Kyria's journal

Class
My 7 week beginners session ended and though all students loved it, I only have four sign ups for the session that starts on February 9th. It's not as bad as the advanced group, with only 1 enrollment so far. *le sigh* I once more wonder why I put in all the effort when it is harder and harder to get people to sign up.

In brighter news, yesterday was the muwashshahat class where we danced on the 10/8 rhythm with the handkerchiefs. Last week we did saaidi which was also fun. I am a bit more comfortable with saaidi because I've taught several saaidi choreographies. The first class was Spanish-Arabic with lots of skirt moves. Next week is Khaleegy and for the last class I am still considerening Nubian (did a weeklong with Khazafy to years ago) or Turkish 9/8 (did orientalized version and took some classes in Istanbul, but need to revisit).

The irony of it all is that I becoming a better, more confident teacher while sign up is steadily declining. I really need an at-home dance no rent studio! I am happy with my upstairs dance room: not big enough to teach, but big enough for my own practice which is good.

#10dagenbuikdans challenge
I am still doing my challenge and am now at day 9. I started over on the day I went public with the idea. Many people interested, no one participating. It is awesome to be practicing on a regular base and I can feel my strength growing every day. I'm combining it with 30 day shred and other short workout videos and it works. I learned that I am still very mush focussed on learning through dvd because that is when I can relax. Preparing my classes, making and learning my own choreographies doesn't feel like practice, it feels like work.

Dalla Dream Dancers
We're meeting again tomorrow and we're going to practice our folkloric repertoire. we received word from Ada, our dance aunt who is terminally ill. She is discussing euthanesia with her doctor. I expect that we won't do much dancing tomorrow, but talk about her and what we can do for her as long as she's here.

Workshop
I got booked to teach a bellydance workshop at someone's house tomorrow afternoon. I arranged with work to be working from home for half a day, then I'll hop into the car and teach the workshop. Busy day but I am happy that I get to use my big box with hipscarves once more, I sometimes feel guilty for having so much dance stuff while there are less and less occassions to use it.

Costuming website
the costuming website is online and I planned a couple of posts so it will contain a new post every week. I have a huge backlog of costuming projects that I can upload, and so I will. After all, costume addicts don't care if a costume was made in the past or the present. What does make a difference is the involvement of people when doing a costume project, it's very effective to interact, ask opinions and make people eager to check up on you.

Bellydance Evolution
I want to join the BDE online competition for the shows in Germany in May. I reckon I have a fair shot as
1. Winning means considerable travel and housing expenses for the participants
2. It's the third competition in EU so most people who wanted to join have already tried it
3. Looking at the questions, I have a good amount of training on the subject

I am scheduling my registration somewhere in February an dplan to record and upload my video within three days. 24 hours is just not possible for me, though it would give me a good head start on the other competitors. Part of this is given in by my insane need to keep busy and part of it is a dancer's midlife crisis. Once I have kids, I don't see myself training on this level or being able to run off for a couple of weeks to dance.

I'm still doing the Bellydance Business Academy course and I have arrived in module 3: Social media. I've learned to tweak my fanpage profile (didn't realize I left 3/4 of it blank) and added a 'Notes' article (it will help boost the google rating of the fanpage). I am looking into social media dashboards like Hootsuite. It occured to me that every penny that I made in the past eight years was made in the Netherlands and my default language for social media profiles is English. There's something I could improve right away! I'm going to do a lot more stuff in Dutch for my promotion.

My recent succes is that I had enough people (8) enrolled to start a beginnersclass last night. Much to my amusement, I have a Rosanne and a Roseanne (and my real name is Rosanne) in my class. It was a good class and it reminded me of how much I like the simplicity of bellydance and it's way to connect women with themselves. I put this succes down to the fact of remodelling my website with BDBA so it is easier for people to enroll. That was 12 euro well spent! the website of the cultural center is a hot mess, very hard to find my course and enroll.

I am also looking into creating products that are for sale through downloads. Like the handouts that I make for my courses, PDF booklets, patterns, costuming how-to's, etc. I will be off the teaching grid for a while next year and maintaining my pressence is important to me. I was contemplating quitting teaching but I am not ready yet. Being a bellydance teacher makes me happy and if anything, I want to cherish this for as long as it does feel like a calling instead of work.

My production group is getting along nicely, next Saturday is our second three hour rehearsal (which is over way too quickly). We drummed/danced the full choreography a couple of times now and I am confident that we will rock the stage. the cultural center is being weird last-minute, asking if we can incorporate black and white tights (uhm, no) and I need to be there to supervise the building of the frame for the background. The university is a no dog zone, but I managed to be allowed to bring the dog this time because the building is closed for the general public. The cultural center asked for a name change so our show is now called 'Arabian Nights'. Not original, but it fits into the program. The flyer is a hot mess of non-information, our group is inviting people with the flyer one of us made. Also, thursday is closed to the GP, a recent change that wasn't announced to the performers.

In three weeks, this will all be over and we'll have some great memories to look back on. It feels like I am creating a masterpiece and the eight years of prior teaching all led up to this. There is also interest in my 'Bellydance specials' course in January and people enrolling right now, I feel like I am (finally?) on the right track as a bellydance professional.

Next Friday I have the audition for the Lustrum production. I have six people who enrolled and paid: four students and two dancers who I am not familiar with. The audution is paid: the participants pay 50 euros up front as a downpayment for the whole production, then pay the rest of the money if they succeed. If they do not succed or do not want to participate, their fifty euro will be returned.

This means that you have to be serious to audition, which is good. This is the first time that I am holding auditions and I am the one doing the judging so I am putting a lot of work in to get it right.

1. What am I looking for?
dancers that are technically on an intermediate level. They can perform all the basic belly dance moves, learn an intermediate choreography in e decent time span, practice by themselves, find the beat in a song and dance to it. People that work well together, that can contribute to the group process to create an end product that looks good on stage.

2. how am I assesing?
I am doing an open class of an hour that contains a warring up, drills, learning a block of choreography and doing an assignment in smaller groups. Afterwards dancers have ten minutes with me to talk over their idea, their personal goals, music that inspires them etc. I will videotape this class and maybe one of the people from Parnassos will show up to help me assess.

3. how am I giving feedback
I am putting up a feedback sheet per person, adressing the different area. I want to call the person on the phone and talk through the strong points and weak points to support my final decision (as far as I can see, I expect all dancers to pass, but with areas to work on). If they like, they can get the feedback form by email. I will also give advice for the months july/august and on practice routine. There are some hard decisions to make though, as I have a student that is not good in self reflection and thinks she is doing great while she is often on the wrong foot, her hands are too flexed and her arms go into angles that shouldn't be there. When corrected, she shrugs it off.

4. what are my goals with this production?
I want to learn how to lead a production team. For now, there will not be a storyline as the production is based on people walking in and out of our location. The focus of the classes will be on improving technique, designing your own practice routine and learning how to practice and develop your own choreography. In addition, we are learning two choreographies (yes, that is two full choreographies in 10 classes + 3 extra rehearsals. it is going to be fierce). I want to learn how to motivate and stimulate people to get better technique wise. I will also document the shit out of this project with photo and video material. Because I can.

...and if I do get pregnant, I can look back and know that I did my best to create awesome bellydancers. It will be an interesting day, Friday!

Last weekend was filled with things.  For starters, Mr.R. had his hunting course on Saturday so I had the joy of sleeping in while he had to get up early. I love living in De Meern but the traveling time is killing me and I have always been terrible at getting up. In fact, I am so bad at it that everyone who spend a holiday with me tells amusing stories about me not functioning early in the morning.

I wanted to get up early on Saturday to work on material for my classes but I didn't because SLEEP. I went to The Hague around 11 for a rehearsal of our new theater project. It centers around the many roles that women have during their life and is situated in a laundromat. We had fun doing silly things with laundry baskets and a bit of dancing to a Mozart in Egypt song.

Laudie asked me to do a goddess themed Bellyfit class and I asked if this would be a FaKyMa effort. Laudie confirmed, but I was a bit taken aback by J. who told me she wanted to co-teach with the easier levels. Because 1. she did not finish her bellyfit training (doing eight practicum classes + feedback), 2. she has been a member of bellyfit but hasn't listend to any of the music in the past six months 3. she wants me to send her the artemis training video's that I bought without offering anything in return and 4. I am making us a couple of training skirts so we look similar.

Considering that I did the mandatory extra 16 hours of self study to complete my teacher training, putting in 4 hour to learn the new routine and invest 3 hours on making our training outfit, I feel like I am the main teacher and I am responsible for teaching the workshop. The one who is responsible makes the calls, though I suspect J. might feel a bit agitated about this.

On sunday I had a photographer coming over to our place fora shoot in our living room. We did a lot of close ups of eyes (his request), he took a couple of pictures of me in bellyfit teaching gear (my request) and a couple of shots in regular clothes (it never hurts to have a recent headshot in regular clothes). Mr.R. was noodling around the house and found it fascinating that taking pictures could take up four hours. When the shoot was over I drove Mr.R to the trainstation as he made an appointment to watch terrible movies with a friend. I stayed at home and tried to reign the post-photoshoot chaos into something more manageable, watched the new Veronica Mars movie (it is cool!), did a quick update on my website and some video editing of Ikaiya's wedding footage. It took my old computer eight hours to create a basic dvd but it is done now. I am putting off buying a new pc because we have so many expensive things coming our way this year.

And more sad news; Global Dance Lab, the worlddance studio in Amsterdam that Ada was running is closing it's doors. It is sad because it had really nice studio's and a space to throw hafla's. They are closing up because despite a two month remodelling the noise from the studio is still outside the legal parameters. In the last year, the Tropen theater in Amsterdam shut down, the Dansvloer (studio in Utrecht), the Regentes theater is trying a restart and now Gobal dance Lab. The studio's and theaters that we work with in the belly dance community are closing down, we have less festivals, the theater shows don't sell enough tickets to cover the cost. I came close to not teaching this semester because of low enrollments. Is the end near for belly dance?

I am making a pdf handout for my beginners, including answers to common questions, top ten benefits of bellydance, exercises to improve balance and coordination, overview of styles, etc. The visualization that I talked about yesterday is part of the hand out. It'll be a thirty page booklet with pictures and drawings that I made/own. In addition, several dancers in the past couple of years asked me for business advice. Creating a pdf download that answers questions about taxes, how to set up promotion, that kind of thing. The third idea was to reedit the costuming book that I made in 2007 and offer it as a digital download instead of print. I want to make it a paid download but have trouble with finding a technical solution for the payment that would work.

Most Dutch people pay with debetcards and in order to have the online payment option iDeal, I have to pay 25 euro per motnh to the bank, plus a small amount per transaction. I expect that the sales will (at most!) be 120 items over a two year course, which would not be cost effective. In short, I adjusted my belly dance strategy towards doing things I like and I am good at and I want to charge a small amount of money. For example, I've been writing for several bellydance magazines for over 8 years and though it is a labor of love, most of my work is gone because magazines went out of print/stopped existing. My own website with articles went under because I didn't spend time on the technical platform. Creating downloadable pdf's seems like an affordable way to tap into the e-reader market, spread the information that I want to share and get a little bit paid in return. By little bit, I was thinking about 7 euro (10usd) for a 100 page pdf (costuming book, book for professionals) and a couple of other products like t-shirts and posters, probably through a  third party like cafepress.

Anyway, I want to give kuddo's to Autumn Ward. She never really caught my attention through her instructional dvds, but I found out that she has accompanying pdf downloads for her dvds and they are amazingly detailed and well thought out. I have to revisit her dvds soon!

Yesterday was the free try-out class at the cultural center. It is always a suprise how many people show up for this class: one year, I had three people, another year I had one, who told me that she wanted to start teaching bellydance herself.

( Click for pictures of happy students! )

Last night in class, a student told me that she got frustrated because the transitions between her moves were not as fluent as she wanted them to be. She asked me:'what can I do to improve my transitions? I feel so clumsy and frustrated all the time!'. I know what it feels like, I get frustrated by my perceived lack of skills every day! And by being anxious and angry at myself, I stop focusing on what I am trying to learn and things turn into a hot mess of angst that doesn't work out for anyone involved.

1. get real
We all want to be perfect. We all want to be as good as the person teaching the class and we forget that that person has years and years of training and experience that we don't have. I started classical ballet at the age of 28 and I will never ever be able to do the effortless double pirouette that my teacher is showing us so casually as an example. I remind myself that for my level of experience, being able to make a distinction between a tour en dedans and a tour en dehors is a big accomplishment. Let alone being able to sort of make those turns.

2.you are a winner for trying
Feeling incompetent is one of the worst feelings that we can have. It hits the core of our being, our wish to be good at what we do. You are a winner the moment you try something new because it is victory over not trying it at all. So what if you start piano lessons at age 60, just have a go at it.

3. failing is how we get better
A while back, we did turns during ballet class. I was having one of those days where everything went wrong and the harder I tried, the more mistakes I made. Right in the middle of practicins turns, I fell flat on my face. I admit to crying just a little right there and then. That is how I learned that when I am emotionally unbalanced, I should not try to push myself harder during a class as it works against me. that was a hard lesson that will stick with me. We learn by making mistakes.

I am not in a place where I can let go of my frustration each and every time, but I am getting there. As for the student in my class, I replied: 'Learning to dancing is like learning to write. You might feel frustrated that you can't write supercalifragilisticexplalidocious in one fluent motion. You had three classes and in those first classes you are learning how to write the letters of the alphabet. Give yourself time to learn and soon enough you'll realize that you can write words and that the words are getting longer.'

( Read more... )
We haven't seen the sun long enough to remember what it looks like this summer, and it seems the fall downpour is already upon us. Thunder and lightning are fighting over airtime and I feel sad about the summer that never was.