Super news!

Ladies and Gentlemen, I am proud to announce that The New Baroque Dance is about to infiltrate the Old World! I have a Show!

After sending out many packets and annoying a few theaters with semi-constant phone calls, one finally took the bait and offered me a slot in the spring line-up.

My European group is called The Punks Delight (named after a 17th c. English country dance), and I am running it with my baroque-flute-wielding friend, Beate Alsdorf. We have decided that our show will be a mix of 'traditional' and 'neo' baroque dances with all live music. I'll have three dancers (including myself) with 4 musicians-- flute, harpsichord, viola de gamba, and a singer! I'm going to try my hand at choreographing some luscious cantatas.

It is going to be a crazy amount of work, and I am going to once-again exploit everyone I know (watch out!), but I am trembling with excitement and totally ready to get back out there.


The show is at Arkadas Theater in Köln February 4th and 5th!

Pictures from the Sibling Germany Festival

Hi! I finally edited and captioned the heck out of our pictures from the trip with Chuckie and Elaina around Germany. Unfortunately, Jeremy and I forgot our camera in the hotel room in Heidelberg (note that I didn't say that I forgot the camera. Just trying to be fair).

Here are a few pictures from Chuckie and Elaina's fancy-pants-super-professional-and-makes-all-our-pictures-look-like-a-six-year-old-drew-them camera:

Enjoy!









in front of the gardens at the baroque palace next door
(Kathy, I had to do simultaneous translation for them too-- now that my German is better, I found out that people used a sort of tea-ball filled with blood-soaked cotton tucked away in their wigs to trap the ever-present ticks and lice. Aren't you glad you now know that?)

















Up on the Philosophers' Walk Lookout in Heidelberg













The gate on the old bridge in Heidelberg









Wow! Chuckie has more gray hairs than me!

Schnitzel Tonight!

Today is the last day for Chuckie and Elaina to soak up the deliciousness of German culture, so naturally we are taking them to the very fine restaurant Oma's ('Grandma's') for the best schnitzel in town.

Jeremy and I ran those poor kids ragged: riding bikes to the Palace near Cologne (a 1.5 hour ride instead of 45 minutes. Oops!), hiking the 'Philosopher's Path' in Heidelberg, gawking at the immensity of the English Garden in Munich (they cried Uncle and went back to the hotel, unfortately missing MORE NAKED GERMANS. One part of the park is clothing-optional. Now it seems like Jer and I can no longer avoid seeing naked Germans. Once you start, it seems hard to stop!!), and walking through all of the awesomeness that is Berlin while staying in a hostel barely within the town (and while we were there I saw about 10 hostels MUCH closer to the action. Waah!).

Quotes from the exhausted kids themselves:
Elaina-- "Germany is pretty, too bad the sky looks like Northeast Ohio. And what's up with having to pay for the bathroom and no water fountains and no free water with dinner?"
Chuckie-- "Ich bin ein Strudel."

My highlight of the trip was eating calves' hearts for the first time in Munich. Kinda gamey.

Naked Germans Galore; or, How to Spend your Sixth Wedding Anniversary

Deutsche Badekultur!

Jeremy and I celebrated last Sunday with our first trip to the German Sauna. It was unbelievably relaxing--- 5 different saunas and pools with different temperatures. There was one sauna that smelled citrusy, one that was menthey, and one where a worker put water on the coals and then flung a towel at us to make it even hotter. In this super-hot sauna, we also received a skewer of fruit in-between the towel-flinging. And eating a 'skewer' of fruit in a room that is 100 degrees with 30 other naked people is not only pretty funny, but also extremely delicious.
This brings me to the most famous aspect of the German Sauna System: Nakedness. The place is decidedly co-ed (even the changing rooms!), and one MUST be naked when sitting in the sauna (on a towel). You also go in the pools naked, after taking a shower to get rid of the sweat. When you are walking around between saunas or relaxing on a deck chair, the choice of nakedness is yours.













Chuckie and Elaina come to visit tomorrow! Jeremy and I are going to jet them around Germany-- we'll go to Heidelberg, München, and Berlin. Kind of ambitious (these places are not close together!), but it should be fun.

Meet Arlecchino

As I mentioned last time, the morning after we came home from Belgium, I had to hightail it to Switzerland. I had an interview with the choregrapher Berhard Gertsch for his commedia dell'arte/funny dance show in November. He was desperate to find a professional baroque dancer who could also play Harlequin.

This whole situation rather clearly explains the mix of preparation, waiting, and crazy luck that goes into getting a dance job. Last February, I sent an email with my CV to all of the European baroque choreographers I could find. I heard back from quite a few, but no immediate job offers or auditions. Then, in May, I went to the Rothenfels baroque dance conference and handed out DVD samples of my dancing to the choreogrpahers I thought most likely to be able to give me a job. (There is a lot of baroque dancing in Europe, but most of it seems to be unpaid amateurs dancing in castles) The Monday before last, I get an email from Berhard (who was not at Rothenfels) asking if I could play Harlequin in his show. A choreographer who was at Rothenfels suggested me for the job after watching my DVD.

I told Berhard that I would happily dance in his show, but then I got an email back that he was still looking at other people because he really wanted a man to play Harlequin. I then wrote back emphasising my modern dance experience which would make me a superior Harlequin. Then he said he had to meet me. Hence the loooong trip to Switzerland and back in one day (11 hours total on the train).

Sound crazy? Were you actually able to read all of that?

I am incredibly excited to do this show-- not only do I get to play Harlequin, I also will be a young farmer, a gypsy, a ghost, a statue, and a baccante!


This is a page from the book, "The New and Curious School of Theatrical Dancing" by Gregorio Lambranzi. All of the dances in this show will be reconstructions of the crazy and silly dances in this book. Since the indivisual talents of the performers are so important in making a comic dance, the book only has engravings that show different senarios with suggestions on how they could be performed and what sort of steps to do. The rest is left up to the choreographer and performers!

Ghent!

Ladies and Gentleman, Ghent really deserves its hype. Perhaps this hype doesn't reach all the way to America, but whenever Belgium was mentioned someone would say, "Oh, you have to go to Ghent/Brugges. Those are the pretty cities." We didn't get to Brugges this time, but it is now on the weekend trip list (only 3 hours away!!).


In Ghent they speak Flemish which is kinda like Dutch which is kinda like some weirdly spelled mix of English and German. I was so embarrassed that I didn't learn even how to say "please/thank you/I would like" before we got there, but then when I asked someone how to say "please" it turned out to be stunningly difficult to remember, anyway.

While there, I met up with a baroque choreographer that I first met in Rothenfels in May, Sigrid T'Hooft. We had a great talk about theatricality in baroque dance, and she showed me the Beijnhofs (Beguinage). These were sort of feminist religious communes in Belgium, the Netherlands, and northern France begun in about 1100 and lasting until 4 years ago (when the last woman died). The women would live in a gated, walled enclave in the city by themselves. They dressed like nuns, had a chapel in the center of the enclave, and took a vow of chastity, but were NOT nuns. They kept their property/money instead of giving it to the Church. There were a mix of rich and poor-- the rich ones having their own houses and the poor ones living together with about 4 women per house. I have to learn more about it... Sigrid actually lives in one, and when she moved in, the last woman was still alive. She had to be interviewed, even though it wasn't the same kind of religious community anymore.


On the last day, Jeremy and I were just wandering around, taking in the sights and drinking beer. I thought I had the schedule to get to our train in Brussels all worked out, but we ended up running through town and catching the last bus to the train station (Sunday! Aaargh!). We arrived at the train station in Ghent with only 3 MINUTES to catch the train to Brussels. We didn't have tickets yet, and the train was a Thalys-- you can't buy a ticket on the train. Jeremy had sprained his knee a little last week, so I left him on the platform and RAN to the ticket booth at the OTHER END of the train station. Luckily there wasn't a line, I bought the ticket, and RAN back to the platform. The train was sitting there, and Jeremy and I rushed on board with 30 seconds to spare. YES!

{Jeremy's knee is feeling better now.}

If we had missed that train we would have missed our train back to Cologne, and I had to go to Switzerland the next morning at 7am... But that is a story for another blog.

Please look at the photo album because I just spent 40 minutes writing captions, and that will basically tell you the whole story of our trip, if you are interested.