Christmas and New Years Eve with Riverdance!

January 5, 2010

Laura Yanez, Soloist, Boyne Company

Happy New Year’s from the Boyne Company in California! I can’t believe it’s been another full week of holiday celebrations along with great shows in downtown San Jose. On Monday, we traveled for a mere hour and a half from Berkeley to San Jose, and checked into our hotel…across the street from the San Jose Center for Performing Arts where we were performing for the week! What a nice change from the bus rides into work the week prior. I love being so close to theatre because it gives me the option to do my noisy vocal warm-ups in my hotel room and allows us to sleep those extra few minutes on matinee days. Perfect for night owls like myself!

After Christmas, everyone seemed ready to relax for a few days and San Jose was a great town to do just that. The downtown area was quaint, with a few museums and movie theatres. I spent some time in the San Jose Museum of Art. It was the perfect sized museum to navigate on a relaxed day. My favorite part was a beautiful and provocative exhibit called “Variations on a Theme” containing mixed media art by 40 regionally based artists. I find that local art (and music and dance) gives unique insight to the places and people in each new city we visit. Others in our company spent their time visiting the historic Winchester Mystery House, one of San Jose’s landmarks. This mansion, which began construction in 1884, has stairways that lead to nothing but the ceiling and doors that lead to nowhere. There is a lot of mystique and legend surrounding the house and no pictures can be taken inside it…maybe to appease the ghosts?!

Of course, New Year’s Eve was on the horizon, and everyone set to making varied plans for the special night. As we took our bows, it was strange to think that we had just done the last show of the year…and the decade! Dancers Damian Murphy, Lisa Murphy and Ciara-Lee Jenkinson rented one of the conference rooms in the hotel and threw a great bash complete with strobe lights and a bubble machine. Myself, dancers Patrick Barnett, Liam Ayres and Meghan Lucey spent the evening with Patrick’s relatives in a local restaurant with a cover band, dancing and a delicious dessert selection. Others went to a local club, Fahrenheit, to ring in the New Year. Everyone had a great time swapping stories and photographs from the different nights out at work the next day.

On Sunday evening, members of the company went out to celebrate keyboardist Cathal Synnott’s and dancer Darren Maguire’s birthdays, as well as to say goodbye to dancer Jillian Farmer, tapper Sean Scott and Russian Dancer Andrij Cybyk. These three took time away from their families to fill in for other dancers over the holidays and were much appreciated! Next week, tapper Jason Bernard will be returning to the company after holidays with his family and his stint with the Bann Company in China. Speak to you next week when we head to the beachy and beautiful San Diego!

Signing off,

Laura