Baroque Dance Workshop

Learn the basics of baroque dance with Lyra guest dancers, Paige Whitley-Bauguess and Thomas Baird in this fun participatory dance workshop.

ALL LEVELS WELCOME!

Contact info@lyrabaroque.org if you have questions.

BAROQUE DANCERS Paige Whitley-Bauguess and Thomas Baird interpret, recreate, and perform Baroque theatre dance in venues all over the world. A recent performance was described as "a window on the past...like being caught in a musical and theatrical time warp that reached my ears and eyes as a soft-focus vision of a quite spectacular moment in the history of western performance art," (The Georgia Straight, Vancouver, BC). 

Paige is co-director of the Baroque Arts Project in North Carolina and producer of two baroque dance DVDs featuring the duo’s work: Introduction to Baroque Dance-Dance Types and Dance of the French Baroque Theatre. In addition to her artistic collaborations with Thomas, Paige has stage directed baroque operas for UNC-Chapel Hill, Wingate University, Bloomington Early Music Festival, Magnolia Baroque Festival (with Baird), Peabody Conservatory, East Carolina University, and VOX in Charlotte, NC. She has served on the faculties of Twin Cities Early Music Festival Baroque Instrumental Program, Oberlin Baroque Performance Institute, Modern Early Music Institute, East Coast Baroque Dance Workshop at Rutgers University, Stanford Baroque Dance Workshop, and Tokyo Baroque Dance Society workshops. Whitley-Bauguess holds an MA in Dance History from the University of California at Riverside and a BFA in Ballet from the NC School of the Arts where she also attended high school.

Thomas Baird co-directs Apollo’s Banquet, a New York City-based dance and music ensemble, and from 1998 to 2008, directed the annual East Coast Baroque Dance Workshop at Rutgers University. Thomas lectures regularly at the Juilliard School, Mannes School of Music and the Manhattan School of Music, and teaches Movement Styles for Singers at the State University of New York–Purchase where he also choreographs the opera productions. He was the Period Movement Coach for the Broadway production of O’Neill’s A Touch of the Poet, and, at Lincoln Center Theatre, Sheridan’s The Rivals. In 2005, he provided period dances for the Metropolitan Opera’s Cyrano de Bergerac, revived in the 2016-17 Met season. From 2006-2016 Thomas choreographed and performed period dances for the New York Philharmonic’s Young People’s Concerts at Avery Fisher Hall. For twenty years, he has taught Baroque dance for the Tokyo Baroque Dance Society, and has also taught period dances for the London-based Dance Masters in Urbania, Italy.