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| Solglyt Lodge > Events > Sarah Granskou Performance Biography | |||||||||
“The
wind opened his flue
and blew and set his ashes ablaze.
His lashes got hot, and soon his gaze went wild
and caught and burned
all the tunes he’d learned as a child.
Embers remember the spark. Even in the dark…”
(from “Playing with Fire”, for fiddle-maker Knut Opheimsbakken
of Valdres, Norway)
and blew and set his ashes ablaze.
His lashes got hot, and soon his gaze went wild
and caught and burned
all the tunes he’d learned as a child.
Embers remember the spark. Even in the dark…”
(from “Playing with Fire”, for fiddle-maker Knut Opheimsbakken
of Valdres, Norway)
Sarah Granskou's Performance
Biography
| Ontario
native, Sarah Granskou, has grown deep roots and outreaching branches
in the traditions of her Norwegian heritage. She has learned to sing
in the tongue of her forbears, and to play and carve the Norwegian
Hardanger fiddle, applying her Canadian sense of innovation to the
Norwegian art of imitation. Sarah has developed a niche for herself as a solo performance artist, drawing on both her ancestral background and her artistic background. Sarah’s first profound musical experience in Norway was, in fact, amongst the Sami reindeer herders of the North, where she played their exotic wordless singing (“joik”) upon her fiddle. With her great-grandfather’s fiddle in her backpack, Sarah traveled extensively on ski, hut-to-hut in southern Norway. Upon exposure to the music of her ancestry, she immediately responded through what she calls a “genetic memory”. |
 |
| Upon her return, she could have studied at the Norwegian Folk Music Academy, but chose instead an authentic context, working on farms in areas of southern Norway and Sweden. There, she learned from supposedly “inaccessible” masters of singing and Hardanger fiddle and became involved with the people and their music on a personal level. | |
Sarah has performed traditional and original works as a main-stage act at festivals including Celebrate Norway in Newfoundland, the Edmonton Heritage Festival, the Saskatoon Folk Life Festival, Høstfest in North Dakota and the Yukon International Storytelling Festival. She also has performed at various venues and festivals in her home area, including the Mill Race Folk Festival (Cambridge, ON), the Vital Spark Folk Club (Whitby,ON), the Nordic Labyrinth Festival (Watson’s Corners), Hillside Festival (Guelph, ON) and with Oliver Schroer at the DuMarier Theatre (Toronto). She was the featured performer for the opening of the Viking exhibit at the Museum of Civilization (Hull, May 2002), where she carried the bardic tradition of the Norse into a contemporary realm.
Her own unique poetic narrative is a humorous and thought-provoking context for ancient music. In truth, it stands as intricately patterned music on its own.
 |
As
an arranger, composer and performer she’s been involved with
Theatre Newfoundland and Labrador, Theatre Voce at the Tarragon theatre
in Toronto, and will be collaborating with Norwegian theatres. Several
of Sarah’s original lyrics and interpretations have been released
on Midnight Sun by Ensemble Polaris (on the Dorion label), and aired
on radio stations throughout America, including the CBC. In Norway she was featured on the national television program, Norge Rundt, and performances of her original lyrics at competitions were aired on Norway’s national radio channel, NRK. Sarah also performed for events and weddings in the church at Ishotellet (‘The Ice Hotel’), an internationally renowned structure built of ice in Northern Sweden. More recently, she has attracted the attention of the Norwegian literary world, and presented her mixed-language oral works at the Trondheim Literature Festival. She has also worked as a performing guide for the Vinje Literary Museum. |
| In
Scandinavia, she spices her Scandinavian dialects with a touch of
English, and in North America, she performs primarily in English.
Sarah teaches her original vocal works and translations at Scandinavian festivals hosted by members of the Hardanger Fiddle Society of America and has taught music and language at summer programs including Skogfjorden (Bemidji, MN) run by Concordia Language Villages. |
|
| Sarah
often combines languages, creating an aesthetic dialect authentic
to her own global sense of home. The North American tradition, one
of creating and adapting, is more apparent in a common approach
than in universal forms. Through her work, Sarah bridges the modern and ancient, there and here, acknowledging a continuum between cultures and times, to sustain the momentum in the current of traditional expression…currently. |
“Sarah
is a multi-talented performer with an amazing degree of artistic versatility…and spellbound her audience.” (Knut Nesse, Norwegian Trade Council) |
| “And
in true artistic fashion, Sarah turned the experience into a song.... From Granskou...you learn about the preciousness of heritage and how even the littlest thing can be turned into a beautiful song or poem.” (Andrea Johnson, Minot Daily News) |
“Sarah
reaches them, and they relate! ... those beautiful and above all, strong calls, must one just wonder over, and where she had hidden the air for the long, long last note is a mystery” (Olav Jortveit, Telemark regional newspaper, Norway) |