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Hungarian Performance
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Descendance's Endless European Summer
By Jose Calarco
Its been a hell of a year for Descendance with tours to Korea (twice), Florida, Los Angeles, Hawaii, New Zealand, Russia ,Germany, Hungary, and we are now due to return to Disneyworld in Florida for six weeks from Sept 26th.
If your wondering why you haven't received one of my Descendance world adventure emails lately, its because I have been to busy running around Germany, Italy and Eastern Europe for the last 6 weeks. Descendance has been performing at all these amazing summer events, and then we had to rush home without a break to perform at The Thuringowa Festival in Townsville, and begin making a documentary with the Discovery Channel to be shown in 120 countries.
All this activity has led to Descendance being nominated as a finalist for The Sydney Business Awards for its outstanding cultural service to the City of Sydney and for reaching out to Australia and around the world; we thank Lord Mayor Clover Moore for her certificate of appreciation and acknowledgement of our achievements.
We had some absolute memorable moments on the road this summer in Europe some of the highlights included performing for 87,000 people at Munich Olympic Stadium at their annual Summer Nights Dream with legendary German conductor Eberhard Schoener, the night concluding with the worlds finest fireworks display on four floating stages on the river.
The Sziget Festival officially Europe's biggest cultural event, set on an island in Hungary, the festival runs over one week and brings in 100,000 people per day, with the final day of the festival bringing a staggering 300,000, Descendance without doubt was one of the best received acts at the festival and carried the flag for Australia along with Natalie Imbruglia and Nick Cave.
The tour included countless performances scattered in charming Eastern European cities, some 700 years old with names that no English tongue could never pronounce, like Székesfehérvár, Nepmuveszeti and Nagykanizsa during the summer of festivals. We had informative meetings with Gypsy leaders from these areas telling us about their struggles for freedom, we performed for children and families at Europe's biggest inland lake at Balaton, completed events for The Australian Consulates, performed in Vienna for the poor Koalas who now make Europe their home at the zoo, made eight Television appearances in prime time to audiences of Millions, all to the benefit of Australia and indigenous culture.
Descendance stood out at these festivals, many European countries provided the standard Folkloric dance acts which has a similarity whether it's from Russia, Italy, Finland, Morocco, or Greece it's jovial, energetic and colorful, but lacks the mystery, ceremony and spirituality of the worlds oldest culture.
The trip ended with us missing our flight home from London, due to our travel agent booking an impossible connecting flight, for 10 hours we sat at Heathrow Airport praying we would make our flights to Townsville to perform at The Thuringowa Festival which we had planned for one year.
Thankfully we made the Thuringowa show (just), for the production and staging of this event blew our minds, just when we thought we had seen it all in Europe, along came this little gem of a stage and set up dug out into the mountain ranges overlooking the river, large Aboriginal motifs lit the mountains, the river was shimmering at night from surreal lighting, and the 3000 audience had to be driven to and from the site in fifteen buses so mysterious and inhabitable was the location.
Descendance celebrated the event with a twenty piece show, which featured Traditional Aboriginal, Torres Strait Islander and Contemporary dancing, even jet lag from a twenty four hour flight was not going to stop us giving our own home town our best show for the year.
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