Last weekend was the San Antonio Folk Dance Festival, a weekend-long workshop with a dance concert on Saturday night.
I’m told that the teachers, Daniela Ivanova (Bulgarian) and Daniel Sandu (Romanian), were excellent. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to do the workshop because I was in the concert with Village International Folk Dancers (or rather, I could have, but I’d have missed the entire afternoon for dress rehearsal, so I decided against it).
But the concert was fun, with lots of excellent dance groups including some amazing kids from a Serbian dance group in Houston. (Several of the groups did use similar dances, though; after a while we began to joke about the preponderance of csardas dances and guys jumping over sticks.) And our group did a good job with our Israeli set, considering that half of us had never performed before and that the dress rehearsal was the first time one person had been able to come to practice in three weeks. We got a lot of compliments on the staging for Likrat Shabat, which we did with the stage lights turned down and the dancers silhouetted against the background.
Learning dances for performance was a good experience for me, and I’m glad I did it, but I find I don’t have the performing bug. Next time, if VIFD is performing, I’ll probably pass so I can actually do the workshop and learn dances well enough to bring them back to our group.