Phyllis Gracy on the joy and satisfaction of Scandinavian folk dancing at Tucson Meet Yourself
As told to Kayleigh Stack in 2022 as part of an oral history project, 50 Years of Tucson Meet Yourself, for which we interviewed long-time participants on their Tucson Meet Yourself experience and how their tenure with the festival impacted their lives or careers.
Phyllis Gracy is a folk dancer who has danced with several iterations of Swedish and Norwegian and ethnic folk dance troupes in Tucson since 2002. She is the the program coordinator for Tucson Scandinavian Dancers. Retired now, she did secretarial work, was a CPR-First Aid Instructor, a scuba diver, and an avid-traveler. She is also mother to two sons and has three grandchildren and a great grandchild.
I was born in a small town on the south shore of Long Island, East Rockaway. I lived there until I was 21. I started tap dance lessons in kindergarten, and went on to do ballet, toe dancing. My sister and I did a variety things with wooden skates, took the ball bearings out and learned to tap dance with them. In school, we learned ballroom dancing in junior high, and square dancing, which was the first taste of, I guess, folk dancing. Reels and call dances and some circle dancing.
My husband was in the Air Force when we got married, and I thought, “Oh great, I’m going to travel and see the world.” We lived in Kansas for a year. He went to Vietnam. I went back to New York for a year. We came to Tucson, and we’ve been here since 1970. So, I didn’t get to see the world too much.
I’ve always done some kind of dancing. A lot of it was just going out to places that had music. I went down and watched Tucson Meet Yourself for a number of years. There was a group called the Tucson Ethnic Dance Ensemble that danced on Mount Lemmon, four weekends for Oktoberfest. They did German dancing. Basically, I’m a very shy person. I told my husband for years when we were up on Mount Lemmon, I was like, I can do that. That’s the first group I ended up joining, in a roundabout way. I’m German. I did polkas from the time I could walk. So, music and dance and singing was always part of growing up.
In the 1950s, VASA, a national organization in Sweden, started a chapter in Tucson, about the same time, I believe, that the Sons of Norway started as Norwegian group. We now have the Swedish group, the Norwegians, the Danish Club, and the Finnish Club. All the groups, at least the two I danced with, wanted to preserve the culture, which is why they were formed, to keep their traditions alive.
I started about 2002, believe it or not, at the YMCA. One of the members was with the Tucson Ethnic Dance Ensemble. She also danced with the Leikerring Norwegian Dancers. So, I transitioned into that, as well as doing the ethnic dancing the instructor was involved with, dances from all over the world and performing for many different ethnic groups.
But then I started dancing with the Norwegians. We have traditional costumes. My first performance with them was at Copenhagen, a Danish furniture store here, for their holiday celebration. From there, I was asked to join the Swedish dancers. Both those groups performed at Tucson Meet Yourself. The Leikerring Dancers started probably in the late 70s, shortly after Big Jim [Griffith] started Tucson Meet Yourself.
Both groups also had food groups at Tucson Meet Yourself. That’s a side to dancing: you get to eat all kinds of good food. I’ve always been adventurous. I even eat lutefisk, if you can believe that. I discovered well after I was dancing that I do have a smidgen of Scandinavian blood, probably from my German family and travelers.
Mia Hansen, who was the executive director at the time of Tucson Meet Yourself was a Norwegian folk dancer. She asked if I would like to help out, mainly to help figure out the scheduling with all the little Post-it notes on a wall. I was also a volunteer coordinator for a number of years. As things in my life changed, I still stayed connected to Tucson Meet Yourself by dancing. Dance has always brought people together from different areas.
There are different types of Scandinavian dances. In Swedish there’s a Schottis, which is very similar to a polka. It’s a one, two, three, hop, one, two, three, hop, and then you do four pivot turns. It’s one of the most common dances. A very similar step in Norwegian is called a Rhinelander. Both groups do polkas.
There’s also a style called Engelska in Swedish that was borrowed from the English sailors—it’s a sailor step. The music is old and you’re doing a walking step to a beat, where long lines go around in a circle or weave back and forth.
Every region may call the dance the same, but it’s a little different. Your village kind of decides how you’re going to do it. You know, we don’t want to be like the people in Northern Sweden, so we’re going to just change it a little bit, make it a little livelier or add a couple steps to make it more of our own dance. That’s been a lot of fun.
We have a dance in our Swedish repertoire, which is called the “Hambo for Ami,” which was put to a Hambo beat and was written specifically for Ami [Kinnison, former VASA dance leader] by her friend in Sweden and given to her for our dance group. Other Swedish dance groups cannot use this dance, unless our VASA chapter gives them permission. Some of the dances, we had to ask permission from the originators to be able to use them.
Our VASA dances were also given permission to use a waila tune, which is Native American [Tohono O’odham] dance music. Somebody wrote steps for it. One of our Ami Swedish friends. It’s called the Tucson Jig Waltz. Again, this is one is specific to our group.
Performing is a way we can share our culture. My whole group looks forward to Tucson Meet Yourself every year. A lot of them have danced since they were in their 20s. And here they are dancing years later. I’m a newbie to it, mostly, about 18 years. I’m not the newest person anymore.
We practice once a week. Our youngest person now is 37 and our oldest dancer is 88. Almost everybody does a waltz, some type of a square type. We have quadrilles. We do a lot of memory work, but when you have a dance that has twelve different patterns, there’s always somebody who will kind of whisper what comes next. Memory plays a big part. When we didn’t dance for nearly ten months, when we got back together, that muscle memory just brings you right back. It took a little bit of time to get the right pattern, but we did it.
The younger kids no longer want to learn. They’re too busy doing other things to learn the traditions. My own children didn’t want to learn to dance, my two boys. My granddaughter did show an interest when she was young, but as she got to high school, this wasn’t her thing anymore.
On some occasions, some of us had gone into the schools. We did teach the kids a Schottish dance, just the steps. We were all surprised at how many kids wanted to come up on the stage and dance. We showed them the steps but then moved down to the floor and just did the dance all around a multi-purpose room. To see their eyes light up!
It’s always nice to be able to perform. We’ve performed at assisted living homes, and senior living areas, and have gotten the older people sometimes to come up and dance with us. Or we’ll do a dance that brings back memories of someone from Scandinavia, and it’s heartwarming to see them reliving their youth, the memories of living in the Scandinavian countries.
People who appreciate what you’re doing and come up to you afterwards. “How do you do that? How long have you been doing it? You made me so happy.” Scandinavian people have come up and said, “I remember that from my childhood that I didn’t know anybody even did these dances anymore.”
I think the main reasons we dance are because we love it and we want to carry on the tradition and hope.
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Phyllis Gracy performs at Tucson Meet Yourself 2025 with the Tucson Scandinavian Dancers.