Friday 31 July 2009

D-DAY minus 1 !


Photo Bettina Stoess

Just one more day and the Firebird project starts! Tomorrow Ada will travel to Sibiu and Brasov with Tedy and his team to fetch our young participants and bring them to Bucharest.

On Monday, August 3rd, the first day of rehearsals, at 9 AM, we will all be gathered at Caragiale High-School: over 100 young artists among which three Germans, Monique Gruber, president of JRC, Josef Eder, artistic director of the project, Romanian choreographer Irina Roncea and Columbian choreographer Martha Hincapié, Romanian assistant Oana Rotariu, film maker Tedy Necula and his team in charge of the documentary dedicated to the project, German and Romanian volunteers, and last not least, Alexandra Arnautu, Ada Lungu and Mircea Tache from If Magic, coordinators of the project, who have been working day and night with Monique in the last few days to ensure logistics and organisation.

Volunteers and participants from Sibiu and Brasov will be accomodated at "Neghinita” Care and Hosting Centre, a tidy and centrally located home kindly offered by the City Hall of Sector 2. For 4 weeks, the gymnasium generously put at our disposition by the National College I.L.Caragiale will be the birth place of a new Firebird, the place where creative energies will be unchained. There will be dancing, hopping, sweating and laughing….

Just as thrilled as a team competing in the world domino championship right before the first domino falls, praying that it will trigger the hoped for chain reaction, we are engaging in the community dance adventure. Our first destinations will be the stages of the National Theatre in Bucharest and Sala Transilvania in Sibiu, but the journey will hopefully take us much further in the next few years.

If it is true that the Firebird is everything but a competition between the youngsters, it is a competition of each participant with himself, against the boundaries of his mind, against his own doubts reflected in his peers´eyes.


Photo Bettina Stoess

Community Dance is a competition with neither winners nor loosers. Everybody wins: Only five weeks from now, 100 new born artists will stand on the National Theatre stage and dance on Stravinski’s music. They will have traded a holiday of fun and leisure for a month of hard work, an unexpected choice for their age to say the least, but each and everyone of them will be awarded the most precious prize of all: the belief that he can fulfill his dreams, against all odds and no matter how wild they are, but that it is up to him to fulfill them.

The website www.pasareadefoc.ro will witness the evolution of these one hundred yougsters and monitor every step of theirs on this arduous trail. In time, the site will turn into a virtual home for all community dance fans willing to indulge themselves and join others in this enriching experience.
A popular French saying has it that “It is only the first step that matters.”

So, let´s step up and start dancing our way through this fabulous journey along with the Firebird.

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