Changes in local communities: The cultural geography of Finnish open-air dance pavilions

Abstract

The open-air dance pavilion may be regarded as a special feature of the summer evening landscape in Finland, a national landscape element in a visual sense, as a physical construction, and in an auditory sense, in the form of the music emanating from it, particularly the melancholic strains of the tango played on an accordion, accompanied by nostalgic words which frequently incorporate a consciousness of the shortness of the summer in the north. No attempts have been made previously to study the cultural geography of these pavilions, in spite of their important role as a scene in the recurrent drama of pair formation that makes up part of the demographic process.

The period of time covered by this survey encompasses the whole post-war era, and the area concerned is Southwestern Finland, interpreted in a broad sense. This enables the changes that have taken place in the dance pavilions to be linked to the spatial and temporal reorganizations that have taken place in society during the period concerned.

A survey has been made of the areal distribution of open-air dance pavilions at ten-year intervals between 1945 and 1995 inclusive, with a formal description of their structure, their location relative to the surrounding landscape and spatial differentiation in activity at the micro level, and above all a perspective on the relation of the dance pavilion culture to the changes that have taken place in Finnish society, urbanization, industrialization and migration. At the same time, some information has been gathered on the manner in which a change in scale has taken place from activities based on small local communities to commercial operations at the provincial level, and the manner in which these pavilions have influenced the Finnish population, its marriage patterns and even its genetic properties.

The dance pavilion, as a feature of the cultural geography of Finland, can still tell us indirectly a great deal about the nature of local communities and what has happened to these in the course of time. It is still an important national element in the summer landscape, and a scene for the pair formation dance of life that holds an endless fatal - or should one say, biological - attraction for the young people of each successive generation.