Dresden rocks for Haiti

Note: unpublished

A packed audience shook the Bärenzwinger to its arch Thursday night (Feb. 4, 2010) and raised over 3,000 euros for relief efforts in Haiti in the process.

“It was better than we expected,” Dr. Torsten König , a Romance Studies professor who helped organize the fundraiser, said. He estimated around 500 attendees.

The money was raised for arche noVa, a Dresden-based international aid organization.

König said he was surprised by the turnout: “It’s finals time.”

He sent an email on the 18^th of January appealing to the students and faculty of the Romance Studies program for help to organize a concert to raise funds for Haiti. “They speak French,” he said, expressing a sort of kinship between the French speakers in the Romance Studies and the French-speaking country of Haiti.

The students and faculty met on the following Thursday for the first and last time: they continued to organize the event, find bands, print flyers and get the word out all by email, phone and social networking. “An initiative from under,” he said. And all in two weeks.

The first band, Stilbruch, took the stage at 7:40, forty minutes after the presumed start-time. Stilbruch, an acoustic rock band from Dresden, played to a half-filled room until the singer asked the audience to move up and let in the people behind. After some shuffling, the room was once again packed.

At the midway point in the session the singer/bassist engaged the audience and tried to initiate hand clapping. The hand clapping quickly died. After the band played for just under an hour, the fiddle player, singer/bassist and drum player took bows and walked off the stage, waiting for the room to clear.

A presentation on Haiti came next, lasting for close to an hour and a half. After the presentation, a large portion of the attendees moved back into the warm Zwinger.

A Funk ‘n Soul band, named Staircase Club took the stage and played a foot-thumping Superstition. However, the packed audience wasn’t moved seemingly moved. The set moved on to “Get on the bus.” The band seemed warmed up and the first of the band’s rollicking solos appealed to the emotions of the audience. Although the audience still wasn’t moving, the band was playing loud, was playing hard, was not projecting music into ears but into bones.

Elisa Bartling, the singer, jumped into the third song without preamble, pacing her small piece of the stage. Even though the band was warmed up by the second song, it wasn’t until the third that the audience seemed to come to life, at least a little. Movement did occur in the crowd, although it wasn’t the dancing of later on in the session.

In the fifth song, the bass, a tall, almost goofy, aloof Jens Bellmann stayed in his spot next to the drummer, behind the trombone and trumpet and rocked the audience. Seemingly straight out of Minnesota, he played with a grin and reveled in his playing.

The drummer, Christian Lampe, rocked out with a drum solo in the sixth song, although the audience wasn’t really rocking along. He rocked his own little world, separate from the Haiti benefit concert, separate from his band.

By the end of the last song, the floor had thinned out but the people were dancing to music. The only thing amazing is that they weren’t dancing before.