Edmund Fitzerland Hall Stage features performances of Kisarit dancers and interviews with traditional craft artists, each of whom has a booth in the Tori Nordic Fair where they display their work and talk with tori visitors.
The artists’ participation at the 2024 festival is partially funded by either the American Scandinavian Foundation or sponsored and organized by the Nordic Folklife Project/Center for the Study of Upper Midwest Cultures, University of Wisconsin–Madison.
9 am – Kisarit Dancers
10 am – Lori and Kara Oikarainen with Yvonne Lockwood, interviewer
11 pm – Carole Stelic with Yvonne Lockwood, interviewer
1 pm – Taylor Johnson with interview by Marcus Cederstrom
2 pm – Kisarit Dancers
3 pm – Derek Brabender with interview by Jason Schroeder
Come enjoy a mix of folk music from different countries within and outside Scandinavia (Finland, Sweden, Denmark, Ukraine, etc.).
Trio Tumpelot consists of Pasi Lautala (accordion, vocals), Anna Gawboy (concertina) and Meg Pachmayer (bass). The band plays a mix of folk music from different countries within and outside Scandinavia (Finland, Sweden, Denmark, Ukraine, etc.)
Your goal is to build a tower as high as possible from the given materials, with one marshmallow that should stay on the top. At the end of the time, the heights of the towers will be measured. Who will win the challenge?
In this laboratory, exercise, biodegradable plastic is made from organic materials. Bioplastics decompose quickly in compost. Did you know that it can take up to 1000 years for ordinary plastic to decompose in nature?
Finnish utopian communities have an interesting history reaching back to the 1792 “New Jerusalem” plan in Sierra Leone. While the best-known Finnish utopian ventures are Sointula in Canada (1901-1905) and Colonia Finlandesa (1906-1940) in Argentina there were, however, almost twenty similar Finnish ventures around the world based on nationalism, utopian socialism, cooperative movements, “tropic fevers,” and religious ideas. This exhibit includes photographs, texts and maps.
Presenter Bio: Mr. Teuvo Peltoniemi, Licentiate of Social Sciences, is a Finnish researcher and science journalist specializing in Nordic migration. He has worked in universities, radio, TV, and print media, and published 18 books. In 2007, he was honored with the “State of Finland Award for Life Work on Public Information.”
This exhibit honors Minnesotans, past and present, who consider themselves Finnish American. This exhibit is presented in eleven topics presented through photos and text. The topical selections, and the people documented here, are not meant to represent the complete experience of Finnish Americans and those who identify as such. We encourage you to think about this as you explore the sources presented here. What other topics might we also have included? What questions do these sources raise for you? You may know the complex history of the land now known as Finland; what do those complications mean for the historical record of Americans of Finnish identity? We invite you to think about these questions as you experience this exhibit.
Presenter Bio: The Immigration History Research Center Archives at the University of Minnesota maintains a large and significant collection of Finnish American materials, one of the two major collections in the USA, the other at the Finnish American Heritage Center in Hancock, Michigan.