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PAIGE WHITLEY-BAUGUESS & THOMAS BAIRD

Baroque Dancers Paige Whitley-Bauguess and Thomas Baird have collaborated exclusively as dance partners for the past fourteen years. Together, they interpret, recreate, and perform Baroque theatre dance in venues all over the world. A critic described a recent performance 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). Highlights of their artistic collaboration include repeat concerts with the Little Orchestra Society at Lincoln Center and the Pacific Baroque Orchestra of Vancouver, their reconstruction of the courtly entertainment Le Mariage de la Grosse Cathos in Tokyo and Shizuoka, Japan, and Bailles y Danzas, a program they created especially for performances with Chatham Baroque. The duo met in 1986 as members of the New York Baroque Dance Company.

Paige Whitley-Bauguess is director of the Baroque Arts Project and Atlantic Dance Theatre in New Bern, NC, where she also directs two social dance troupes, the New Bern Dancing Assembly (youth) and the Craven Historical Dancers (adults). In 1999 she was awarded an NC Arts Council Choreographer's Fellowship to produce her first educational video, Introduction to Baroque Dance-Dance Types. A new DVD addressing Dance of the French Baroque Theatre and featuring the duo's collaborative work was released in July 2005. In addition to her artistic collaborations with Thomas, Paige is a frequent guest choreographer and director for the Opera Theatre Department at East Carolina University. She 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 is the co-director of Apollo's Banquet, a New York City-based performance ensemble of period dancers and musicians, which, along with the Rutgers University Dance Department, has co-sponsored the annual East Coast Baroque Dance Workshop since 1998. Mr. Baird is a regular guest lecturer at The Juilliard School and the Manhattan School of Music and is on the faculty of the Opera Division at the State University of New York at Purchase and the Mannes School of Music. Most recently, Thomas was the Period Movement Coach for the current Broadway production of O'Neill's A Touch of the Poet starring Gabriel Byrne and, in 2004, for the Lincoln Center Theater production of Sheridan's The Rivals. In 2005 he made his choreographic debut at the Metropolitan Opera providing period dances for the US premiere of Franco Alfano's Cyrano de Bergerac. This season he choreographed and performed period dances from the Baroque, Classical, Romantic, and Modern eras, for the New York Philharmonic’s Young People’s Concerts at Avery Fisher Hall.

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Dance of the French Baroque Theatre DVD

Magnolia Baroque Festival 2004
Photo by Norman Engel