I'm doing an advanced dancer course with Charlotte Desorgher in London at the moment. I haven't been in regular classes for quite a while, and it's great being back into learning.
We've been working on grace and on a concept I'd heard of before but never really integrated into my brain - every second of every movement being beautiful.
Something a friend posted on Facebook this week really illustrated this for me.

If you pause this at any second, whatever the chap in this is doing it looks beautiful. Every second. From this I also learned that when I get re-incarnated, I am going to be a male ballet dancer because I want to be mega muscly like him and do that crazy jumping scissor kick thing.
Checking back on my own grace and gorgeous:graceless ratio, a great way I've found is to have a snap-happy person photo you as you perform, and then you can measure the ratio of graceful dancer to gremlin/limp zombie arms/grimacey dancer shots you have at the end. I've checked mine. Owch.
So this week in my choreographing I am really working on the details: body positioning, finishing my arms with beautiful fingers, shoulders and arm paths, so I can start my journey of being graceful all over rather than being graceful generally.
It sucks watching yourself on video or looking at the non-best photos of you performing - I really really don't like watching myself on video, blegh - but since we are all super critical of ourselves, we generally can find our biggest weaknesses and the areas that we need to fix to make ourselves better dancers. Like a lot of dancers, I need to keep working on my shoulders and my insane possessed left hand, who always likes to move around and join in with everything else I am doing.
I think this concept and awareness of grace is super important and will make a huge difference to my dance. Maybe one day I'll be good enough to don some near-invisible pants like the chappy in the video and prove my grace to the world.

Last Saturday, my ATS troupe Imramma Tribal hosted Akula Tribal for an afternoon of workshops and Tribal Party in the evening.

These workshops poured rocket fuel on my love of ATS belly dance, and now I am SUPER excited about training with Carolena Nericcio, the creator of the dance, later this year! Wahoo!

Maxine and Christine from Akula are such beautiful dancers, and watching them execute each move so gracefully was wonderful. We refined our basic movement vocabulary, learned a few new variations (our teacher was old school ATS I think and Akula are always travelling to keep up with what Fat Chance are up to) and did a lot of drilling. And most importantly, zilling with everything! I love zills, love 'em love 'em love 'em, and the only way you get better is practicing as much as possible. Zills with everything please! 

The evening Hafla was such great fun - I got to dance with old and new friends, with zills and zills and zills again, try my hand at drumming, chat with loads of lovely people and have a great time dancing away to fab music, doing a little bit of improv performance and watching others performing too.

I hope we are able to put on another event like it in the near future as it was so so much fun! ATS seems to bring people together like no other form of belly dance, and it's absolutely gorgeous to see everyone able to dance and have fun with people they have never met before.

This video has been making the rounds on facebook - it's flipping gorgeous. I haven't got "slow" down yet, so for the last week I've been practicing my hand ripples whenever I remember - on the bus, waiting for the printer to work, in the shower.

The more I see of Slovenian dancer Manca Pavli the more I like her.

As promised, Intermediate students, here is a link to the Gothic Fusion Choreography video for you guys to practice to. And beginners, you can get a sneaky peek of what the intermediates are up to. 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S9AFYz37BmA

Browsing through the archives on the Gilded Serpent (it's a bit like a online belly dance magazine) I found an article that made me think. (I can't find it again, dammit, but I remember!) It was talking about the Bellydance giving you self confidence.

I've heard that old chestnut being bandied around loads of times, but I really don't think my involvement in belly dance has personally affected my self esteem in any particular way. I was never a shy and retiring kiddywink - pre bellydance, I was usually the lead in my youth theatre group, so I've always been quite happy being the centre of attention. Mmmm delicious attention. I always quite liked my body, so I haven't had any huge bellydance body-confidence adventures either. 

Bellydance hasn't really affect my self confidence much at all. Honestly, my brain uses my bellydance skills and aspirations as a way to destroy my self confidence and kick myself in the face for not measuring up to my brain's standard. 

So no bellydance-changed-my-life self-confidence stories here.

The article in the Gilded Serpent talked about self esteem and performance, focused on masks in bellydance - I remember it mentioning the gothic fusion mask in particular. 

I have always found it interesting that my students seem to be most comfy improving and performing gothic fusion bellydance rather than regular fusion bellydance. The same peeps who look a bit unsure and suspicious when asked to improv bellydance turn into scary intense confident vampires as soon as the word Gothic is mentioned. 

I guess it's all to do with having a stage persona - here on this stage, I am not me, I am SexyGothRa therefore I am confident. And I guess when you perform "normal" tribal fusion, it's just you and yourself, so it is scarier. 

With the Gothic fusion side of things, even if you forget the moves, you have this persona to fill up the space. I guess with regular fusion, there is no obvious persona to fill the space with, and confidence seems to come after really internalising the moves.

Or in my case with really awesome loud music.

The article spoke of how you are compelled to watch the dancer who is totally at home in her own skin, who is onstage with no self-conciousness and nothing holding her back. And I agree. I think it seems to be easier to reach this when we have some sort of persona to dance around, but I am trying to figure out how to make dancing just with yourself more accessible and less scary. I have a suspicion it's just lots and lots of practice.  

Here is a video of me performing Silver Poetry at Majma Bellydance Festival earlier this year. I have a love/hate relationship with my own videos, but having realised that the only stuff of me on YouTube is more than a year old (and out of date!) it's time to woman up and put some stuff into the internets.

Silver Poetry is a song by Digitonal, a glorious band my boyfriend introduced me to. I wanted to choreograph something to this song a year before this was filmed, however, it's such a touching and emotional piece of music I wussed out. I'm not a very touching or emotional person, and any touching- or emotional-ness is pretty hush-hush and ssssshhh so creating a choreography to this song was pretty scary for me.
I saw Anasma perform her tear-jerkingly beautiful piece A Life of Love five months before this performance, just after I had begun choreographing this piece, and her dance chased away all my wussy demons. My new mission was to make people cry with my dancing too.
I performed this piece three times over that winter, though I got no actual tears (dammit!!) I got a whole bunch of people close-to-tears, which I think is more than good enough for my first attempt. 

The other weekend was Ed Adams weekend. How excited was I? Very. 
The workshops were being organised by my boyfriend Guy so Ed was staying at our house. You will be surprised to hear I cooked dinner (I'm a bit allergic to kitchens, apparantly a lot of us active dance ladies are) and that it was DELICIOUS. Nut roast, yum!

He taught workshops in Body Awareness, Slow motion, Waving and Contact Juggling. My favourites were the Slow Motion and Waving ones. In slow motion, after choosing a foolishly dynamic pose, Ed made me stay in it unmoving for 15 minutes. My thighs were vibrating by the end of it, and trying to do slow stuff the rest of the workshop often set my crazy tired leg vibrations off. 

Doing stuff really slowly is my favourite - as my ATS chums can verify. We also brushed up on some video editing techniques, like rewinding, looping and fast forwarding. A whole chunk of stuff that I have always, always wanted to learn.

The waving workshop was really different from the way I had been taught waves. I'd initially been exposed to waving through bellydancers teaching it and breaking down the technique, but Ed was having none of that. We we worked with up, circles travelling through the body and waves controlling us, rather than us telling the waves and circles what to do. It was totally different to what I had learnt before and I loved it. 

I really learnt so much from this weekend, and it was great fun hanging out with Ed - the dude literally practices non stop all the time. So right now I'm looking out for a track I can use so I can combine all this precious knowledge with some awesome belly dance. Fzzham!!

Yesterday was the first class of my winter 10 week Intermediate Tribal Fusion course, and I just wanted to say THANK YOU to everyone who came along: it felt like coming back home, and I STILL have a massive grin on my face today! Oh I have missed teaching! It was so great saying hello to old students and meeting new students, being back in the studio teaching again, and looking round at the start of class to see all of you, waiting, ready to have your ass kicked... :D

As our class is a bit more mixed level now, I'll be trying to keep the classes more accessible than our previous intermediate classes (so hopefully no more deathly difficult layering, but class veterans will know I am not the best at keeping things easy!) but if you want me to up the game for you, just let me know.

See you all again next week, and bring your shimmies!