Andrea Baumann

Andrea studied violin from early childhood and for over 10 years at the Conservatory in Karlsruhe and Freiburg. She came from a family of musicians and painters, and this led her to choose an artistic education. After leaving school, she worked as a set assistant for a few years in various theatres, and was also heavily involved in painting, eastern philosophies and yoga. She completed her studies at the Academy of Visual Arts in Karlsruhe with a dissertation on the meaning of figure and space in the sacred art of the middle ages and the modern period. She first came to take up dance after a remark by her teacher on her study drawings of dancers in motion. She started studying movement and dance: modern dance, aikido and dances of the East, particularly Iran and Egypt. She completed teacher training for bodywork and eastern dance forms in Germany.

Andrea started teaching dance in 1990, opening her own studio four years later. Inspired by films of dancers from Egypt between the 1940s and 70s, she set out to find teachers from the land of origin, and as a result became a pupil of Mahmoud Reda for a time. During this period, she also saw a video of Suraya Hilal’s work, Return of the Spirit, and was so impressed by the power and beauty of this dance form that she took the first opportunity she could to attend a workshop. By working with Suraya, she gained a whole new approach to the quality of movements and to dance itself, and a deeper understanding of the music and cultural background. The longer she studied with Suraya, the greater her conviction became that this dance was her chosen path.

In 2000, Andrea was invited by Suraya to take part in the professional course, which she has attended regularly since. This gave her the opportunity to study the Hilal Dance concepts in depth. For Andrea, this work by Suraya is a continuous artistic process that continues to feed ones own creativity. Working with the Hilal Dance concepts means coming face to face with another culture, as Hilal Dance has its roots in Egypt, but the concepts also embrace the universal language of the body as a finely tuned instrument – pure movement, gestures in space, expression and emotion, images.

Andrea has been using the Hilal Dance concepts in her teaching for a number of years now, and from time to time she invites licensed guest teachers to give workshops in her area and to continue enriching the training of her students.