OUR MISSION

Sandi, a native Californian, has been and participates in many facets of multicultural folk arts since the 1980s. She is a dancer, choreographer, performer, dance teacher, musician, handicrafter and tai chi practitioner.

Sandi started dancing in high school during PE. When she moved back to California in 1990, she joined the El Dorado International Dance Association. She was a founding member of the Sacramento Scandinavian Dancers in 1992. Specialization in Scottish Country Dance was added in 1996, Vintage Dance in 2000 and English Country Dance in 2004. She has performed in multiple festivals and cultural events. Sandi underwent the rigorous training required by the Royal Scottish Country Dance Society (RSCDS) and became a fully certified teacher in 2002. She has taken English Country Dance calling classes. She won her “Big Silver” in Swedish Dance in 2019. She has attended many weekend workshops and week-long dance camps in Hawaii, California, Washington, Wisconsin and Sweden. She has been Bruce Hamilton’s teaching partner at the Statewide Festival and Stockton Folk Dance Camp. She taught at Dance in the Woods and Mendocino Folklore Camp. She currently teaches weekly classes in Scottish and Nordic dance.

Sandi has choregraphed Scottish Country Dances. Many of which have been published by the RSCDS-Sacramento Branch and the Folkdance Federation of California. Several of them have been danced at parties and balls in the US and elsewhere.

Musically, Sandi started with the fiddle in 2nd grade but dropped it just prior to moving to New York during her high school freshman year. Knowing that bagpipers opened the Scottish Balls and her local branch did not have a piper, she has taken lessons on the chanter. She was introduced to the tin whistle at Mendocino Folklore Camp. She plays the Native American flute. She is currently learning the Nyckelharpa, a keyed fiddle that many consider to be the Swedish national folk instrument.

On the handicraft side, Sandi started wheat weaving or corn dolly making as it is known in Europe in the mid 1990s. This has branched off into Swiss Straw Lace and Straw Marquetry. She is a member of the California Straw Arts Guild (CSAG) and the National Association of Wheat Weavers (NAWW). She has taught this folk art at Mendocino Folklore Camp, at CSAG’s and NAWW’s annual conventions and at cultural events. She has also presented this folk art at cultural events and at museums. She has won ribbons with her straw art, canning, baking and candy making. She has done quilling, pergamano and a bit of quilting.

Tom Oesleby began international folk dancing in the late 1980s on Thursday evenings in Washington Park near his home in Denver. He soon added contra dancing and in 1989 took a class in Scandinavian folk dance in Boulder, Colorado, just before moving to Cody, Wyoming in early 1990. Although Tom enjoyed country-western style dance in Cody, he soon learned about the Scandinavian Dancers of Red Lodge, Montana. Tom and his new wife Gwen commuted regularly to Red Lodge to practice and perform with the group from 1990 until 2006, when they moved to Salt Lake City, Utah. There, it was back to international and contra dancing until 2010, when Gwen and another local dancer organized the Salt Lake Scandi Dance. Since then, Tom has served as group leader, president and instructor, and in 2014 the group formally organized as a 501c3 non-profit called Salt Lake Scandinavian Music and Dance. The group holds regular recreational dances and classes, semi-annual music and dance workshops with guest instructors from other states, and performs at local heritage festivals. Tom has attended many folk dance workshops in Colorado, Washington State and California, as well as the Nordlek festival in Norway and Sweden. He is a retired consulting geologist and served for nine years on the Board of Park County Mental Health Center in Cody, Wyoming.

Michael has been involved with Scandinavian dance and culture since he discovered his mother was Norwegian (and not Swedish) in the late 1970’s. This discovery has led to him joining the Nordahl Grieg Leikarring and Spelmannslag, a performing Norwegian folk dance troupe, becoming a member of the Sons of Norway, a fraternal organization, and joining the BygdelagFellestrad as a member of the Sigdallag, a group focused on American descendants of emigrants from Sigdal Norway. Since the discovery of his Scandinavian heritage, he has been immersed in Scandinavian culture and dance, and traveled twice to Norway and once to Finland to meet relatives. He has served as Treasurer for both the Leikarring and for his local Sons of Norway Lodge for the last 30 years. He also currently serves as a Board Member of the Northern California Spelmanslag, a California non-profit whose focus is promoting Scandinavian music, dance and culture.

Fred Bialy has been interested in international folk culture since he was introduced to Israeli folk dancing soon after graduating from a West Los Angeles high school in 1969. During his years studying at UCLA, his dance interests broadened to include the international folk dancing offered through UCLA’s folk dance club and at the many folk dance cafes around Los Angeles. During his senior year at UCLA he was active in the Yugoslav performing group of Elsie IvancichDunin and the AMAN International Folk Ensemble. He also began to play the gaida, a bagpipe from Bulgaria. By the early 1980’s, his musical interests gravitated to Swedish folk fiddling, when he started to play the violin. In 1988-1989, he spent two semesters studying Swedish folk music at the folkhögskola in Malung, Sweden. Since 2006 he has also been playing the nyckelharpa, a keyed fiddle, considered the Swedish national folk instrument. Fred has been primarily interested in Scandinavian folk dance since the early 1980s. He has been a co-director of the annual Scandia Camp Mendocino since 1999. He has primarily been the Music Director, but also served as Business Manager for three years. He has been on the Board of CMAI since 2011 and became Treasurer in 2017. He also serves on the Board of the nonprofit Northern California Spelmanslag. Fred is a retired Emergency Physician.

Dick met Russian traditional instrumental and vocal music during military service in the mid-1960s. He learned some songs and began collecting recordings. Later, after college, he became interested in Israeli and mid-Eastern music, found some international-folk-dance groups in Detroit and then the south San-Francisco-Bay area, and immersed himself into whatever folk dancing he could find. In succession, he held all the officer positions at the Santa Clara Valley Folk Dancers of San Jose. Later, he co-led and mostly taught at the weekly Sierra Singles folk-dance activity in Palo Alto. He started attending Stockton Folkdance Camp in 1977 and has attended all of its camps but two since then.

In 1995, he began attending weekly Transylvanian (mostly Hungarian)dancing in the Palo Alto and Menlo Park area, and still attends regularly, pandemics permitting. He also began studying the Hungarian language around then. (He also has some facility in French, German, and Russian, and curiosity about several others.) He attended two of the final three Barátság Hungarian music and dance camps (1997 and 1999) that were held, at the Mendocino Woodlands.  He then attended the final Symposium Hungarian camp and all four of the Aranykapu Tabor session sat Cazadero. Since then, he has attended TiTi Tabor Hungarian music and dance camp at Raft Island, Washington. Hungarian language, music, songs, and dance are his primary folk-cultural interests.

He didn’t leave the Woodlands, however, as he began steadily attending Scandia Camp Mendocino in 2000. He helps there with photography and odd jobs as assigned. He had started attending the Southern California Scandia Festival workshops over the Thanksgiving Day holiday weekend at Julian, CA, sometime in the mid-1990s until 2006, and later added the annual Bay Area Scandia Festival workshop in Petaluma.

Dick is retired from a series of computer-programming and data-networking roles.