This year’s program focuses mainly on knowledge of the Vikings. Don Mowatt will be our featured speaker, and he has a lot of lesser known facts on hand! Jørgen Lyth will tell us about the ships found in Roskilde Fjord. In addition to lectures and slide shows, there will be a lot of singing (led by Morten Larsen and Elisabeth Sivertsen); a Faroese kvad—and there will be a lot of good food, prepared by Knud and Doris Nielsen. As participants, you will be asked to do your part—for example, we ask you to bring an item which has relevance to Denmark and to give us a brief description of its origin and/or use. We already have a barrel organ and a Nimbus motorcycle!
The Heritage Weekend is a joint venture between the two Danish Churches in Greater Vancouver. As always this weekend will be filled with lots of singing, interesting lectures, delicious food and unforgettable fellowship.
Everybody is welcome; no experience or special knowledge necessary; previous years’ participants are not disqualified, you are welcome back
The 2007 Heritage Weekend was cancelled due to the change of pastor at Granly. This is what it should have been about…
Henrik Ibsen, August Strindberg, Kjeld Abel, Per Olov Enquist, Astrid Saalbach, Per Fly… Who characterises the Nordic Drama? What characterises the Nordic Drama? This year we will explore the writers, the plays, the history, the tradition and the future of Nordic Drama. Come and take part in a weekend filled with intelligent lectures, wonderful music, happy singing, wonderful fellowship and lively discussions.
While the ironist keeps his distance and thinks himself wiser the humorist appreciates the human frailness. Maybe that is why humour is so important to us. Most people love to laugh, there is nothing like being happy together, and not only does humour make us laugh it also works as an eye opener, contributing to a more varied outlook on life and the people around us. This year we will explore the many faces of humour, laughter and tragedy especially through Shakespeare and his plays. But we will also, of course, touch on Danish humour and Canadian humour; does humour unite or break up? What sets peoples apart? Maybe it is the difference in humour.
Denmark is said to be a very homogeneous country because of its more than 1000 year old history as a monarchy and with the general common cultural background that every Dane enjoys. But many things have happened over the last 50–60 years. First of all the huge economic boom in the sixties, and then Denmark has experienced a big immigration of people from entirely different countries and cultures. Denmark has become a “melting pot” of many new impulses and life styles, and this year we are going to explore that “melting pot.” Maybe we like what we discover, maybe we won’t, but we guarantee that it will be interesting when we ask what does our wonderful Denmark actually look like today?
The speakers will be:
It is impossible to speak of Danish heritage without mentioning N.F.S. Grundtvig. He is a giant in Danish intellectual life, and his work and thoughts have had an enormous impact on Danish culture, schooling, politics, church life and self perception. His thoughts can be captured in one sentence, “first the human, then the Christian;” a statement he brought to life with great originality and strength in all the fields he touched on, and which brought about the concept of the folk high school from where our Højskole springs. His versatile involvements in Danish life and thinking are closely connected to his own biography. Therefore we will be hearing about his life and work and about the time in which he lived. We will deal with his writings—the prose as well as the poetry,—and we will be hearing how his thoughts on Christianity influenced the political scene when the Danish constituent assembly gathered for their final decisions on Danish law. And of course we will hear about højskolen. There will be a lot of singing and hopefully a lot of discussion when we attempt to draw some lines to Danish life and thought anno 2004.
The speakers will be:
Being Danes we have always been Europeans, and we still are—but we haven’t always played the most important role. However, we have taken part in the European developments, we have been nourished through other countries—and we have given out nourishment as well.
The European Union is one important issue of the European Development that we will deal with in our Heritage Weekend. Earlier than that the Royal Family was involved in many ways; King Chr. IX was called the Father-in-Law of Europe. All along, artists and other important people have had their Educational Travels (Dannelses-rejser) through Europe, Hans Chr. Andersen being one of them.
The bell will be ringing at our Heritage Weekend in September 2003 for the following activities:
…and there will be a lot of singing, and a lot of fun, we hope. Friday night will be a starter, Saturday night will be party-time. Join in—you won’t regret.
We Danes have been all over the world—and we still are. Even if we haven’t ruled the world since the vikings, we still participate in world development in many ways. We have learned a few things from foreigners and maybe we have shared a bit of our own too.