Year: 2005

Kristina Larsson always wanted to dance, but she was turned off by the phony smiles she saw fixed on the faces of most performers. “When I saw flamenco, I thought, ‘Wow! They’re not smiling!’” she says. It was that subtle epiphany that helped this Minnesotan fall in love with a dance associated with the sultry climes of Southern Spain. It happened on her thirty-eighth birthday: She had been wandering around Paris for six months, a painter/waitress on her first visit overseas, and three weeks before her return home, she decided to take a flamenco class. “That was the end of life as I formerly knew it.” Now Larsson’s own company and dance school, Anda Flamenco, is part of a surprisingly robust local flamenco scene. “It’s the climate,” says Larsson. “We’re attracted to opposites.” Kristina de Sacramento, as she’s known onstage at nightspots like Babalu and Nochee, travels to Spain every year to study dance. What if she should become stranded on a desert island en route? Here’s what she’d want to have on hand:

1. I’d bring my cat. Cats fascinate me. Time stops, and I feel like a kid when I watch them. They are the most amazing physical creatures. When I’m teaching flamenco to non-dancers, I teach them to walk like a panther. That creeping weightlessness, that impending doom to the prey–that’s very much an idee of flamenco. You stalk the audience a lot.

2. My dancing shoes and a board to dance on. I’d need a board because the shoes wouldn’t make sound on the sand, and that sound is essential to the dance. Flamenco shoes are like an instrument. The only good ones are made in Spain. They have steel arches. The heels and the points of the shoe have tiny nails in them, to give support and make sound. They are like castanets. Every maker’s shoes sound different. I have maybe twenty pairs.

3. I’d need a singer to accompany my dancing. In the Twin Cities we have a great cantaora (a native flamenco singer), Mar”a Elena Òla Cordobesa,Ó which is why I’m still here. It’s a great honor to be able to work with her.

4. A homing pigeon, so I can stay in communication with friends and family. That undulation of love and ideas is very sustaining for me. I can write the messages with ink and paper I make from things on the island.

5. Some beautiful human-made thing to inspire me to remember hopes and dreams and the ability of the spirit to soar above the mundane. Maybe a stained-glass window from some cathedral. Didn’t Matisse make paper cutouts at the end of his life that were made into windows? He, for me, represented both the joy and delightful transcendence of life.

For more on the Anda Flamenco Company and School, go to www.andaflamenco.com.

If there’s one thing the mainstream media loves more than creating its own celebrities, it’s a good old-
fashioned rags-to-riches story. So much the better if that classic American journey involves flesh peddling at one end and a prominent masthead title at the other. That’s why there’s no hotter commodity in local journalism these days than Donny Highrise, the former meatpacker and male escort who’s parlayed his colorful past into a six-figure book deal with Regnery Press—and an editor’s gig at the house organ of the Twin Cities zeitgeist, “Jeepers” magazine. Look for Donny’s memoir, “Nude Beneath the Chaps: Packing Meat, Throwing Heat, and Grinding Sausage,” early in 2006.

A picture of Broadway Street in Gilbert from 1910 looks surprisingly similar to one taken yesterday. Sure, there are now streetlights and pavement and tall trees, but the strip is still lined with old-fashioned, flat-roofed buildings, none more than a couple of stories high. While nearby Ely, in catering to canoeists and nostalgia seekers, has come to resemble the “Minnesot-ah!” store at the Mall of America, tiny Gilbert stubbornly remains the real deal.

Founded as a village in 1896, Gilbert was originally and optimistically named Sparta. It was also located on another spot. But when iron ore was discovered there, the townspeople had to move, buildings and all. With the new location came the new name. In the early 1900s, it was thought that Gilbert would become huge, bigger than Hibbing, even—thus its early nickname, the “Village of Destiny.” The town built a wide, wooden main street, now Broadway, which was part of a twenty-eight-mile boardwalk connecting a string of Mesabi Range towns. Gilbert was also the eastern terminus of the Mesabi Electric Railway, a streetcar line that went to Hibbing.

Gilbert never did become the jewel of the Range, but its streets continue to be lively and well-kept, its storefronts occupied. At one end of Broadway sits the Iron Range Historical Society, a low brick building that used to be the city hall/police station/jail. There, the curious can view artifacts from Will Steger’s North Pole expedition, jail cells straight out of Mayberry R.F.D., and an impressive mining exhibit. Food options include Koshar’s Sausage Kitchen, specializing in wild game dressing and hand-crafted ethnic sausages (including potato and blood versions), and the Memory Lane Café, which serves hearty breakfasts and homemade soups and pies, the blueberry being especially scrumptious. Gilbert’s best restaurant is also its most unlikely, a Jamaican joint called the Whistling Bird. It draws so many customers from nearby towns that a person is lucky to get a table on a Saturday night.

When Gilbert incorporated, the first act of its village council was to grant a liquor license. Today, the town still has just two churches but nine bars, all on Broadway. Nick’s is one of the best. Owner Nick Vukelich is an old-timer with a lazy eye, a fever for sailing ships, and a deep love of polka. Representative of his cheeky sense of humor, the sign in the front window reads, “Sorry, we’re open.” About the only thing missing in Gilbert is a place to stay. For that, travelers must drive four miles to Eveleth, where the tidy Koke’s Motel awaits. It gets enthusiastic recommendations from the patrons at Nick’s. That’s the neighborly way things work on the Range. —Jennifer Vogel

It’s not easy to get your hands on a twenty-one-key embaire xylophone from Uganda; to acquire hers, Nichole Smaglick sacrificed a chicken. Through this act, she demonstrated her reverence for both the instrument and the Busoga tribe, giving thanks to and blessing its xylophone-playing ancestors.

“When playing the embaire with the group in Uganda, I can enter an altered state of being,” Smaglick says. “It’s not a trance, but more like being consumed by something. In the first moments of playing, I am creating. Then it slips from my hands into the interlocking engine of all six players. ‘I’ turns to ‘us.’ Then this engine we created seems to come alive.”

In 1997, after a couple of years of traveling to African countries, Smaglick founded Another Land, a tour company that organizes safaris and homestays with villagers from several tribes, during which travelers take part in dancing, beer brewing, and other daily activities. The first time she returned to Minneapolis from Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, her living quarters seemed positively overstuffed compared to those of the people she’d been visiting. She promptly purged about three quarters of her possessions, primarily clothes and knick-knacks. Now she keeps only what keeps her going. “It is a skill to learn how to live with less,” she says.

Granted, the embaire practically fills a room by itself, but technically it counts as just one object. Smaglick’s African instruments include an amadinda xylophone, thumb pianos, a zeze harp, and an “endangered” ennanga harp. She double-majored in African studies and piano performance at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, but in 1997, Africa took precedence when the pianist sold her Steinway for a ticket to Uganda to conduct research for Another Land. “I went for six years without a piano,” she says. “The piano is like my lungs. Now I can breathe again.” (She’s since replaced it with one signed by Henry Steinway himself.)

Despite the Steinway and a few other Western furnishings, African objects dominate Smaglick’s Nokomis-area house in Minneapolis, where she resides about eight months of the year. Her collection gives deeper meaning to “conversation piece.” A Chagga spear hangs over the entryway, and in the bedroom is a replica of a love seat owned by the last sultan of Zanzibar. The Barabaig of Tanzania gave her several gourds, both decorative and practical, to celebrate her marriage to musician Steve Schley (from the local bluegrass outfit Free Range Pickin’). A beaded leather cloak was another gift, the kind normally given by a mother to her daughter. And a tribeswoman gave her a bracelet in friendship with the request, “Tell my story.”

With that in mind, Smaglick founded a business with Barabaig women, the Amias Project (amias is “beautiful” in Barabaig), selling their shawls, jewelry, handbags, and scarves. She plans to open a retail space later this year in Northeast Minneapolis’ Northrup King Building; in the meantime, she’s looking to round up Twin Cities musicians to whom she can offer lessons on the embaire, an ensemble instrument. “I need some people to play with!” she says.—Jenny Woods