F: Just before this interview we realized that even though you have been living in Gävle for the bigger part of your life, you aren’t from town. How did you get here?

Ida: I started to dance at the age of 14 on Ackes in Gävle. I was living in a small village 27 miles outside the town. And I saw an ad in the newspaper for showdance and that’s when I started to go to Gävle. But I didn’t move to town until two years later to study at Vasaskolans jazz program. So, I was 16 and got my own apartment and never moved back home. It was pretty tough to live by yourself at that age and only have your teenage friends as support, as teenagers can be pretty cruel to each other. But outside of school I took all the dance classes that existed. Because back then you only paid one semester fee and you could dance as many classes as you wanted. So I found a safe place in dancing.

Fico: Is this the reason for you being such a great dancer in so many styles?

Ida: Yes, the cheap price made it possible to take many classes. And I thought that it could be good to be broad. But it also took longer time to be good at all these styles compared if I would have spent the same amount of time on one style.

Fico: How many styles can you control, cause we have seen you perform so many styles that we don’t get surprised anymore:

Ida: I wouldn’t say I “control” all of these styles but I can dance and teach breaking, popping, locking, whacking, step, voguing, ballet, jazz, contemporary, house and hip hop. But if a student wants to get serious in a very advanced way in any dance style, you should go to a teacher that is 100% dedicated to that style. Because my strength is to make choreographs, where I mix all the knowledge that I have from all the styles that I know. I feel like I’m preparing my students so that they can take the next step and be ready for their next teacher.

Fico: We think you are a bit modest, because there can’t be a teacher in Gävle that can educate a student better than you in for example popping?

Ida: No, I don’t think so. But if you want to learn these styles in an advanced way, you must travel and visit bigger cities.

Fico: We believe you, but must also point out that you have a specific style, taste and talent that have taken you on several adventures, right?

Ida: Well, I love odd things. I like to give things more depth and I love to mix ugly with beauty, feminine with masculine. I like dancers that are unique in their own way, in them you can see what they are feeling when they are dancing. They take the moves and do something extraordinary with them. I always try to teach and get my dancers to use their own feelings for the music and the moves. I think that this is the most important thing in how I work with myself and all other dancers.

Fico: Do you see yourself mostly as a musician or a dancer?

Ida: I see myself mostly as a musician and I think that the reason why I´m dancing so much is that it feels like it´s something I do because it´s fun. But at the same time, I have been super disciplined with the dancing and gone to other places to take classes to become better. I started to go to Stockholm for more classes and after that I travelled to New York for longer periods to learn me even more. Meanwhile I was a singer in a band, started my own solo project and did tours in Europe.

Fico: You say it so casual; I have been going to New York for several months to dance. Do you understand how much Fame vibes we get when you say that? Where do you stay, where do you eat, where do you go clubbing, are you wearing leg warmers and a head band?

Ida: Hahaha, the first time we stayed on Upper East Side, but we have also stayed in Brooklyn and in Harlem. It depends on which dance studio we have planned to go to. The biggest one is on Broadway, and it is so amazing to be there. Because there you will meet all kinds of people, on an ordinary day we saw an eight-year-old super star from a musical, a beginner arriving in a suit from Wall Street, a seventy-year-old ballerina doing splits and an oddball dancing in a flame suit with wings. Everybody is welcomed, it´s drop-in classes. So, you just pay your entrance fee and there are classes in five different rooms from 09.00-23.00. If I was rich, I would move there and take one ballet class every day and afterwards sit outside drinking coffee and look at all the people. But we dance like crazy when we are in New York. We can take up to 8 classes a day and every class is 1,5h-2h. So, it´s very hard work and I´m never as fit as when I arrive back from New York.

Fico: Alright, but do you find time to do anything else?

Ida: Well, on Sundays we usually go to dancing clubs. They are not ordinary nightclubs,   it´s were all dancers go to show off their new moves and to get inspired by others. You´ll see a lot of people filming every move because it is at these clubs the development of dancing takes place.

Fico: So after you have danced all day and all week, you go and dance a little bit more 😉

Fico: Talking about New York, you have done the music to the trailer for one of the world’s most well-known tv-series, Mad Men season 4, how did that happen?

Ida: It was a guy on channel 5 who was hired to make the trailer and he had heard my solo on Myspace, and he had also heard Baron Bane. He wanted one of those two singers to sing the music for the trailer. He hadn´t realized that it was the same person.

Fico: That is sick, what a coincidence, what are the odds on that?

Ida: Yes, it´s actually unbelievable that he could even find one of the acts on Myspace. But he found both and I was the girl behind both the voices.

Fico: Did you get any buzz from this trailer?

Ida: Absolutely, there were many people that discovered me as a solo artist thanks to it. And as it continues to stream, there are still people writing to me that they discovered my music after hearing that song. The trailer also won two international awards, so it is nice to have been a part of it.

Fico: But you didn´t start your career as a solo artist?

Ida: No, I started as a singer in Baron Bane 2003, a band with incredible talented musicians. It was lucky that I was only nineteen, so that I didn´t understand how good they were. Because otherwise I would have been extremely nervous. But it was wonderful to be in this band because there was no fear of what other people might think. The guys didn´t even think that anyone would like it, they just did things that they thought were cool. So, both the music and the performances had more artsy dimensions compared with similar bands. There were many thoughts about how to give people a concert experience that was something else, every concert should be more as a performance, it should tickle every sense. So, for example, we worked with fire and projections, we switched positions between the crowd and the band, we put the singing on backtrack and the singer either off stage or way back on the stage. Because why should the singer always be in the center? We challenged all things that are seen as a normality.

Fico: You must love that attitude. Baron Bane was a cool band. But you are also an amazingly cool lady by yourself. Because we need to talk about your first tour when you were 23, what happened?

Ida: I thought that I had a great solo thing going and I wanted to go on tour, because I had never been on tour. So, I arranged a band of five musicians and two dancers. I had one invitation from the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam and started to email other promoters around Europe. When I had, what I thought was a nice schedule, I rented a bus from “rent a wreck”, packed the whole crew in it and went away. We had no idea what kind of places we would play on, because I had only had email correspondence with a lot of different promoters. So, we played at both big and small places, for big audiences and for a few people. At some places we slept on the stage were we just performed, on other places we got the addict above the club for ourselves and sometimes we crashed on someone’s apartment floor. In some cities we got interviewed by the radio and everything was really professional and other times we ended up in a strange café with no people at all attending.

Fico: Do you get any money from the venues when you do a tour like this? Or is it just free food and accommodation?  You get the door and if it´s a lot of people it´s great. For example, on a goth club in Kreuzberg we played several nights in a row. And it was 300-400 people every time. But on the strange café I mentioned earlier, there were no people and when we got our room, they had arranged only 2 beds and we were 7. So, you get highs and lows.