Germany / Estonia Camp – July 14 – August 1, 2018 – $1900adult/$1675youth
Date: July 14-August 1, 2018
Venue:
Armenhus - Laage, Germany
Leaders:
Larry Gordon,
Bongani Magatyana,
Nathaniel Damon
Price: $1900 adult/$1675 youth
Open, like all of our international camps, to both adult and teen singers, this Village Harmony camp session will begin in a small town in former East Germany, and end with five days at the 2018 Europa Cantat Festival in Tallinn, Estonia.
We will start our 19-day program with a rehearsal week at the Armenhus, a small church retreat center in the charming German town of Laage, near the city of Rostock in northeastern Germany’s Mecklenburg province.
Camp repertoire will feature South African songs and dances composed and arranged by Cape Town composer and camp leader Bongani Magatyana. Village Harmony director Larry Gordon and alumnus Nathaniel Damon will lead the group in traditional Georgian, Balkan and American songs, as well as a set of early music.
Our week in residence in Laage will be followed by a six-day performance tour, with concerts around Mecklenburg, in Buchholz and in Hamburg.
The morning following our Hamburg concert we will board a short flight to the beautiful and well-preserved Estonian city of Tallinn. There we will spend our final five days staying in a center-city hostel and attending the huge Europa Cantat 2018 choral festival. While there we will perform, attend other performances and take part in our choice of workshops before heading home on August 1.
Europa Cantat is a pan-European choral festival occurring every third year, hosted by a different European country each time. The festival customarily attracts thousands of singers and choirs from all over the world. This will be the first time that a Village Harmony group has taken part in Europa Cantat.
Tuition: $1900 adults/$1675 youth. Registration, food and lodging at Europa Cantat is included in the tuition price. Transportation to and from camp, and airfare from Hamburg to Talinn, is extra.
Village Harmony founder and director LARRY GORDON has been making community music in Vermont since the early 1970s. He founded Village Harmony in 1989, and his patient and relaxed, yet demanding, teaching style and his collaborative approach have shaped the welcoming atmosphere of the Village Harmony community since the beginning. Though his first love was medieval and renaissance music, he is a vital figure in New England shape-note singing, and he is the music editor of the popular Northern Harmony shape-note songbook. Larry is an inspired organizer with an unerring eye for good repertoire and a unique knack of pulling together interesting combinations of singers and letting them shine. Larry has led Onion River Chorus in Montpelier since the late 1970s, and is well known across the US and internationally for leading stunning periodic ad hoc incarnations of Northern Harmony, a semi-professional tour group made up largely of veteran Village Harmony singers. Recently he has been devoting increasing time to teaching Balkan folk dancing.
BONGANI MAGATYANA is a professional singer /music director /composer /theatrical producer living in Gugulethu Township in Cape Town, South Africa.
NATHANIEL DAMON started singing in Village Harmony while living in Vermont as a teenager. He immediately felt at home in this community created by honest and heart felt singing. After moving to Germany in 2004 he founded the world music choir, Weltmusik-Chor Hamburg, a community choir of 50 voices that performs many genres Nathaniel was introduced to in Village Harmony including Georgian and shape-note music, songs from the Balkans and traditional choral music from South Africa. Nathaniel studied music education in Hamburg and teaches at a Waldorf school for children with special needs in Hamburg. He often performs as an improvising solo vocalist and multi-instrumentalist (banjo, guitar, fiddle, trombone, percussion) at contact improvisation festivals that he attends with his partner and two children. In this camp session he will lead a number of songs from around the world including Georgia, Germany and USA, a choral improvisation and at least one of his own arrangements.
The Armenhus is located in the small town of Laage, near the larger town of Rostock and in the beautiful Mecklenburg-Vorpommern region in the far northeast corner of Germany. The center is s