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I had an utterly, utterly wonderful time dancing at my favourite night in Cambridge, the Neon Moon Caberet and Burlesque Night, last month, and just recently the photos came in so I can show you! The night was prequeled with a week of frantically sewing costumes for performers - I made stuff for three performers, including myself - and I have had a wonderful time not sewing a thing since then. I ran a tribal hareem installation on one of the fancy pants bedrooms - we bedecked it in Morroccan glory to turn it into a beautiful performance space, and I danced to wonderful live drumming. There was also a performance on the teeniest stage and an extra sword performance, followed by a parade up to our installation room, throwing rose petals everywhere we went! Here we are dancing downstairs in the library
It was an amazing night and I had so much fun! Make sure you come to the next one, it's at Halloween! Links are here for the Neon Moon Burlesque and Cabaret Club. And a massive thanks to the awesome Andy Starwarz for all the great photos - you can check out his flicker stream, and all the awesome costumes everyone was wearing, here.
Check out my new video! This has been my winter choreography piece - I wanted to go for intense and happy rather than intense and moody, as it's so much easier to do generic moody Tribal Fusion and beautiful and happy is always much nicer. It's been performed at theatre shows, bellydance events, burlesque nights and restaurants all winter long. The music is Crystallise by Lindsay Stirling. Enjoy! Lets talk about Anasma's performances. For the Anasma World Fusion Showcase on Saturday 13th October, we have over half an hour of performance in total from our star headliner. Wowzer. That's a crazy opportunity to really see the reportoire of a international dancer and really immerse yourself in her performance style. I can tell you are super crazy excited about this already, and about to click over to the booking page right now... right? Now, I mentioned this to one of my circus friends and she said - Woah, isn't that a bit overkill? Won't that get boring? You know, if it was anyone else, I would agree. I get bored pretty easy. I think even watching a half hour of Mardi Love or Rachel Brice would get dull. But not Anasma. I have never seen a performer like her. I remember watching her at International Bellydance Congress a few years ago alongside such great artists as Randa Kamal, Fifi Abdou, Sadie, and all these other guys I've forgotten, and Anasma was the one who got a double standing ovation, Anasma was the one who completely blew everybody's minds, fusionistas and traditional bellydancers alike, and Anasma was the one everybody couldn't stop talking about the next day. She was in-freaking-credible. I saw her do another longer set in London a couple of years back - maybe half an hour, maybe less? I really don't know - I and everybody else completely lost track of time. She took us on this seamless story through dance, alternately heart-wrenching and hilarious, perfectly matched to the music, beautiful, and when it ended I realised I was sobbing like a crazy woman. So were almost half the audience I think - I'm not sure, because I was too busy trying to get a hold of myself. It was the most incredible and most beautiful thing I have ever seen on a stage. Or maybe anywhere.
More non-Anasma-ry about the World Fusion Showcase
We've got some amazing other performers supporting Anasma at the show: International performers Alexis Southall and Mari Pia with her Flamenco Band, Egyptian dancer Clair McGregor, Bharatnatyam dancer Apoovra, me and other acts to be confirmed The venue is stunning - a performance space in a newly converted church, with a stage directly under a beautiful stained glass window, right in the centre of Cambridge, and a simple five minute walk from the train station. You can book your seat here on the Showcase page!
belly dance company Bellyqueen, and creator of the interactive dance show "On Your Marks, Get Set, Go!" which has so far been presented in 3 countries. Phew! She's a busy lady. (I remember working with her Bellydance Hip Hop Fusion DVD every night for about three months - and I remember seeing ticking, popping, waving and specific Anasma combos from that DVD at every Hafla I went to for a while after the DVD came out!) So now we've established that she's very cool and well travelled, lets talk about her teaching style. Anyone who has seen one of her story telling performances can see that this is a lady who does not shy away from a good time. Her workshops are such fun, and that comes from her personality - Anasma is so warm and open, and ready to have a great time at every opportunity. She takes the time to do personal corrections in workshops if they are needed, and makes you want to try your hardest to be able to dance as cool as she does. She will always challenge you, give you new ideas to experiment with and stuff to take home and master. And now her content. Anasma takes fusion to a new level: she fuses many different art forms with skill and integrity, always creating something beautiful, awesome and seamless, where you can clearly see all the art forms used - no mean feat! It's so flippin' difficult to do that! Her skill as a creator of innovative and creative bellydance fusion is incredible, I believe in part because of her commitment to fully studying each style she is interested in before fusing it with bellydance, and partly because she is not clinging on to the label of bellydance so strongly it strangles her innovation - she frequently refers to herself as a World Fusion Dance artist rather than just a bellydancer. She doesn't create bellydance with a touch of hip hop, or with a touch of salsa - she creates a proper 50/50 blend, and she shows you how you can create that strong seamless blend in your bellydance too. (At the Intensive Weekend she will be teaching workshops in her signature style of Hip-Hop Bellydance Liquid Fusion (which rocks) and her Wushu/Bellydance fusion workshop, which is a martial arts/bellydance fusion workshop not to be missed!) And I always without fail leave an Anasma workshop feeling inspired, wanting to create, become more bendy ('cos she is like a plasticine woman) and be a Dancer. When I first started studying with Anasma I completely fell in love with her hip hop fusion dance style - somehow it was ladylike and elegant but very hip-hop at the same time. Her work in turn made me feel free to turn my dance into what I really wanted my dance to be - to not worry about labels, to experiment to blend influences, and to explore hip hop more fully and bring it into my dance practice. Seeing what Anasma was doing made me feel like I had permission to look outside the bellydance box for inspiration, get excited about it and bring it back and play with it.
Ah, daily dance practice. My old enemy.
I want to push myself to be the best dancer I can conceivably be - I want to move as effortlessly as Samantha Emanuel, be as jawstopping as Zoe Jakes and to capture my audience like Anasma. And to get somewhere near thise guys I need to practice every day, lots and lots and lots and lots. Self-discipline has always been my weakness, and I have always found it really hard to commit to a daily practice or routine of anything. After a visit to see Samantha Emanuel last week I've decided to up my game in the practice stakes and do the work needed to craft myself better. From usually putting in about an hour a day, I've upped my aim to one to three hours every single day, hitting the three hour mark as often as possible. I'm gonna be honest here, it's really flipping tough and I don't enjoy a lot of it. I get really easily distracted, I feel like I am getting nowhere, I get grumpy, I end up doing hours of yoga and no actual dancing, my arms get sore, I check Facebook every half hour and I get bored real quick. Dude, it's hard. And I figure that, if I really wanted to be a dancer, it would be easy. I've got a very loud internal voice who loves to beat me up about my practicing habits. I'm not doing enough! I'm not doing it properly! I need to do more! I mustn't get distracted! And the biggie - I should enjoy it, because dancers love dancing! And if I don't enjoy every second then obviously I am not supposed to be a dancer and I should give up, right? Erm. I think I figured something out the other day. Training and daily practice isn't meant to be fun all the time. It's not meant to be easy, either. It's training. It's supposed to be hard. If it was all rainbows and giggles, the world would be chockablock with Samanthas and Zoes and Anasmas all over the shop. When I was at university I remember going to the library reading every book related to chapel architecture, no matter how dull, boring or useless it turned out to be. I remember spending literally DAYS painstakingly building up a wash on a painting. That wasn't fun either. It was work. But I still loved art and architecture, even if I wasn't enamoured of what I was up to right then. I think my big challenge right now is getting myself out of the hobbyist, I-dance-for-fun! brain and into the professional I-show-up-for-work-every-day-no-matter-what brain. I've been reminding myself that just because you find something tough, it doesn't mean that it's not for you. It just means it's tough, and that's ok. Last week I completed 17 hours of dance practice, and I am damn proud of myself. Hurrah! Forward Ho! I've just returned from a weekend training with my hero, Suhaila Salimpour. I bang on about how awesome she is all the time, so I will not repeat myself (except to say I got to cop a feel yet again of her amazing glute contractions) but there is nothing like a little training with Suhaila to pull you apart, blow your mind, and be inspired to train harder and more passionately than ever before.
(She's the greatest! Ahem.) Anyway, a big focus in Suhaila's format is conditioning - every class she will do a 30-40 minute strengthening and conditioning warm up to prepare our bodies to be able to handle all the stuff we try to get it to do in the name of belly dance. Here is my confession - I used to hate squats, sit ups, push ups, yoga, pilates and all those dull, dull fitness-related exercises - I just wanted to dance. I didn't want to do stuff I felt was boring. Then I realised if I just spent 20-30 minutes working on my strength and flexibility every practice session I would be so much stronger, so much more able to train the way I wanted and more able to dance with grace and strength without cocking up or falling over mid poncy move. Since I've been adding conditioning to my practice (and I do, every day) I really feel that my dancing has transformed - my posture is better, my extentions are more elegant, my balance rocks, and I can stay one step ahead of my students in a choo-choo shimmy-athon. I feel much more of a dancer than I did before, as I know my body is strong like a dancer's should be. And on the plus side, my body feels stronger and fitter, more snakelike than ever and I love it. All my puppy chub has turned into muscle. Hurrah! True Story: I never liked doing dance conditioning until four years ago when doing forced conditioning in a thrice-weekly hip hop class, and I realised I could touch my toes for the first time in my life. It was a hallelujah moment. It was amazing. I told and showed everyone I met for about three weeks. I feel conditioning is an incredibly important part of dance, and something we don't often get in a regular belly dance class - I think (cynically) because we are scared that putting anything non-dancey in our class will make our students go running for the hills. Honestly, I still hate sit ups, because I suck at them. But the other stuff I love, as I have a goal in mind - strengthening my body so it's able to become the best dancer I can be. From September I will be introducing more conditioning into my Fusion class warm ups - just enough for us to work the core muscles we use in bellydance and for us to nudge our bodies into becoming lean, mean dancing machines. Hurrah!! I wanted to talk a little bit about critique in Class.
I'm really big on drilling proper technique and posture into my students, and as dancing is so different from our normal movement vocabulary it takes everybody a good while for their bodies to work out how to move in a new way and even longer to learn to not have to think about it. So in my classes, everyone gets lots of reminders and correction, so we all learn to use our bodies safely and remember to use right bits. It's really easy not to notice when you are performing a movement incorrectly because you are concentrating so hard on just making the movement happen. That's when you need a chum to put you back on track, and that's why I always try to teach in mirrored rooms - so we can keep an eye on what our bodies are up to. When we start out we are often terrified of the teacher correcting us, as that means we were doing it wrong! We like to think we can do everything we are taught right the first time without help and when someone corrects us we focus on this thought - we needed correcting because we were wrong. As a teacher, I am super aware that a lot of my students probably don't really like it when I correct them, as when I was a newbie I didn't either. I wanted to think I could do everything perfectly the first time, and I was really embarrassed when I couldn't! I think we automatically focus on the bad side of corrections - oh no, I'm not good enough! nooooo I did something wrong - rather than the good side - excellent, now I know exactly how to look fabulous doing that, look how much better I look in the mirror now! I personally think this comes from an emphasis in our culture to always focus on the past and the rubbish stuff first - what a rubbish summer, look at all the rain, I couldn't do this move last week either, obviously I will never be able to do it - and not the future and the good stuff - man, these plants must be loving this rain. I am so excited about being able to zill and dance at the same time at some point! I didn't used to like critique, but I hassle people for it now, because without input from other people who can see what you are doing, you will never grow as a dancer. Correction in classes and workshops doesn't bother me at all now. I'm so used to it, and I always ask my teachers to be extra mean to me. Performance correction is my thing. I need it, but I don't always like receiving it, and sometimes it takes me by surprise. For example, performing at a gig the other week, one of my performance/action buddies was in the audience, watching me, and when I came to see her after the show she goes, "Wanna know what you did wrong?" Gah! She made a couple of comments about facial expressions and I'll be honest, it's never very nice when you are being criticised, even by a friendly face, and I did not enjoy it. But since then, I have been hyper aware of what my face is up to when I dance, and I am fixing it so I will be a better performer. When I think about fixing my face now, it doesn't bother me - it feels like business, something to be aware of and to work on, emotionally neutral. I guess criticism is a bit like getting an immunising injection. When it happens, it's not very pleasant, but the after affects are great and make sure you stay safe/look great/don't get malaria. You get used to it if you go abroad a lot, and needles push some people's buttons more than others. In my classes, I critique and comment a lot because I can see how you can be a beautiful dancer, and I want to show you how. Dance isn't something we can learn on our own - we all need input on our learning journey, including me, you, Rachel Brice and every belly dance star in the world. So when I critique you in class, it's not a big deal - I'm not singling you out. I will be correcting all your classmates at some point too. Everyone needs help becoming the best dancer they can be. I recently returned from Berne in Switzerland, where I completed my General Skills with the creator of the ATS format, Carolena Nericcio!
I am super rubbish at writing about awesome experiences worth writing about (fail!) so here is a handy bullet point list! Five Awesome Things about my General Skills Workshop Experience
Five awesome things about Berne:
Completing my General Skills was amazing, and was the best birthday present to myself ever! 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. |
Demelza Fox
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