Norwegians in a cluster of Danish farms in Wisconsin. the essence of her Nordic roots by launching into a discussion Her great aunt tells stories of remnants of the ages-old of the World Tree, or Tree of Life which connects the heavens, persecution from the Danes to Norwegian children. When earth, and through its roots, the underworld. The so-called her grandmother was a schoolgirl, for example, the Danish tap root goes straight down, Tauring says. And at the cellular kids told them they smelled bad, made them sit in the back level, the Northern European memory of immigrants goes of the classroom and cut the buttons off their dresses. back to the ice age, passed down through the mitochondrial According to Tauring, prejudice can become an endemic DNA of their mother’s mother’s mother’s mother (and so on). problem within cultures because of people’s tendency to identify She points out that one reason the arts of a culture can be so with their oppressors, one characteristic of what psychologists healing, is that they stir memory at this deep level, especially call the Stockholm syndrome. When this happens, cultural through the vibrations of music and the movement of dance. dysfunction becomes normalized, amounting to a denial of According to Tauring, dysfunction in a culture is often cultural identity. Sinead O’Connor, in the lyrics to her song the result of external factors impacting on it. In Norway, the “Famine” tells the story of the historical trauma of the Irish of plague of the 1340s where perhaps half the population was the potato famine, pointing out, “If there ever is to be healing, Vol. 55 #3 • Sing Out! 5 Kari and Drew Miller perform at the Cedar Cultural Center in Minneapolis in 2009. photo by David De Young to workshops around the country and present in her seasonal shows. In the title song, she announced her intent to express the heritage of her “deeper-than-Lutheran” roots. In “Boundaries,” she discusses the importance of boundaries in human relationships, noting that “an erosion of boundaries by degrees leads to the seemingly sudden lapse of all rules until gravity is the only law that some humans adhere to.” “Mother Mate Myself” was written after her second son was born and describes the loss of self that can come from mothering small children. The song is also about the opportunity to re-build the self as better, more careful, more “safety first” and more here and now. In 1999, Tauring presented the first of what would become seven yuletide celebration shows. The shows incorporated there has to be remembering and then grieving.” Parallels can elements of the world’s various festivals of light and took easily be drawn between Norwegian, Irish and even Native place over the winter solstice in Minneapolis. These multi- American experiences, and Tauring says this remembering is media events, employing music, puppets, dance, stilt-walkers, the inspiration and motivation behind her work in Norwegian film shorts and photography were a way for people to re- roots. Part of the healing process is achieved by connecting connect with their cultural heritage and traditions from which with one’s ancestors in the language they would have spoken, they might have, for whatever reason, become divorced. An and because of this, Tauring’s performances include music and early theme was “Discovering Origins, Building Traditions,” song in English as well as Norwegian traditional folk music in which remains an appropriate banner for the work Tauring the dialects of her great grandmother’s family. continues today. She released a studio album of some of Tauring uses the phrase “inherited cultural grief” to those songs in 1999 and a follow-up, expanded version of it describe what is also called historical trauma. If not healed, (A New Yuletide Celebration) in 2011. these traumas can be handed down from generation to When she began writing music for dance to as part of generation, often as traditions of addiction and passive these shows, Tauring says it changed her music organically. aggressiveness. Through the vibrations of her music, Tauring Karen Solgård had told her several years before, “Kari, hopes to create new patterns of functionality and heal the you will never really have the deep spiritual experience oorlog for the next generation. “You have to ask yourself,” with this music you are seeking until you learn the dances. she says, “Are you going to keep repeating a habitual phrase The dances express the spirituality through the body.” that’s dysfunctional and pass it onto your kids?” 2003 was a threshold year for Tauring. Both her boys were in school, and she had expanded her ritual shows to Thorn, The runes, Yule shows and BeYond include the equinoxes, now doing three shows a year.