Singing With Your Feet

I was told recently that the Mixtec people of Mexico have a delightful word for “dance.”  It means “to sing with your feet.”

My chorus and I have experienced the idea of singing with one’s feet in an unusual way lately, first in our just completed Christmas concerts, My Dancing Day: A Renaissance Christmas.  We combined some dance-able Christmas carols with various Renaissance dances that were done hundreds of years ago as part of all kinds of festivities, including Christmas.  We didn’t dance them (!), we collaborated with Seattle Early Dance who did the actual foot stomping, but it opened a wonderful window into the elegant interweaving of song and dance that would otherwise have remained closed to us.

And now members of Master Chorus Eastside and I are deep into rehearsals for a marvelously imaginative production of a choreographed Handel’s Messiah—yes, choreographed!—with Ballet Bellevue: four performances the last weekend in December.

It’s a kind of opera/ballet, with dancers and chorus on the stage in a kaleidoscope of music and movement, and members of the Sammamish Symphony orchestra with me in the pit, all combined in a glorious explosion of music and dance.

I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of ballet companies in North America who have attempted such an event, and I don’t need all my fingers to do it.  And of those few, practically none have done a nearly complete Messiah with live orchestra and a chorus incorporated among the dancers.

It’s creative, it’s unique and it combines two lovely art forms, Baroque music and ballet, to tell the story of the oratorio through music and dance—a double whammy!

It is truly singing with your feet!

Dr. Linda Gingrich

Artistic Director and Conductor

Master Chorus Eastside