Lazy Lent

I have the L in a big way at the moment. I don't like exercise at the best of times, and having been unwell means I pretty much have a carte blanche to coddle myself without anyone pointing out that I've been sat on my arse solidly for three weeks...

Such sedentism is good for neither my waistline nor my dance ability, so I've decided to give up chocolate for Lent, and take up three lots of exercise a week. This is slightly weird, since I am a dyed in the wool pagan, but I figure since I was too sick at New Year, this as close to a resolution as I'm going to get!

Class last night saw me discovering just how pathetically noodle-like my arms have become, so this evening I hit the swimming baths after work, and felt duly virtuous. The new public baths have only just opened, and they're pretty nice, so it was less of a chore than slogging up and down the old pool. They're also rather controversial, being heated by the crematorium next door. You can decide for yourselves whether this is recycling taken to its logical extreme, or pearl-clutchingly offensive!

You Might Need Some Body

I still haven't summoned up the balls to tackle the horrific mess that is my sewing room, but I did brave the carnage for long enough to rescue my latest project, the blue baladi dress.

I'd been pondering for a while how I was going to decorate this, as I had a load of turqupise blue satin to play with, and didn't fancy making appliques or cut-outs. Then I was inspired by Shira's glorious burgundy/rose dress, but was a bit stymied by the prospect of trying to sew non-stretch satin onto very, very stretchy velvet.

Clearly the solution was to buy a dress mannequin off eBay for a cost considerably higher than all the costumes I've made so far put together (which admittedly says more about my penchent for recycling and cheapness than the cost of the dummy). I set it up in the living room when it arrived, much to the horror of the dog, who first growled at it, then barked, then tried to pee up it and was summarily ejected into the garden.

I've redraped and ruched the satin since this shot, but it gives some idea of how I wanted to arrange the swirl of fabric. It's actually quite a flattering design for an apple shape like me, as it makes me look like I have a waist (if you look closely you can see how I had to pad the mannequin with a white towel to get it to match my waist measurements!).

The satin is the bottom six inches of a cocktail frock that didn;t fit, and as it was already beaded, has saved me hours of time and effort. I've gathered it up about every seven inches or so, and I'll add some accents of fringe under each gather. The bra is still in progress- I have some of the beaded material left over so I'll gather it in the same way across the top of the cups. I'm not going to go over board with the deco on this outfit as I don't want to swamp it in sparkle. I feel like the material should be the main feature, and any embellishment should just help show it off.

New Year, New Start

Classes start tomorrow, and I'm looking forward to seeing everyone and beginning the arduous process of getting fit and flexible again. I did little or no dancing over the Christmas period, and lost a lot of weight, so I'm weak as a kitten. We're doing veil work this year, so I fully expect to have aching arms and shoulder for a few weeks until I adjust.

I'm dropping my Thursday classes (cabaret and advanced tribal) this term. It's a 70 mile round trip, and I get home well after 10pm, and that's really not conducive to my recovery. I'll miss dancing with the tribal girls, but hopefully come summer term I'll be back with them.

Sewing projects are currently on hold because my beloved husband had a massive clearout over New Year while I was away. The corner of the living room where I kept my 'TV sewing' now looks like this, with a couple of forlorn sequins stuck in the carpet.

My sewing table in my craft room, however, looks like this:



The blue fabric in the middle of the pile is my velvet baladi dress, still with the pins and a needle in it, and screwed up with two delicate lace hipscarves. The yellow bit at the top is the handle of a bag containing 100000000 scraps of fabric for a rags and tatters skirt, but sadly Captain Clever turned the bag upside down so the scraps are everywhere. Underneath all that is two teatowels, a selection of books from the downstairs bookcase, three foil platters, a large box for carrying cupcakes, the dog's old collar, the manual for the food mixer and a bottle of men's aftershave. Somewhere behind all this crap you can just see my poor, put-upon sewing machine Fritz, looking distinctly unimpressed by the mess!

I Ate'nt Dead

Holy Smoke, has it really been going on for a month since I last posted? It doesn't seem that long, but I guess a lot of things have happened since then.

Namely, I got sick. In the head. I've suffered depression before (and it was one of the things that led me to belly dance as a way of making myself feel good), but this latest crisis has been a particularly bad one, and my recovery is going to be a slow one. For a week or two, dance fell off my radar, but it's something that brings me a lot of joy, so I've been working hard to stay connected.

That paid off last night, when I got back onstage. I danced a lovely veil piece with my teacher's student troupe, and it felt great to be up there and dancing again. I was wondering if stage fright was going to be an issue, but all I felt was joy and excitement at performing!

I think that will be the last outing for this costume in its current form though- straight, skinny belts are just not a good look on apple-bodied chicks, and the bra is now a good two sizes too big and I've lost my chicken fillets!

Anyway, that was the last hafla before Christmas, so now it's back to present wrapping, packing to visit family, and deciding which abandoned sewing project needs reviving.

I hope everyone out there in the blogosphere has a very merry festivity of choice!

Ulp

So you know how I was being all self-congratulatory and shit in my last post about finally being up on stage with my teacher's tribal (my brain insists on typing that as tribble, btw) troupe?

Well, this weekend, the Tribble Dictator wants us to repeat this piece. With zills.

Yeah. About that.

I have chronic RSI in both wrists, a sense of rhythm comparable to that of an epileptic one-legged wombat, and a lack of coordination that makes said wombat look like a prima ballerina. This is not going to go well.

Of course, I could always say no, but where would be the fun in that? Besides, this performance is by way of being a spot of one-upmanship, as another local tribal group (with whom I used to study) recently performed with zills but didn't actually play them. If I don't join in and pull it off, we don't get the sense of smug holier than thou-ness which is an integral part of the sisterhood of dance :)

So this last week I have been drilling the ever-loving shit out of my zills, at home with mufflers on, on the wasteland outside the office without mufflers (and scaring every pigeon in South Birmingham) and driving my husband mad in bed (not in a good way) by singing baladi rhythm whilst mentally rehearsing the piece.

Tribal Debut

I think I've mentioned before my difficulties in memorising tribal combos, and this difficulty became considerably more pressing when my teacher asked if I wanted to join her troupe on stage for Infusion Emporium last weekend.

To help you put this in perspective, four years ago I remember sitting in the audience at my first ever hafla, watching Khalgani dancing, and thinking how much I wanted to dance like them. To end up performing with them and their sister troupe, Prana, was literally a dream come true... or a nightmare, if I couldn't get my brain and my hips in the same gear.

I also needed a costume in a hurry. My first attempt at a tribal bra ended in ignominious disaster and a lot of safety pins, so I was determined to do better this time!

As you would expect for an inveterate hoarder, I had a whole world of fun collecting bits and bobs to sew onto it, including keys from an old necklace, a pentacle, a little silver spider (to ward off stage fright), and about 50 old coins, which an obliging colleague identified as a mix of Pakistani, Indian, Irani and Afghan, and the oldest being from 1948. Probably my favourite pieces though are the turquoise roundels, which started life as earrings from Primark (50p a pair!)

Spiders or no, I had epic stage fright on the night; fortunately we were on int he first half, so I didn't get to brick it for too long before we were up. As far as i can recall, I didn't balls up too much, although there are a few embarrassing photos of me with my arms in completely different positions to the rest of the troupe!

As you see, my arms definitely need some work, and I'm wearing far too few clothes to be able to pass as a proper tribal dancer, but I'm definitely on my way! 

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!

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!

Burlesque Starlet

Today saw me tottering off (not literally, because I don't do heels) to the darkest depths of Leicestershire for the second Showgirl School run by the lovely ladies at Kookie Kaftan. It was, as ever, fantastic fun, and left me feeling like a true glamour puss!

We started off with a fabulously saucy strip tease choreography, during which we learnt the intricacies of removing button-up tops and long skirts, and also managed to throw bits of lingerie all over the hall. As usual, there was no actual nudity involved, but I think I'd feel less silly if there was- something about wearing frilly knickers over leggings makes me feel like a complete plum.

Then came afternoon tea, with an array of goodies that have absolutely no place on Slimming World (I figured the two hours of dancing cancelled them out), and then the bit I was really looking forward to- the fascinator workshop.

I had a lot of fun, as you can probably tell from the picture above. Our teacher for the day, Lynne, had brought an abundance of random haberdashery for us, and we had a positive orgy of hotfixing, glue gunning and generally indulging our girly sides. I'm totally hooked on hat making, ad will definitely be trying it again.

Finally we had a lesson on vintage hairstyles. I've already tried my hand at a couple, but it was really useful to get tips in person, especially as Lynne, like me, has quite long hair, and most of the tutorials online are aimed at people with shoulder length hair. I spent most of the session wrangling with the pompadour, or false fringe, which is a look I've always coveted but didn't have the first clue how to achieve. I ended up rolling it around a mascara brush to get the shape right, but once it was up there it stayed in place for nearly nine hours (I found 12 kirby grips in it when I took it out).

It was a fabulous day, and I left brimming with new ideas and feeling totally inspired to dance and create. Which, frankly, is a great way to end any workshop!

During the day I also picked up a copy of a new BD magazine - Majency, which looks pretty awesome. It includes submissions from several dancers I know, including Lynne herself, and appears to cover the whole spectrum of belly dance in the UK without prejudice- cabaret, folkloric, tribal and fusion all get covered. Can't wait until I get a quiet moment to read it myself!

New Project!

I had no intention of starting a new project. I have two finished costumes still in need of alterations and repairs, a peacock bra that's been on hold for months, a tribal bra that needs reworking, and a new troupe choreography to write, learn, costume and perform by early October.

I DO NOT NEED ANOTHER PROJECT!

I guess no one told the universe this, because this sparkly blue evening gown was lurking on the rack of my favourite charity shop, just waiting for someone to see past the torn lining and mumsy neckline and discover the baladi-tastic beauty beneath.

I hate mumsy necklines. Can you tell? Also for some reason the only costume bra I could find was leopardprint!

This will be my first shot at a dress, as the glitterdot monstrosity has been borrowed by about half the local dance community and I daren't take a pair of scissors to it until the hafla season is over.

Current plans involve adding some cap sleeves (made from the scraps I cut out of the bust) to try and balance out the silhouette, then throwing a load of hotfix crystals, sequins and beads at it, and seeing what sticks. Sadly there are not enough scraps to cover a bra, so I'm thinking turquoise satin and lots of dark blue trimmings, to pick up the glittery streaks in the dress.