Skolt Saami Dance: The Transformative Journey of Tradition, Resilience and the Arctic Quadrille

This is the first book in English exploring the quadrille as danced among the Skolt Saami, one of the indigenous Saami peoples in Northern Europe.

The Skolt quadrille - the focus of this book - offers a fascinating case of transnational movement of dance forms, as well as insights on a living dance tradition in a specific indigenous culture. Today, the Skolts’ quadrille is a social dance with six figures, and it is most often danced by four couples. The dance resembles quadrilles in northern Russia, but its historical roots are in the imperial French quadrille.

This book traces the history of the Skolt Saami through the lens of their dance and what is known of the Skolt quadrilles from historical sources. This is contrasted with contemporary narratives and practices, including interview materials with practitioners. The Skolt quadrille is examined as embodied action and as performance, taking place amid changing historical, social and cultural discourses. The book considers how the dance represents issues attached to the Skolt people’s identity as a religious minority, both among the Finnish majority and the Saami; an evacuated community, living amid other Saami groups and Finns; and as Finnish citizens, most speaking Finnish as their first language.

Petri Hoppu is Principal Lecturer of Dance (Oulu University of Applied Sciences) and Adjunct Professor (Docent) in dance studies (Tampere University), as well as co-editor of Nordic Dance Spaces (Ashgate 2014). His areas of expertise incude theory and methodology in dance anthropology, research of Finnish-Karelian and Saami vernacular dances and Nordic folk dance revitalization.