Leah Bauer as Fatima of Cordoba and Alex Abarca as Hasdai Ibn Shaprut in the August, 2007 workshop performance of Al Andalus! The Legend.Sorry, I took a ten month break from blog writing. I’m back to it again.
While I wasn’t blog writing, some things happened to the Al Andalus Project. It got extended. It is now a multi-year project. We realized that this endeavor is so very big…B-I-G, that we needed a few more years to let it ferment and grow artistically. Conveniently, this also allows us to do the fundraising in smaller chunks. Although the chunks are still fairly big. It’s all relative.
Let’s back up so I can catch you up. If you read the first blog, you already know that Phase I culminated in a workshop performance of Al Andalus! The Legend a year ago. Phase II began in 2008 with the Dance Styles of Al Andalus Workshop in January, a tour to Louisiana in March, a presentation at SIETAR Houston in April, and finished with a duet performance in the BRDF in June.
Teachers of the Dance Styles of Al Andalus Workshop in January, 2008. From left to right: Ady Fisberg, Sara Draper, Lucia Rodriguez-Sanchez, Maria Ferdandez Urbaez.The Dance Styles of Al Andalus Workshop at University of Houston featured our project consultants Ady Fisberg teaching Sephardic folk dance and Lucia Rodriguez-Sanchez teaching flamenco. Maria Fernandez Urbaez taught Middle Eastern dance. All of this was followed by my debut offering of a new style that I’m developing, Modern Andalusian Fusion. (Since that time I’ve offered this master class at NSU in Louisiana and at American College Dance Festival in Texas. I am offering a Modern Andalusian Fusion workshop in Houston this fall…visit http://dancepath.com/events.htm for details.) The Dance Styles workshop was attended by enthusiastic participants (as were the master classes) and we all had a wonderful time.
In April, Dr. Sharon Joy (Music Director of the Al Andalus Project) and I gave a multi-media lecture presentation to SIETAR (Society for Intercultural Education, Training and Research) in Houston titled, Al Andalus! The Legend: Then and Now, Spain and Houston. We gave a summary of the project and offered insights of cross-cultural awareness that unfolded for us during our work with our multi-cultural team of artists, musicians, translators, and scholars.
In June, Leah Bauer and Richard Hubscher performed the love duet choreographed to the soul-wrenching Sephardic song, Dame La Mano recorded by Alhambra, the ensemble of our consultant Isabelle Ganz. This presentation was part of the Dance Gathering, an event in the annual BRDF (Big Range Dance Festival).
Backstage at the recital hall at NSU. From left to right: Khaled Al Jamal, Linda Gomez, Kristina Koutsoudas, Leah Bauer, Jonathan Gutierrez.The highlight of Phase II was the March Al Andalus Tour to Northwestern State University in Natchitoches, Louisiana. Consultant/performers Kristina Koutsoudas and Khaled Al Jamal, along with dancers Leah Bauer, Linda Gomez and Jonathan Gutierrez accompanied me to NSU. Sharon is a Music Education faculty member there and served as our tour coordinator. Kristina and I taught master classes in Middle Eastern dance and Modern Andalusian Fusion to students in the dance program. Khaled taught master classes in Middle Eastern music to percussion students and another to strings students. Sharon and I did the lecturing in a lecture-demonstration that included our dancers, Khaled and Sharon. They performed numbers from our production that included segments of multi-lingual narration and a slide show of Andalusian architecture. The performance and master classes were enthusiastically received. This was a rewarding endeavor that we may repeat on other campuses in the future.
Speaking of the future, we now foresee a Phase III, a Phase IV, and even a Phase V to the Al Andalus Project. I'll give you more details as we go along, but the main idea is that we’re going to work our way up to our pinnacle production over time. Meanwhile, I’ll be offering Modern Andalusian Fusion classes to dancers who want to train in this style, and it looks like some additional, interesting Al Andalus Project events will continue to pop up along the way. I hope that you will journey with us throughout the length of this discovery and creation-filled path!
