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| Entry march |
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| The Prince and Princess (gosh I want his hat) |
So I've survived my first ever Karneval Sitzung and now I am going to attempt to describe it to you. I did manage to take some pictures (and a video) which will hopefully help but this is not going to be easy! Right, first my part of the evening. The orchestra's job is to provide music in between acts, to play a march for people to walk in and out to, to provide music as part of acts and to highlight jokes made by people on stage. There a Karneval group who organise it all and a Prince is picked from the group who oversees the whole thing. Then there's basically an MC and a variety of acts. The comedy acts I didn't really understand because they were often very "in" jokes - about the village, the surrounding villages, current events, Dutch people etc. Or they were making fun of the accent by speaking in their very strong dialect and then I understood about 40% of what was going on! Apparently very funny though!. Then there were the dance groups who dance specifically for Karneval. Their style is a mixture between aerobics and cheer-leading and is done either as individuals or in groups. The theme for the evening was fairy tales so there was a skit of Hansel and Gretel which involved a LOT of cross-dressing, also hilarious. Everything was very relaxed, the audience also came in costume and got up and walked around throughout the evening. Everyone drank large quantities of beer (I had lemonade) and sang along to all the songs. By midnight it had just turned into a big party and, I suspect, continued long after the thing actually finished. The evening was sort of a mixture between a dance show, stand-up comedy, concert, Last Night of the Proms and Gang Show I guess. I had more fun than I was expecting and I hope you enjoy the photos and the video. This is a video of the Dreamboyz http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nLX4_o1GuCA&feature=youtu.be
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| Solo dance |
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| Orchestra! |
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| Group dance to , you guessed it, Singing In The Rain! |
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| Hansel and Gretel... |
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| This was very good. These are people's feet which then had their own dance routine |
