Hm, Gardetanz is hard to describe in english words... (at least I find it difficult) - as a dancer there you are jumping 4-5 minutes only (it depends on which song the coach chooses how long it is, there is no special order). Usually a "Garde" (I would translate it as "guard") consists of 20 girls in short skirts and uniform jackets and boots (we never were so much, only in the beginning of training - but when show season arrived we were only 8 or 12 left - in my last year we were 6 girls... riddiculous). In former days a king or prince has a special guard to save his life - this was a millitary guard. This carnival tradition is a little kidding with that, a carnival association finds a "prince" and a "princess", they are usual people in usual life but for this season they costume as prince and princess (should mean they have to pay a lot!!!
) and princes "guard" is not a military one, it is a group of dancers looking a bit millitary. The point is that one association or party promoter "invites" a prince and the prince brings his guard to dance for the people there) Also the dance itself is a bit military - marching or jumping in lines or other figures, usually we had 8 beats walking into a figure then 8 or 16 beats "throw up your leg as high as possible" or "catch it on the highest point and jump in circle while holding it still"
at least two times every dance we had to jump high and land down in splits... and so on. Usually we had 3 till 5 shows per evening, and we had to travel to every venue, the costumes are quite valuable and couldn´t stand to get wet or pushed, so we had to take care of it a lot and of course we also had uniform-hats with feathers (veeeery damagable also). Before every dance we had to change dress and style up ourselves new, usuallly we had only one little room for preparing ourselves and we had to share it with the whole association -> 30 persons in a room of 11qm... we had around 10 minutes to prepare, so usually we had a big time problem if we needed to visit toilet during an evening, not to talk about time for warm-up. This show evenings used to be only friday and saturday, sometimes also tuesday over a period of 4-6 weeks and everytime the last weekend was stress pure, friday and saturday as usual, sunday we spend the whole afternoon at a parade (wonderful cold in our damagable costumes...
) Monday evening only one show in a disco (every year the same) and Highlight Tuesday all day dancing and running from 10 a.m. till "funeral" at midnight and then a little clean-up and finally some rest... sounds unlikely, I know but nevertheless I loved it for some years
Oh, I didn´t mention, this was only "marching"dance - we also had a show dance every year, it´s like "Jazz-dance" I would say, we deceided one theme to choose, choose a song (or two or three and got them "mixed" ahem...
) then we made a choreography (not too exhausting, because we had to do this dance in addition to our marchdance). And we got theme-fitting costumes for that dance.
There are also "solo dancers", most time in marchdance but we had also one for showdance - we even had a showdance-pair (usualla it´s a man and a woman dancing and doing some pair acrobatics, possible for marchdance or showdance) ours consisted of two girls (guess who was one of them ...
)
And all of this stuff we had to cary to every single show and back...
However, it was a great time...
