New Bielau Dance Hall Reunion in the Works

For folks of a certain vintage who grew up around here, lots of weekends were spent at the old New Bielau Dance Hall south of Weimar..

The Hall burned to the ground in 1999, but the memories live on.

On Saturday, May 30, Erik McCowan of an upcoming TV series, The Texas Dance Hall Show, will host a New Bielau Dance Hall Reunion at the New Bielau Trinity Church Grounds and Fellowship Hall.

“I created a documentary, ‘Dance Hall Days,’ on German and Czech Texas dance halls that came out about 2018,” McCowan said. “And throughout my travels, every time I’d go to a new or different hall around Lavaca or Fayette County, really anywhere in the east of the Austin area out here, folks would be like, ‘Oh yeah, this dance hall’s cool, but did you ever go to New Bielau? Have you heard about New Bielau?” And it was just a legendary thing.”

McCowan, who lives in the Rosanky area, said he never got a chance to visit New Bielau before it burned down. While working on his documentary and now a new TV show, McCowan said he tried finding old video or photographs of the hall.

“As time went on, I never found anything,” he said.

But last September, while at a dance at Freyburg Hall, he ran into Tim Langham of the Texas Unlimited Band. The two of them struck up a conversation about New Bielau, and Langham mentioned that he had some VHS tapes of a Mothers Day dance with Texas Unlimited at New Bielau Hall.

“So I jumped at the opportunity,” McCowan said. “I said, ‘Well, let me get a hold of them, I’ll look at them and see if I can use them.’ I found a VHS player that still worked and popped it in here at home, and my goodness, the footage was great. It was the first time I’d seen anything live or photographed of New Bielau, and the inside of that hall was just loaded with people. I mean, it was wall-to-wall.”

Much of the video shows the band playing on stage. But during the breaks, the cameraman walks through the audience, capturing faces and reactions of teenagers looking into a camera.

“He just filmed people milling around the hall and waving and doing things kids did back in ‘91,” McCowan said. “All the fashion was there, all the bangs, all the ropers, all the colors of the early ‘90s, and it was just so vibrant and cool.”

McCowan digitized the tapes and thought he would present them on his TV show one day. But then he had a better idea: why not host a reunion of sorts, invite everyone to come and watch the video, and capture the reactions of some of the same people in the video 35 years later?

“We’re going to have an event where people can show up who used to go to New Bielau, who have a passion about New Bielau,” McCowan said.