Happy Halloween, Samhain, All Hallows Eve, and Sweetie Fest to all those that celebrate it, and my most profound sympathies on those who don't and are missing out on my favourite time of year!
Thursday, 27 October 2011
Happy Halloween!
Teacher is on holiday this week, so my dancing has been pretty much limited to a few glute drills and this 'work of art' created during my Girl Guide group's annual pumpkin carving and chocolate fest.
I kind of wish I'd left out the eyes, as 'ninja belly dance mexican wrestler assassins' was NOT the look I was aiming for, but I had fun carving it, and I liked it enough that I signed the back!
Happy Halloween, Samhain, All Hallows Eve, and Sweetie Fest to all those that celebrate it, and my most profound sympathies on those who don't and are missing out on my favourite time of year!
Happy Halloween, Samhain, All Hallows Eve, and Sweetie Fest to all those that celebrate it, and my most profound sympathies on those who don't and are missing out on my favourite time of year!
Friday, 14 October 2011
Still kicking
I'm not dead, just dead tired!
By mutual agreement, my dance troupe are taking a break from performing together; we've all got a lot going on at the moment (one getting married in two weeks and the other two of us are her matrons d'honneur) and practising and performing was becoming a chore rather than a joy.
Technically this should mean I have much more time to dedicate to my own personal dance journey. Real life, however, has other ideas, and although I'm managing my three classes a week, time and energy for private practice has gone for a burton.
In my Tribal advanced class, I'm finally getting to grips with the group's combos. My teacher does a hybrid of various ATS styles, so moves get borrowed, plundered or straight up invented from all sorts of sources (I even have faint hopes that one of mine may one day make the repertoire. The Air-Hostess turn, you saw it here first!)
My learning style is intensely word based, so it's not enough for me to drill complicated sequences of moves (especially when, being improv, they have no musical phrase attached to jog my brain) into my muscle memory. It's taken a while for my teacher to understand that I need to sit out and write the move down while watching others dance it if I'm to have any hope of remembering it. I think she got the point after she and I spent a whole half hour drilling a two person move, only for me to have forgotten it again by the end of class!
I now have a sheaf of scruffy notes, which are slowly being transferred into a notebook full of neatly written out combos. I have been spending quiet periods at work adding in descriptive diagrams and arm positions (and have discovered my utter inability to draw profiles. All the side-facing dancers in my notebook look like Neanderthals!
By mutual agreement, my dance troupe are taking a break from performing together; we've all got a lot going on at the moment (one getting married in two weeks and the other two of us are her matrons d'honneur) and practising and performing was becoming a chore rather than a joy.
Technically this should mean I have much more time to dedicate to my own personal dance journey. Real life, however, has other ideas, and although I'm managing my three classes a week, time and energy for private practice has gone for a burton.
In my Tribal advanced class, I'm finally getting to grips with the group's combos. My teacher does a hybrid of various ATS styles, so moves get borrowed, plundered or straight up invented from all sorts of sources (I even have faint hopes that one of mine may one day make the repertoire. The Air-Hostess turn, you saw it here first!)
My learning style is intensely word based, so it's not enough for me to drill complicated sequences of moves (especially when, being improv, they have no musical phrase attached to jog my brain) into my muscle memory. It's taken a while for my teacher to understand that I need to sit out and write the move down while watching others dance it if I'm to have any hope of remembering it. I think she got the point after she and I spent a whole half hour drilling a two person move, only for me to have forgotten it again by the end of class!
I now have a sheaf of scruffy notes, which are slowly being transferred into a notebook full of neatly written out combos. I have been spending quiet periods at work adding in descriptive diagrams and arm positions (and have discovered my utter inability to draw profiles. All the side-facing dancers in my notebook look like Neanderthals!
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