Traveling For Dance

Two of my loves in life: travel and belly dance. So what could be better than putting them together and traveling for belly dance, am I right? But before you grab your hip scarf and zills, and run out to sign up for the next out of town dance workshop or retreat, it’s best to make sure you know exactly what you’re signing up. That way you can ensure that you have the best possible experience.

I’ve traveled twice out of the country for week-long belly dance retreats. One was great: well-managed, organized, and excellent instruction. The other was not so great: disorganized, failed to provide all elements paid for, and overall left a great deal to be desired.

So how can you avoid the pitfalls of poorly managed and executed dance retreats and instead find your way to the retreat of your dreams? Research. Yup, I’d say your number one key to secure a great experience is investing the time up front to investigate what you’re getting into. The data you are able to gather in advance will be a great indicator of what kind of experience you’re signing up for.

Here are my recommendations of what to check out and what questions to ask before you hit that submit payment button:

• What is the reputation of the instructor? Is she well-known within the dance community? A good instructor should have strong ties and be on “good terms” with the dance community at large. Things to check out is whether or not the instructor is a member of popular dance related Facebook groups and if she is friends with a majority of other well-known dancers. Check out her teaching schedule and see if she is sponsored by other dancers and travels regularly for teaching gigs. Also try searching the discussion threads of online forums and groups to see if any complaints or negative feedback have been shared.
•  Can the person actually teach? Just because someone is a good dancer doesn’t necessarily mean they can teach. If possible, check out the instructor’s DVDs (if she has them), try to attend a local workshop, or check out any instructional YouTube videos she might have uploaded and see if her teaching style is coherent, logical, and appealing to you.
• Read and solicit reviews. Are there any online reviews posted about the event? Or have you had any friends that have attended in the past? Word of mouth and reviews from past attendees will be one of the strongest indicators of how enjoyable the experience will end up being.
•  How long has the camp / workshop been running? A successfully run camp will have a good history and will run annually. Newer events might be a bit more iffy, as they have not yet stood the test of time.
• What does the website look like? If the instructor is running a professional operation, they will also invest time and money into the website. A cheap website might be an indicator that the instructor is just trying to make a quick profit and not really investing anything into the experience.  Additionally, how well organized and laid out the website is may also be an indicator of how well organized and laid out the retreat will be.
• What is the response time on emails? Try sending an email asking some questions about the retreat and see how long it takes to receive a response. An organized event organizer should get back to you within 24 hours, or I’d say 48 hours tops. Longer response times might indicator poor service both now and during the event.
•  Make sure you understand what’s included. Read the fine print. Maybe the price is cheap because you will be expected to pay for your own meals. Or maybe you won’t have a private room (if that’s important to you). So be sure you know what you are paying for.
• Can they accommodate any special needs? If you have food allergies or intolerances, can they cater to this? If there are any other special health needs or accommodations will need make sure you inquire about these in advance.

Okay, there you have it! Those are my top items to look for and investigate before signing up.

Hope you have a marvelous, fabulous, and magical time on your journeys. Bon voyage and break a zill!

Photo Credit: http://www.mgtdesign.co.uk

Shahrzad Superstar & Egyptian Stylization

Back in January, I had the opportunity to study with the lovely Shahrzad. Shahrzad is an American dancer, currently based in Egypt. An in-demand performer and teacher, she travels around the world to share her gifts, and one such stop was Seattle. I won't say much more about her and just let one of her videos and her dancing speak for itself:

With striking features, her face and figure remind me of a cross between Dita Von Teese and Elizabeth Taylor. I thought for sure someone so pretty and talented must surely be a bit distant and aloof. Not the case. Not even close. From the moment she started teaching, you could tell she was fun, friendly, and down to earth. Despite being one of the current superstars in the belly dance arena, she didn't talk down to any of the workshop participants or otherwise make anyone feel "small". She was happy to share her expertise, and secrets to some of her fabulous technique, like her big juicy shimmies. Her friendly attitude made me want to share a girls night with her; drinking wine, eating popcorn, and sharing beauty tips and gig stories. I didn't quite get that opportunity, but I did at least ask her for an after-show photo op.

I highly recommend studying with her if you have the opportunity. To tide you over in the meantime, here's a few tips from her Egyptian-stylization workshop:

1. Want to look more Egyptian in your dance style? Key characteristics of Egyptian style dancers are (a) bending at the knees; (b) low center of gravity; and (c) moving the knees, hips, chest, and shoulders outside of the shoulder column.
2. Try moving from the wrists and elbows when performing arm work, rather than the hands and palms, which is more American.
3. Don't think about moves as one dimensional. Focus on changing your position and shape in your entire body to create more curve and dynamic movement. 
4. The attitude of an Egyptian performer has two key characteristics: femininity and humor.
5. Keep the feet closer together to create curvier, bigger and more vertical hips. For Soheir Zaki hips, move the knees in toward each other to create a more elegant look.
6. Remember: A native dancer changes her vocabulary as the rhythm changes and changes her style as the song changes, so listen and let the music guide you. 

To learn more about Shahrzad, you can check out her website, or watch her dancing light up the stage on her Youtube channel. Shahrzad also has a number of great DVDs available that you can use to practice with at home, available on Amazon and other sites:

Photo Credit (Top): www.shahrzadraqs.com 

Dancing with the Superstars

This past weekend I attended two workshops taught by Jayna and Stefanya of the Bellydance Superstars, as well as the evening Cairo Nights Vol. 4 CD Release show and party, produced by Roxy. Jayna taught double 3/4 double circular veil technique, and Stefanya taught a choreography that she uses for the Bellydance Superstars tour.

The first workshop of the day was with Jayna. Trying out double 3/4 circular veil with Jayna was a new prop that I'd never attempted before. Jayna credits her 3/4 circular veil inspiration to her mother, Marta Schill. Marta was one of the founders of national non-profit Middle Eastern Culture and Dance Association ("MECDA") and co-author of the book The Compleat Belly Dancer.

I don't think I was personally that successful at it, but Jayna definitely had some wow-factor moves. I was hoping she had a video of her double veil posted online, but unfortunately I wasn't able to find one to share with this post. (I have one that I took during the workshop, but I don't like to post without videos without people's permission.) So instead, for your viewing pleasure, check out her skill at double sword!

The second workshop of the day was with Stefanya. I don't usually care for learning choreography in workshops, but Stefanya won me over right away with her emphasis on artistry and expression.  A couple great tips that Stefanya shared were:

1. Three connections - in any performance you must make sure you are establishing the three critical connections, which are (a) your connection with the earth, in which you ground yourself down into it, (b) your connection with and relationship to the music, which like in any relationship, sometimes you lead and the music follows, and sometimes the music leads and you follow, and (c) your connection with and unity to the breath, which is your spark for creative expression. 
2. Engage in the inner thighs - to find the right muscle to engage, place your arms straight down at your sides, then take the hands and move them to the back of the leg (you should be touching just below the ledge of the glutes) and then think of squeezing these two points in toward each other. I had never actually had another teacher talk about engagement in this exact place or manner, but when I activated here, I automatically grew taller as it caused the arches of my feet to engage upward and it also caused my core to automatically draw in to the proper engage position.

Not the same choreography that we learned, but to see Stefanya's artistry in action check out the video below.

Photo Credit: Cover of Cairo Nights Vol. 4 

Bozenka!

My year of epic belly dance study continues! First, it was a weekend of workshops with Sadie. Then it was completing Sahra C. Kent's Journey Through Egypt Level 1 program. Most recently, it was a weekend of workshops with the brilliant Bozenka!

In case you aren't familiar with Bozenka, let me provide her with a brief introduction.  Bozenka won the title of "Miss America of Bellydance" in 2000, only a short two years after she took up the art form. Her career and fame skyrocketed from there. She was one of the early inductees into the international touring troupe, the Bellydance Superstars, and she's performed for celebrities like Sean Connery, Madonna, and Enrique Iglesias. She also spent time working as Shakira's choreographer. In the belly dance community, she's pretty much a legend. If you want to see the star in action, here are a couple of my favorite performance clips of hers.

The three workshops that I attended consisted of a shimmy technique class, Egyptian technique class, and an extended masters performance class. The workshops were held down in Eugene, Oregon. With traffic, it turned out to be a six-hour drive from Seattle, but the time spent in transit was completely worth it. From the moment we started the warm-up, I could tell that this was going to be special.

From the outset of class, as we started gracefully dancing our way through the warm-up, Bozenka asked for precision and attention to detail. Her teaching style was relaxed and calm, but at the same time highly focused and professional. In turn, her demeanor required that students meet her on this elevated level of professionalism; on more than one occasion politely, but firmly, asking for no talking during class and that students return to carefully watching her alignment and movement.

That's not to say however that she wasn't friendly or personable. Early on the first day, as I was standing in line for the one shared bathroom, Bozenka struck up an easy conversation with me, asking me where I was from and inquiring about my background. Before the weekend workshops, I expected that someone who was so talented, famous, accomplished, and beautiful, would surely have an ego of a matching size. But this was far from the case. She was pleasant and engaging to converse with.

It would be too lengthy to fully sum up and recount the hours spent studying with Bozenka, but I'll summarize with a few of my top takeaways:

• Think of turning the elbows out, rather than letting them point down at the floor. Simple advice, but oh what a difference it makes in the elegance and carriage of the dancer!
• Use the movement of the hands and wrists to echo movement in other parts of the body. Let the hands undulate with the breath. Really think of inhaling and exhaling right through the palms. Let the wrists reflect the movement in the hips.
• An exercise to try with a partner: One dancer (carefully) dances with her eyes completely closed while the second dancer with eyes open follows her. Then switch. Again simple, but very profound results, especially in the aspects of learning to tune into the music and letting the music be the guide, rather than being swayed by any visual cues or audience distraction.
• Before each performance take a moment to center and ground yourself. Consider dedicating your performance to someone or something else. This will make the performance less about you, your ego, and your nerves, and instead refocus the performance as something larger than yourself.
• When doing solo work, work with a skeleton choreography, rather than choreographing out every beat. When you don't do your choreography perfectly, there's an inherent feeling that it's somehow a "failure" on your part and the whole performance is now "flawed". But the audience has no idea! Just avoid putting yourself in this position to begin with and stick with an outline rather than regimented steps. 

Overall, it was a powerful and inspiring weekend. Bozenka teaches two annual week-long belly dance workshops on the island of Crete, where she lives. As soon as the timing works out, yours truly will most certainly be attending, anxious and eager to continue studying with this master teacher.

Top Photo Credit: Bozenka, www.bozenka.biz

Bottom Photo Credit. Alessandra with Bozenka

My Weekend with Sadie - A Review

I recently spent a weekend studying with the world-famous Sadie Marquardt. Okay, it wasn't just my weekend with Sadie, but really Seattle's weekend, organized by the lovely and talented Roxy. It was a whirlwind weekend of dance and shows. I participated in six of the ten hours of workshops offered, and attended one of the two evening shows.

Before starting out on Friday in the first set of workshops, I was curious to see what they would hold. Sadie skyrocketed to international fame after her appearance on America's Got Talent, performing a belly dance duet with her dance partner Kaya. I wondered, would she act like the dance celebrity that she is? Additionally, Sadie is also known for her elaborate and intricate drum solos.  They are definitely impressive.  But I was curious, would there be a deeper, artistic dimension to her dance and her teaching as well?  Or was she just a one-trick pony? And lastly, I couldn't help but think about Sadie's other TV appearance: the semi-scandalous one on a reality show that shalt be named here. Was she just a party girl seeking attention like that episode had shown?

Let's start with day one, the first workshop.  The workshop topic was on Creating Your Signature Dance Set.  One of the first exercises we did was just walk. Sounds easy, right?  We all know how to walk.  Nevertheless, slowing down can frequently be one of the hardest things for a dancer to do when nerves take over.  Sadie had us work on executing this simple movement with enough confidence to snag our audience's attention by adopting postural and facial adjustments. The instruction in this workshop showed me, that yes, Sadie definitely had a deeper dimension to her dance than just the pops and locks of her spectacular drum solos.

Sadie also shared some stories from her beginning days that made her seem more relatable. She discussed how she cried from nerves at her first ever performance and how she, like myself and many dancers I know, is extremely shy and has had to "just get over it" to be a successful dancer and entertainer. She also said that to this day she still gets nervous before performances. She brought out a great point about nerves: if you aren't nervous at least to some extent, it probably means that you don't really care about the performance or the audience.  Sadie also discussed the joys and trials of being a dancer in restaurants, and how it can be an immense challenge to get diners to look up from their plates of food and watch the show, even for a few minutes. She's preaching to the choir on that one! But she said, and I would whole-heartedly agree, that restaurant experience is invaluable for honing your performance skills.  Restaurants are a great environment for working on up-close and personal audience engagement, as well as practicing and perfecting new skills. Although, if a dancer as lovely and technical as Sadie has issues capturing and keeping audience attention, I fear for the rest of us! 

Rolling into day two, the first workshop was Phenomenal Abdominals.  As someone who already does belly rolls and flutters, I was somewhat skeptical that I would learn anything new in this workshop. Man, was I wrong! Sadie took the abdominals to a whole-level level with intense layering that I will need to practice for some time before gaining proficiency. For example, when I say intense layering, one drill we worked was belly rolls with mayas while walking with arms floating up and down, with various timing for each movement.

The second workshop was Drum Solo Secrets. Again, oodles of involved, quick, and complicated layering. At about half-way through the workshop, Sadie started to go into teaching choreography and my reaction was to groan inside. Everyone has their personal preferences in this regard, but I really dislike learning choreography in classes or workshops. After the class is over, the choreography is really of no value to me because I'm never going to use it again. I'm certainly not going to go out and perform some else's work. Thus I prefer to focus on exercises and drills to build skills, technique, and artistry. Fortunately, a couple dancers in the class asked some specific questions on technique and the direction of the class changed. In particular, we moved to working on pelvic shimmies, which I really enjoyed, as to date, this hasn't been a move I've had much exposure to and would love to master it and add it to my repertoire.

Concluding out the weekend for me was the gala show on Saturday evening. It was a line-up jam-packed with some of Seattle's top talent. Amazingly, it even started within 5 minutes of being on time! Shows that start past their scheduled time are one of my biggest pet peeves about belly dance events.  Some dancers like to chalk it up to Arab time.  Frankly, when it comes to this, I ding-dang don't care that the dance originated in Arabic countries where punctuality is a fluid concept. If you are producing a show in the U.S. you should cater to your American audience who expects the show to start on-time.  Otherwise it's unprofessional and you are alienating potential audience members outside of the belly dance community.  Kudos to Roxy, the show's producer, for keeping to the clock. Alright, soapbox rant over, back to Sadie.

Sadie did one choreographed drum solo set in the first half of the show. Her choreography was so loaded with intricate, fast moves that I wondered how she even remembered it, let alone executed it. Sadie then did a second, improvised set with the band House of Tarab in the third section of the show. My one small critique of the performance is that I would have liked her to include zills in her set. Of course the highlight of her performance was the ending drum solo, with more of her signature fast-paced, highly technical pops and locks. My favorite part of her set was right at the end of the drum solo when she really just let the music take over, got down on the floor and did a mix of accented movements combined with zaar/Iraqi/Khaleegi-based moves with lots of hair tossing. Given that she has, oh, about a mile of hair to toss, it was pretty breathtaking.

That's my review of the parts of the weekend that I attended. If there are any Sunday workshop participants reading this, are there any major takeaways for you from that set of workshops?

And as far as that scandalous video goes?  Well, we've all probably done or said things at various points in our lives that didn't highlight us at our most spectacular, or showcase how we want to put ourselves out into the world, but fortunately, those moments weren't video-taped (at least I hope this is true for you!). So at least for me, I'll refrain from passing judgment.

To Sadie, thank you for the fun, informative, and fulfilling weekend!

Photo Credit: Sadie, www.sadiebellydancer.com

You Don't Want to Miss This

There are some exciting and unique belly dance workshops and events coming up in Seattle in March. I will, without a doubt, be attending all of these.

Tamalyn Dallal Workshop: World-famous dancer, Tamalyn Dallal, is teaching a workshop on Samaii, Turksih 9/8, and Masmoudi Khabir. Tamalyn teaches classes, workshops, and retreats all over the world. Tamalyn has trained various dancers who have gone on tour as members of the Bellydance Superstars. She has also performed for numerous celebrities, including Madonna, Michael Jackson, and King Abdullah of Jordan. Workshop is on March 10th, 2pm - 4pm at the Ottoman BellyDance Studio in Bothell. Also, in July, Tamalyn will be teaching a week long belly dance intensive here in Seattle. Check out her website for more details.

Leila of Cairo Workshop: Another world-famous dancer in Seattle this month! Leila of Cairo will be teaching an Egyptian technique-based workshop, including the latest hot moves from the stages of Cairo and a section focused on Shaabi style. Leila has been a professional dancer and model since the age of 16. In 2002, she moved to Cairo and landed contracts with prestigious hotels. From there her career went on to include television commercials, music videos, and even movies. The workshop is on March 25th from 1:00pm to 4:30pm at the ARC School of Ballet in Seattle. To register for the workshop email me at alessandra@alessandradance.com and I'll put you in contact with the scheduler.

Saharan Soul Performance: This is a performance featuring eight esteemed and influential performers with over 25 years of experience each. Performances will range from raqs sharqi to dervish whirling to khaliji and raks assaya. Performers gracing the stage will include Mish Mish, Alfredo Gormezano, Feiruz Aram, Maria Morca, Marion Moat, Sahaila, Zaina Hart, and Zulaika. Performance is March 31st at 8pm at the Seattle Art Museum. Tickets can be purchased on Brown Paper Tickets.

 

Photo Credits: Middle photo of Leila from Leila's website at leilainegypt.com