It’s a brilliant plan: the annual “come and try out the courses at Tobo” and the reunion for all previous ESI students happen on the same day, so the potential new students get an entire houseful of enthusiastic graduates. We were invited to join in the two-hour morning class session (one hour each with Sonia and Ditte) in exchange for lunch, so nearly the whole playing class showed up to learn a couple of bonus tunes. I think most of the prospective students stuck around for dinner (taco night! lots of yummy cake in honor of ESI’s 15th anniversary!) and the evening dance.
As you’d expect with an alumni pool including David Eriksson, Magnus Holmström, and Anna-Kristina Widell, the dance sets and jam sessions were super-awesome. Nice dancing, too, with more dance alumni and other folks in the house. I chose to spend a fair chunk of my evening sitting in on sessions that were over my head — tricky harpa rep at lickety-split tempos — in order to pick up some new tunes to digest later, with an end result that I came out of it feeling kind of depressed about not being 10 years farther along. But I could’ve fixed that with another couple hours of a more accessible session if I’d just had a couple more hours…
