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.

The Comedown

This weekend was absolutely crammed with dancing, starting with a duet on Friday evening at a hafla organised by BAMBA, then another duet and a solo performance on Saturday at a hafla planned and executed with military precision by my good friend and troupemate C, then a two hour intensive class.

I had little or no sleep all weekend, too much pop (soda) and not enough food, bought a frightening amount of stuff, worked muscles I didn't know I had, and achieved some seriously startling hairstyles (protoype below, I don't have any pictures from the weekend yet)

All in all, it was a fabulous, decadent weekend, in which everything else got subsumed by sparkles, sweat and the sheer joy of spending time doing something I love.

It came as a bit of a blow this morning then to realise that I had to unwind the victory rolls, take off the red nail varnish and put Lilith back in her box in favour of my much less interesting (but far more fiscally sound) persona, whose name is that on my birth certificate. Back to typing up reports, unjamming the photocopier, emptying the dishwasher and taking out the bins. Booring.

Costume!

Finally finished the flapper costume, and am tolerably pleased with it.

Bra still needs stuffing and I have to make a headband to match, but it's definitely wearable. I've got a gold overskirt to wear with it if i feel I need a little more coverage (the skirt is very clinging and I'm worried about VPL), and a gold stole to wave around dramatically before dumping it mid shimmy.

Both choreographies appear to be locked in my head, but of course I'll practise a few more times before I perform on Friday and Saturday.

I don't know about other dancers, but I often do 'meditation rehearsals', normally during quiet periods at work, where I put on the music and mentally dance along. This backfired on me in a big way last week, I put my music on and closed my eyes to better envisage the moves, then opened them again to find my MP3 player two songs further on and my colleague sniggering at me!

ohshit

Popped round to my wounded friend C's house this evening and had a quick run through of the duet. It's a Gothic fusion piece, done to a Siouxsie and the Banshees track- Cities in Dust.

There was, naturally, a good deal of confusion as C tried to dance the other half of the duet with me without actually doing any dancing, whilst reading out instructions for me. Much bumping of elbows and smacking of light fittings ensued, and her cats hid under the sofa.

This is only the second time I've rehearsed this dance with another human being, and by hell it showed. There's a sequence at the end that I am clearly going to have to rehearse daily if I'm ever to remember it, and I haven't got many days left- we perform on 2nd September.

The costume is also causing headaches- we're wearing ruched overskirts that must have looked divine on slender R and hourglass C, but look heinous stretched over my wobbly belly. Still pondering a solution to that one.

Fortunately my own solo is going a little more smoothly. The costume should be finished tomorrow, and I'll post up on-body pics. The choreo is beginning to flow nicely, though I still have blank spots in the middle. Again, need to drill it daily, and i'm running out of days.

Also I have been offered the chance to dance on the same night in my teacher's student cabaret troupe, and also the ITS troupe. Naturally I said no. Even if I could hold four choreos in my head and scare up a tribal costume in two weeks, no audience needs to see me four times in one evening!

Where has the year gone?

It can't possibly be half way through August already, can it? This year seems to have flown by, even though I have been cramming as much dancing into it as possible. I've taken more workshops this year than in the first three years of my dance career put together!

I'm still cracking on with the summer intensive held by my teacher. Although the level of the class is pitched a little high for me in terms of fitness, I'm still getting a lot out of it, but I'm always the first to crack during drills or strenuous warmups. It gets me down sometimes, and I have to remind myself that the rest of the participants are not carrying around an extra six stone of Lilith!

I caught up with the rest of my troupe, Women of Mass Distraction, last week, and discovered that one of them is off dancing altogether at the moemnt due to a seriously crocked back. As a result, I'm standing in for her at the next hafla, doing a duet with our third member.

Gods only know how this is going to work out. Mashallah I already know the music, but those two planned this piece basically on their own, and I have only a sheet of paper to work off as the other troupe member is on holiday.
I also have to make a costume for it, as I won't fit in the invalid's costume bra and skirt :( Disaster looms like a iceberg!

In between panicking over duets and aching from class, I'm also trying to get my solo ready for early September. The piece is choreographed, but I'm short on space to practise it. Suspect I may end uop over the park with my headphones on, and to hell with the funny looks I get. Fortunately the costume is all but finished- pictures to come when I get more than ten minutes to myself!

Summer Workshops are run by Sadists

This, FYI, is the face and body of a broken woman!

I signed up for my teacher's tribal fusion course this summer, as our cabaret and ITS classes stop over the school holidays. I expected a certain degree of pain from a two hour workshop, but this practically had me weeping on the floor.

Dawn began by asking each of us what we wanted to get out of the course, and making notes. The committed fusionistas had a long list of specifics, magpies like myself were more general. I knew I wanted to hone my technique, expand my range of movement and gain tighter control over muscles.

Having got all that down, she then took us through a gruelling warmup, culminating in about 20 years of arm rotations (this is only a slight exaggeration) and a further six months of Planking (yoga, not internet meme).

We worked the upper body, and we drilled it on the most basic level, opening out the muscles and sticking to the simplest of moves, but trying to perfect them. For added impetus, Dawn filmed us, so we could watch ourselves later and spot any mistakes. I'm not a fan of seeing myself on film, but it worked- I can see just how much I'm holding back on moves (eg rib slides) when I should be pushing them to their full extent.

We finished up with belly rolls and today it hurts to laugh. I drilled that forward roll (my bugbear) solid for ten minutes, and I'm feeling the effects, but i also have a nice smooth roll, and an intimate knowledge of every (screaming, agonised) muscle involved. We also did a little work on isolating the muscles on either side of the belly button, which is awesome because sideways belly rolls are freaky things, and I'm all about the weird.

We all got personalised homework at the end after the cooldown, so this week i will mostly be rib sliding and circling in front of a mirror, trying to break through that invisible barrier and get some range!

Progress!

This week I have mostly been preserving every single fruit or vegetable that isn't fast enough to get out of my way, and have therefore had rather less time for costuming than I would like. What free time I have had has been somewhat complicated by the near permanent spattering of fruit pulp* over my person, which makes working on a cream costume a very bad idea.

That said, last night I did manage to wash off the raspberry juice, and finished up the belt base for my twenties costume. No pics yet, because boring strip of satin is boring, but the bra is looking something like this...

I have since finished the beading on the left boob, but still need to add the pearl drapes. There will undoubtedly be a post about that as I'm not sure where to put them, and asking my husband about the placement of pearl necklaces is a one way ticket to Facepalm.

I don't know about the rest of the blogosphere, but my bellydance diary is filling up fast, I have Sunday workshops over the summer concentrating on tribal fusion, which is my teacher's speciality but not my usual style. Come September i have two haflas and a workshop, then we're into October and another three haflas and a henparty. I've never had so much of a social life!

*six pots of raspberry curd, five of jam, a bottle of plums, two lots of cherries in brandy and some disastrous redcurrant jelly that hasn't set. The kitchen may never be clean again, but at least I'll never run out of raffle prizes!

A Little Bit of Goth and a Whole Lot of Thinking

I had been looking forward to Gothla 2011 since the end of Gothla 2010, but due to the gross inconvenience of my father-in-law electing to celebrate his 60th birthday, I had only the smallest taste of what is usually a hedonistic and hilarious weekend.

Gothla kicked off on Friday afternoon with a series of three hour masterclasses run by Morgana from Spain, Sera Solstice, and the inimitable, indomitable Sashi of Ascend Tribal fame and that wings performance. Guess who I was learning with?

The class was called 'The Awakening: Captivating Stage Expression', but could just as easily been called 'How the fuck did she make me spend three hours interpreting emotion through dance for the edification of complete strangers and why aren't I curled up in a ball of horror at the memory of it?'

Sashi freely admits to her ability to get people to do 'fucked up things', and in my book, convincing twenty uptight English chicks to throw phantom energy balls to each other, writhe around on the floor, and perform said interpretative dance is far more noteworthy than sticking bits of metal through your shoulders!

The course was light on actual dance content (some warm up shimmies and a short combo over which we had to layer the expressions of emotion), but by the end of the three hours I felt like I'd learned so much my head was going to explode, and moreover, learnt it by thinking and exploring and analysing, rather than having it broken down into bitesize chunks and spoonfed to me.

During the workshop we had to say what we wanted from the class, and then paired up with people who we felt shared a similar goal in dancing. I ended up working with a very talented lady who said she felt attuned to what I'd said about being a bundle of nerves and not being able to enjoy the experience of performance.

You may imagine my surprise when I connected the various bits of info I picked up (her first name, the fact she was teaching that weekend), and realised she was the creative director of a very theatrical troupe whose style I loathe, and whom I've been extremely rude about in the past!

A few lessons learnt then; firstly that this scene is too small for you not to bump into those you've been merrily slagging off; secondly that not all goths have facial piercings and tattoos; thirdly that just because someone likes to dress like Lady Gaga and throw fake blood on stage does not mean they can't dance; and finally it's Gothla, and if there's room for a fat cabaret chick, there's room for everyone else too!