I should have practised and studied the by now 30 tunes of
Asan and friends, but due to brain-capacity-overflow, I booked myself in for a
massage instead, as this was around a quarter of the price from London
massages. A fellow hotel guest, a great eccentric American lady had been going
on how wonderful the massages here were, and how sweet and sensitive the lady
was, so I was looking forward to a relaxing experience.
However, o my god, I
had an hour of agony ahead of me. Yes, she was sweet indeed, very powerful, and
very sensitive to detecting my tensions and soft spots. She found muscles on my
body I had no clue they ever existed, and she had no hesitation whatsoever
torturing me thoroughly for my own good, as she kept saying.
I did survive, and later, when I had recovered, my body did
feel light and free indeed. J
Meanwhile I had received various messages about the
happenings later in the day, and that I would need to come as smartly dressed
as possible for the concert in the evening.
We had a light rehearsal at Amit’s house, this time only
with few visitors, and Amit dropping out half-way through as he was suffering
from bad tooth ache, and the dentist visit earlier that day had not relieved
him.
We made our way to centre of Skopje and its National
Theatre, an absolutely monumental building, newly re-built from the old one
which got destroyed in an earthquake some 50 years earlier, and rather contraversially received by Macedonians and tourists alike. After some lengthy speeches in
Macedonian, Romany and luckily some English too, the music was initiated by Đelem Đelem, the Romany hymn, Weird for me was, that it was sang by a white singer, and only a few very shy audience members sang along softly - unfortunately my language skills were not sufficient to find out why.
Then finally the real thing started, and the wait was absolutely worth it: They had
invited Romany bands and mixed groups from various countries. The first one was singing a song which I need to learn for our Macedonian Repertoire: Rovela O Demo:
Apart from a dance group, the performances ranged from classical to jazz and fusion and were of stunning quality – I have heard and seen such excellent music for a very long time !!!
This gentleman did an excellent jazz piano performance, but the big applause came with his 'dance encore'...
Look at the shoes to find out who of them is not Romany...
Real Gypsy Tango to finish off with...
After that, I finished the evening going for a drink with
Asan, and a lively conversation using my limited repertoire of
Serbian/Macedonian/Romany words, however, we did talk about many things !
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