On 12 August, I loaded up my car with feathers, masks, props, and costume accessories, and headed to the Royal Palace in Gödöllő, Hungary, for a very exciting project as part of the Music Palace Festival: stage-directing a talented group of young singers in Purcell’s The Fairy Queen in the palace’s small baroque theatre of the palace, with historical sets and machinery! Members of Ensemble Marquise hosted the festival and provided masterclasses for young musicians, and I joined them in a recital as well, with cantatas and arias by Strozzi and Purcell. Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, around which Purcell’s Restoration Spectacular is composed, was Queen Sisi’s favourite (in Hungary, she was Queen), and she even used Titania as a pen name. So it seemed highly appropriate to be perfoming The Fairy Queen in her theatre, and we built some references to Sisi into Titania’s costume! Abdominal surgery a few weeks earlier had made me cautious about committing to such energetic endeavours, but it seemed a shame not to dance the famous chaconne in the final scene…feeling much stronger towards the end of the week, I decided to put in an adaptation of Feuillet’s woman’s choreography for the Chaconne de Phaëton, which maps quite well onto Purcell’s music, and is an old favourite of mine.