Kyria's journal

I am continuing to squeeze in bellydance practice and in a moment of weakness signed up for the improvising course on this website: http://cairobellydance.com/

Seven classes on improvising by an American dancer who has been performing in Egypt for years. Some of the classes are with live percussion. This should be interesting.

I was reading Andalee's blog about Cairo and I longed for Egypt and this happened. I look forward to working on the classes but I also have to prepare the choreographies for my class starting next Monday, plus find a 48 hour timeslot in February to work on my audition for BDE. I am still working with Jenna's 'The Next Level' dvd, this is a recording of how far I am with her drum solo choreography, it's nice to work on something for myself and though there are a million little things I'd like to correct, overall I am pretty pleased.


In case you were wondering what a dancer could possibly do with a worldwide available choreography on dvd, here are a few suggestions.
1. teach it to your beginners




2. Use it as  atroupe performance piece

3. put on a costume and videotape yourself in front of a webcame in a dimly lit living room with barely audible music

With a bit of a break between day 1 and 2 due to health, However, I did get back into it.

Day 3
I was still chewing on the material from Fluid Tribal bellydance with Fayzah. This time I decided to start with the warm up. Unfortunately it was a warm up aimed at superfit twenty year old dancers. It included a whole lot of crunches, some squats, stretches that weren't held long enough for me and so on. I did a quick run through of the tribal basic moves and then moved on to the choreography. I had been stalling this part because the choreography is daunting.

The choreography is 1.16 minute long. The choreography explanation is 8.04 minutes long. I kid you not.

My rule of thumb for creating and learning choreography is that it takes roughly one our per minute of intermediate/advanced choreography to create the basic framework. It then takes three hours to get the framework solid in your body for one minute of choreography. It takes roughly five more hours of practice per minute of choreography to make it smooth and polished. Compared to the other teachers in my area, I am pretty fast with creating and learning choreography.

I did the choregraphy section and paused after every combination, practiced a couple of times, then moved on. At this pace it took me roughly 30 minutes to go through this section. It is a fun tribal choreography and contains some of the moves she explained in the earlier sections BUT I can't get it to work for me. Oriental dancer says 'no'. Instead I jotted down the moves I really liked and created my own practice flow, which is roughly four times slower and a hell of a lot more fun.

I then started on the preparation of my Zambra Mora class and worked on the hand-out. My search took me to Old Bhuz and it was fabulous. In depth threads on dance styles, remember those? Say all you want about facebook but facebook is impossible for searching and retrieving information. We're basically just yapping at each other in groups now with the memory of a goldfish.

Day 4
I planned on dancing but I didn't. Instead I continued on my hand-out for Zambra Mora, created a playlist with music for the class and then decided to make a new free hand-out for circle skirts. It took me three hours, using material from my 2007 costuming book combined with new insights on costuming and what a useful format would be. I then continued to write out the chapters of my Bellydance skirts e-book (in Dutch) that I plan to release later this year. It will contain at least ten extensive how-to's on bellydance skirts and in total will be roughly 50 pages. This is a follow up of my grand masterplan to not rewrite my costuming book, but instead make smaller (wahahaha!) seperate publications for online sales. The freebie turned out pretty good and if I can work some more this week on the rest of the patterns I might send out the newsletter in January announcing the release date, probably start of March 2015. I need products that I can sell during the expected time that I won't be teaching/performing next year if I get pregnant again.

Day 5
I dug through my dvd collection and found some real gems. I started with Jenna's Bellydance, the next level. It is a WDNY dvd so quality is good and this dvd is more my style so easier to work with.

The warm up works for me and I did the three drill sections for a total of 35 minutes. I stopped at the choreography section and instead put on steady music to drill the combinations I wrote down from the fluid fusion dvd. The moves are growing on me and hav an Indian flavor to them. If I continue drilling these, I will put them in my new intermediates choreography, to give them something to chew on. Looking at Fayzah's website, she has dropped bellydancing and is now into futuristic streetdance stuff. I dare you to watch her trailer. It contains dancing octopussy, fire breathing, headstands and a windows phone commercial

I've been watching three bellydance dvd's today:' That's Hot!', ' lights, camera, bellydance' and 'shake it up!'.

Most memorable awful performances:
-Kaya and Sadie dressed up in white feather boas including the white feather headdress, doing extremely huge pelvic moves. It'll take a while before this is out of my system
- meleha doing an oriental fantasy number in a catsuit with ski-pant feet and a black and gold lace thong and triangle bra tied on top of it. Too much 1001 night fabtasy, higly artistic floorwork without any depth in emotion. Why the thong?
-kaya doing the 'seduce the sultan act' with a dressed up guy in the background sitting on pillows and smoking a shisha. Loved the sleeves on her crop top. Hated her adult movie faces.
-bellydancer on speed doing cane dance. I like cane dance when done well, but this was just too much of everything.

what I liked:
-some of the duo dances where nice to watch, they match well when it comes to dance style, though I rather watch a dancer with smaller and more controlled moves. I like the hat-dance thing they did, very cabaret.
-ava fleming showed her amazing muscle control, but I think the music was added out of sync.
-Sadie has good technique and nice flwoing arms
-there are some great drum solo's on these dvd's.

Hate to say it, but my armwork is a bit like that of Kaya. ai. Right now it's a bit between Samia Gamal (she could get away with it, I can't) and kaya (I'd like to keep my arms up, but somehow they always go down). Need. more. practice. I'm going to tape some choreo's next teusday, some of which aren't finished yet, because I like to keep things open when performing.

Music:
Adana- turkish folk, upbeat song
Mouna- arabian classic, everything goes style wise (Egyptian would be best, but GP likes a mix of everything)
zay al asal