The Dancer

Chapter 27 of Search For a Dancer, a memoir of a week spent in Iceland in November 2022

Fríða, Hrafnhildur, and Karòlína are Groá.

These are the three young women who stole my heart at the 2018 Iceland Airwaves. This neo-punk-feminist band with a DYI ethic took the Icelandic music scene by storm when they emerged from nowhere to make it into the finals of Músíktilraunir, an Icelandic music competition.

A cellar full of noise. The basement of Smekkleysa is not the most ideal venue, but it suited the group’s performance: up close and personal, with Groá’s in-your-face attitude and high spirits amplified by the hard concrete cube of a room. The group’s sound has evolved as they have grown over the last five years with hints of Captain Beefheart and even some funky drumming to enliven the Dada-esque proceedings.

When one of the audience members stripped to her underwear and began drumming and dancing with the band the energy level of the room ratcheted upwards as she shimmied and gyrated among the crowd. When she climbed upon a platform next to the stage the place went berserk as she showed off her embroidered bloomers with a logo stitched on them: ‘Granny Pants.’

I then realized that this wild “hype dancer” was Marta Ákadóttir, sister to Jofriður and Ásthildur. I had seen her in some videos a couple of years ago. Her exuberant performance touched me – actually! She rubbed up against me as she climbed up the stairway where I was standing and shook her posterior at the crowd below. It’s been a while since I have had that sort of contact with a twenty-something woman. A true multimedia experience - I could even smell her! To raise the insanity level even further, when Marta returned to the floor she whipped out a recorder and began noodling along.

The set ended and, since I was the defacto doorman, I held the door open so as to allow the overheated crowd to decompress. The band members seized to opportunity to cool off and zoomed by me for some fresh air. I joined them a few minutes later and thanked them profusely for their great show. I mentioned to Marta that I had seen her videos (see link previous) and she was mortified/thrilled. “I thought no one had seen those! I did them for a class,” she said, with a big smile. I smiled in return, then it was smiles all around, we were all still on a performance high. I walked away blowing them kisses.

The love flowing between these women was palpable. This was not a show-biz ‘act’, it was a flowering of unfettered female spirit and a celebration of life.

I had found my dancer.

Image: Gabriel Backman Waltersson via Flaunt


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