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.
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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! My ATS Tribal ladies and myself popped along to a local event called Fulbourn Day of Dance a couple of weeks ago, to watch the dancers go. There were two local bellydance groups (we are like a plague - we're everywhere) some kickass teens doing irish dancing, some very stoic scottish dancers, morris dancers and a 45 minute flamenco set with live flamenco guitars. !
Mouth gapes, tounge hits the floor. Wow. One of my Tribal ladies is an ex flamenco student, so after seeing the dancers at it and thinking "holy frijimole I need to learn this" she introduced me to her teachers who invited us to one of a series of monthly Flamenco workshops held with a dude called Felipe de Algeciras who pops over from Spain once a month to tour our fine English cities teaching Flamenco. I was totally up for that. I attended a beginner and a technique class. I was the only person there who had never done flamenco before, so I was the one Felipe wanted answers from when he asked stuff. Let me tell you, Flamenco 12-beats-to-a-bar compass is bloody confusing! I had my best Suhaila counting face on. But oh, it was incredible. Don't ask me exactly what I learned as I couldn't pick out particular names with Felipe's super Spanish accent and my absent knowledge of spanish, but it was gorgeous, it was strong, it was bad ass and it was stampy. I managed to keep up for both classes (thanks to my well trained choreography sponge brain) and I was invited to go along to Mari-Pia's classes, a truly lovely lady who was the flamenco dancer I could not keep my eyes off at the Day of Dance. I was gushing about how wonderful the workshops were all night to poor Guy, who was grumpy that he'd been waiting 20 minutes in the car for me because classes had run late. I've decided so far that Flamenco is like proud-horses/hungry tarantula dancing. I think Felipe looked a lot like an expensive pony when he was doing his moves. In a good way. I'm not really keen on photoshoots, I feel pretty awkward in front of cameras. My eyebrow go higher and higher and I look less and less impressed with every shot. It's just how it goes. So left to my own devices, I will always put off organising a photoshoot for myself, no matter how much I need one. I'd be a rubbish movie star for that reason.
I work with a performance agency called WildFire Productions, and they invited me to participate in a performer photoshoot over the bank holiday weekend. Woohoo! I really needed some tribal shots, as bar some dodgy flash-heavy pasty performance shots, I am tribal photo free. I feel a bit silly being a Tribal Fusion dancer and running Tribal Fusion classes and having not one tribal photo of myself on my website. I am a Tribal Fusion dancer, honest! The photoshoot was with Amelia Aventine, a great Cambridge based photographer, at her home studio. We did some cool egyptian-costume-with-veil shots and some awesome tribal ones. Even more awesome were the other performers being photographed - the Incredible Bendini, a contact juggler and contortionist who dresses like a victorian gentleman and introduced me to sock suspenders, and Frankie Dubery, stilt walker, trapeze artist and the founder of WildFire who owns the highest, glitteriest, greenest shoes known to humankind. Shoes, I Covet Thee. And of course my boyfriend Guy, the fire-spinning ninja, was mooching around too, eating cheesecake and choosing photos for me, as I tend to look at my own and go Blech! so obviously I am not a sensible judge of my photos. I am really looking forward to getting my hands on the photos we took, and looking at more work by Amelia. She has this beautiful picture of a girl in a flock of origami cranes on her website. Could I link that with belly dance somehow, so I can have one? Is there a way? Please? |
Demelza Fox
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