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CONTACT:
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COMING IN FALL 2005 TO DEUTSCHES HAUS,
420 West 116th Street, New York City
SUBVERSIVE STORYTELLERS AND MODERN MARRIAGE
AT COLUMBIA’S DEUTSCHES HAUS THIS FALL |
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Danish fairy tale teller Hans Christian Andersen and the modern marriage of Swedish intellectuals will be featured
topics of two special events presented by the Columbia University Swedish Program this fall. Both will be held at Deutsches Haus,
at 420 W. 116th Street (between Amsterdam Ave. and Morningside Dr.), N.Y.C. The public is invited, admission is free, and reservations
are not required.
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The first program, entitled "Subversive Storytellers of the North: From Anonymous Iconoclasts to Hans Christian Andersen" will
be a talk in English by Niels Ingwersen, scheduled for Tuesday, October 25, at 7 p.m. The lecture is being presented in honor
of the 200th birthday of the Danish storyteller, by a prolific teacher and scholar of Scandinavian studies.
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Niels Ingwersen is a professor emeritus of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he taught Scandinavian studies from 1965 until
his recent retirement. He has served as a visiting professor at the universities of Odense and Aarhus in Denmark and the University of
California at Los Angeles.
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Professor Ingwersen has published on Scandinavian folktales and ballads, on many Nordic authors (e.g. Hans Christian Andersen and Søren
Kierkegaard), and on the history of Scandinavian literature. His lecture is being sponsored by the Swedish Program of Columbia with the
assistance of the American-Scandinavian Foundation and the Royal Danish Consulate General of New York.
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Scenes from a Swedish Marriage Through Letters
Both Alva and Gunnar Myrdal were Nobel Prize winners (he in 1974, she in 1982), but in the summer of 1941 both their careers were at
an early stage. While hard at work writing a major new study of racism in America, Gunnar worried frantically about whether his wife
would manage to get a visa and leave Stockholm to join him soon on the campus of Dartmouth College. An ambitious young intellectual
in her own right, Alva was determined to develop her career while raising their three children, but she also missed her husband and
yearned to be with him in the States. Both partners, desperately lonely, could not refrain from exploring other romantic interests as
well. Infidelities ensued and were confessed, at first reluctantly, then in total candor--only making matters worse...
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Swedish TV journalist Hans Hederberg has recreated this remarkably true-to-life chapter of the Myrdals' history as a one-act epistolary
drama entitled Alva & Gunnar: 91 Days in the Long-Distance Relationship of the Myrdals One Summer During World War II.
The play is based on Hedenberg's 2004 documentary study Sanningen, inget annat än sanningen (The Truth, Nothing But the Truth),
derived from the Myrdals' correspondence, and has been translated by Verne Moberg. The reading will be presented in English at 8 p.m. and
in Swedish at 6 p.m. on Thursday, November 17, 2005, at Deutsches Haus.
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Directed by Robert Greer, the English version will feature actors Mary Keefe as Alva and Thom Sesma as Gunnar. The Swedish drama will
be directed by Malin Tybahl and feature Elise Rovinsky as Alva and Björn Olsson as Gunnar.
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Hans Hederberg began his career as a film critic, went into radio and television, published fiction and documentaries, then wrote and
directed several dialogue dramas and a feature about terrorism. He was the first person to examine the correspondence of Alva and
Gunnar Myrdal, which, in accord with their last will and testament, had been sealed in the archives of the Swedish Labor Movements
Archives and Library until the year 2000. He had met briefly with the Nobel Prize laureates when he directed a documentary portrait of
Gunnar, but was stunned by the openness of their psychological insights into the intimacies of their personal lives.
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According to Verne Moberg, director of the Columbia Swedish Program, Alva & Gunnar will be added to the CD recording series,
"Scandinavia Off Broadway, on Campus at Columbia," which the Pro Suecia Foundation has been funding and which is being
distributed by the Swedish Program.
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This program will be sponsored by the Swedish Program with the assistance of the Barbro Osher Pro Suecia Foundation of San Francisco,
the Swedish Women's Educational Association—New York Chapter, the Swedish Consulate of New York, and Scandinavian Airlines.
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| For information about these programs, telephone: 212-854-4015;
E-mail: [email protected] |
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