December Update

Living here so far is amazing. Changing location has helped me refocus and re-establish healthy practice habits. I'm working as a membership/communications cooridinator for a travel industry organization, and I'm really liking it.

I just finished the Mira Betz Performance Intensive. It was five days of total immersion in choreography, character and personal development as well as discussion about the discipline. On the nights that I wasn't out with girls from the workshop I would go home and zombie out until I slept. But mostly I went out. I got so connected with everyone I found it nearly impossible to go home at the end of the day. I'm still feeling very overwhelmed by the positivity the event left me with. I even got my own stalker! It doesn't get much better than that.

But seriously, I did meet/get to know some incredibly beautiful, talented, smart, hilarious dancers. Laura (the aforementioned self-identifying stalker) is Monique Ryan's dance partner who I inter-met through this very blog, so when I met her in person this past week it didn't surprise me at all that she was gorgeous, funny and whooooaaaa-talented.

I'm still processing a lot of the actual material from the seminar, and honestly, the things we talked about and the activities we did feel so intimate and personal that I don't know how much I can say about it. What I can tell you for certain is that if you are not already a Mira Betz fan, you should be, and if you ever have a chance to take anything class or workshop with her, for god's sake do it.

I already miss the girls who came up from Newfoundland (although I at least got to have an old-school sleepover with Rhonda that included Ardene surprise bags). And I miss the dancers who came over from Montreal, although that does bring me to my next point.

My teacher, Audra from the Dark Side Studio, is teaching some workshops in Montreal this January. I'm going over too! The host, Danielle Davies, asked me to dance in a show that Friday night-- Katharsis. I'm really excited, although also losing-my-mind scared. The workshops are also going to be fantastic.

If you would like to see the show or take the workshop, you can register/buy tickets here. It's going to be wonderful!

Little Bit of Everything

So, moving. Even more challenging than I thought. Possibly "way more". But I am here in Toronto, safe and sound!

This was my first experience moving from one province to another, so it took a lot out of me. Fun adventures from the experience included:

• Packing up an entire house in 24 hours (when we finally got in touch with the movers we wanted to use, they were leaving the next day)
• Consequently living out of a suitcase on an air mattress on my living room floor for three weeks
• Getting swine flu three days before I was supposed to leave and winding up a shaky little ball of girl with a 103 degree temperature (and leaving four days later)
• Having to put my cat in a "medium sized dog" carrier to travel because he is so tall and long
• Spending five (thankfully non-consecutive) days without a toilet in our new apartment because the place was plagued by plumbing woes.

But I am so happy to be here. Everyone I've spent time with has been ridiculously welcoming and kind and I already feel like I have friends and people I can talk to. I can't imagine a better move, in that respect. In particular, dancers have made me feel so at home here. My first class at the studio, I was made to feel so so welcome. Since then I've been settling in, taking two technique classes and working my butt off at home (especially where zills are concerned, because I am so deficient with them).

I also had tea with another dancer yesterday, and without even realizing it, we spent five hours talking about anything and everything. I feel like I really made a new friend (maybe two, because her dog really liked me too!) and that feels really good. She also made me the best cup of tea that I think I've ever had!

The list of classes I want to take here is as long as my leg. Obviously I want to take pretty much everything at the studio, but I am also interested in taking some more traditional (who's tradition? I'm not sure) classes-- looking at classes with Mayada and/or Arabesque. I don't want to let my ballet slide either, because it's very beneficial to me, so I am considering taking community classes at the National Ballet, unless through poking around I find a class that's a better fit.

I'm also preparing for the Mira Betz intensive. Tomorrow is library day. I have a pretty good basis for academic cultural stuff because of all the books I collected at school, but I had to give back mom's copy of Said's Orientalism and I have a feeling that I'm going to need that again. I need to finish my paper and then get sure about my choreography. There is so much to do!

I just wanted to post an update because I've been shockingly neglectful through the move, so I'll be back to a somewhat normal posting schedule from here on out!

Torontotime

I haven't been writing as much as usual lately-- crazy things have been happening in my life. That's what this entry is dedicated to!

To start out then, I've been saying since I started keeping this blog that it's not easy to try to make it as a professional belly dancer in Newfoundland-- although it can be a very fulfilling place to enjoy belly dance and to learn. Some of the reasons belly dance in Newfoundland, and specifically St. John's, is great:

• It's a fairly large community (per capita) but we all know each other-- maybe I don't know everyone who has taken a class but I'm pretty sure I can put a name to a face of every dancer who performs regularly or teaches in the city.
• The St. John's belly dance community has relatively few quarrels about modern belly dance or what is or isn't belly dance-- people are generally open minded about the content of a performance and promote and accept most of what has been self-identified as belly dance.
• There are several different styles taught and performed in St. John's-- I practice modern belly dance, OhMaya does fusion that draws on cabaret and some aspects of tribal. There's cabaret, a sort of Algerian-folk style and even Rom-inspired fusion belly dance. Sadly little or no Egyptian or American Tribal Style, but there's lots of variety. Belly dance shows are never boring because none of the acts look the same.
  

So I've had a good place to grow into belly dancing. Lots of people who love to dance and to talk about dance, I've been exposed to lots of styles by the different groups and individual artists and there's a reasonable degree of openness to interpretation of the vocabulary and tradition within the community.

But on the other hand, there are significant drawbacks to living in Newfoundland and pursuing belly dance professionally. Some of the reasons for this are:

• There aren't a lot of opportunities to learn-- I haven't had a regular weekly instructor since about six months into my belly dance journey. I've had the OhMaya girls who I've learned with, and some amazing instructors (in particular the darling Monique Ryan and Audra of the Dark Side Studio, the most influential teacher I've had in my dance career so far). But they only have the chance to visit rarely! I've traveled half a dozen or so times to squeeze in more learning, but I can never be sure it's working without someone to note my progress!
  
• There are few opportunities to perform. I work a lot with burlesque dancers and I sometimes help to produce belly dance shows but the larger dance community completely fails to understand or have any interest at all in serious belly dance and there is generally little interest in collaboration. With such a small community overall of professional dance artists, we should all be working together.
• There are 0 belly dancers belly dancing full time in St. John's. 0. It would be rad to be the first, but right now I'm not sure our city can support it.
  

So when my long-term partner was offered more or less his dream job at a company in Toronto last week I decided that it was time to take my passion and my need to learn and ship them to a bigger city. Audra, my favourite teacher and a huge influence for me, lives and teaches there and it provides much easier access to other cities where large belly dance events and workshops are held. I'm excited about the opportunity to dabble in Egyptian, which I've always wanted to study more closely, and to continue my ballet and modern training.

I'm also nervous. I get to perform as often as I want here in Newfoundland and by all accounts things are going well. If I said I didn't know that it'll be a long while before I get to teach and perform there like I do here, I'd be lying. I know the dancing in a new, bigger city is a whole different calibre and that I will definitely have to step back for awhile to catch up. If I even can!

But it's a challenge and I can't resist it. Besides, at this stage, turning down this kind of opportunity because I'm happy enough being a bigger fish in a smaller pond would be fatal to what I'm trying to do. Time to put down the old ego and go learn, learn, learn.

I can't wait though. I can't help but think this is the start of something very big and very exciting. My goal as I grow into this dance is to be able to travel and perform and teach. I don't know if this step takes me closer to that but it certainly feels like it.

I'll be writing lots more about the upcoming move over the next few weeks, but for now, there's the announcement-- Heather Sara is officially moving to Toronto!

Producing a Show

So this is generally my belly dancing blog, but one of the skills I've been working on is making my own work and being a better belly dance business woman. Organizing shows and producing them professionally is a big part of that, and I was recently offered the opportunity to produce for a local burlesque troupe. Again, I'm not a burlesque dancer, but as a belly dancer I work closely with the local burlesque community because of the overlap in our show-goers, student bases and the relatively small size of each of our followings. I dance in their shows, they dance in ours, and there is no conflict for me. I've written about how I feel about the relationship between burlesque and belly dance before, and it's been pretty widely read and discussed since it was published in February (at least insofar as my original intentions). In fact, it was most recently quoted on YIP podcast just this month!

I didn't mean to stir up so much controversy with it, and didn't even know I could, but there you go!

Now, I've been part of a production team with OhMaya for belly dance and variety shows, with the now-defunct Birds in Space for theatre productions, and goodness knows what else, but this past month was my first experience organizing an entire show start to finish on my own. It was the Burly Q Babies Summer Sweet and it went off at the Martini Bar on August 29th.

Let me preface that by saying that Miss Frankly Scarlet (the leader of the Burly Q Babies) is a deeply talented woman, both in terms of her art and her organizational abilities. Despite having some extremely wonderful and life changing events in her life over the past little while and needing a new producer, she was there for me every step of the way with advice, guidance and recommendations. I really look up to her for her leadership abilities with her group and her energetic, take-charge attitude.

There are so many more small details to show creation and execution than you know. I think everything I did for this show I had done at some point before, but it's so much more overwhelming when you're doing it all! So here are my most remembered moments from my first production.

Booking

I called the manager of Martini Bar. He was nice (most people actually are, apparently!) and we settled on a date, time and mused about drink specials within a minute or two. Pretty easy. All that fear for nothing. It was admittedly easier for me because the girls had done a show there before, so the groundwork had already been laid out.

Marketing

This is probably where I shine, at least relative to my other abilities initially when this all started. I make a mean poster, and I'm the queen of the press release. It's especially fun with the BQB because they have specific colours (soft pink, black and white) that they always use, and I've done work for them before, so it's fun to reinvent that colour scheme with new fonts and photographs. They already have vector logos to slap on everything and they're all so damn gorgeous, that it's easy to come up with something lovely every time. The poster we went with is top right (their favourite colours are also my favourite colours I noticed).

I also got to write up a description of the girls, the show and entice people to come. My sister (a former editor in chief of a pretty prestigious student newspaper) is the real content writing genius in the family, but I think she taught me well, so I can pull it off when necessary. Writing things up and designing posters and programs is the most fun part of producing for me, so this was when I was in my glee.

It's slightly scarier to actually distribute that to local newspapers and events calendars, but I managed. Again with the fear, although it is slightly diminished when i communicate via email.

Human Resources

I had to book two technical guys (Mark Haddon Strong and Johnny Rawkhard who are both, for the record, amazingly competent and very supportive of panicked producers). This was one thing I had never done before so I knew very little about how to pay them, what they needed to know, how long they needed to set up, strike down, and how to fool them into thinking I could do my job with any degree of adequacy. I lucked out and they were great, managed the lights, the music and all microphone/live instrument goodness.

I also had to book additional acts for the girls. The BQB are most famous for variety shows, with burlesque, belly dancing (usually me, or me and my troupe!), hooping, live music, comedy, yo yo-ing and way more. So I booked Lucy O'Lucky, a BQB-show veteran who hoops and tells jokes, as well as a few non-BQB burlesque girls-- Mirrabell and Fleur de Lys.

I enlisted some help to get posters and things out, with varying degrees of success, but the worst was still to come. I needed a host. Oh god please find me a host! Finally, I talked to Wanker Girl, a BQB who has quite a stage presence and agreed to host half the show (the half she wasn't performing in). I can't even tell you how grateful I was! And she did such a killer job! I had to host the other half myself, much against my will, but it was alright, and apparently I wasn't entirely embarrassing. Good. That being said, never again!

Night of the Show

I burned a song wrong (which we realized during tech and managed to fix!), an act showed up less than five minutes before going onstage (but she was wonderful!), the wrong music got played for one piece (also fixed!), and other than that, the show went on. Not bad. It could frankly have been far, far worse. I learned so much and got over a couple of major fears that I had about talking in front of people and talking to people with my professional voice :)

All in all, it must not have been too bad, because I'm signed on to help produce three more shows this fall. The Burly Q Babies Halloween show, the OhMaya Halloween show and my own production. I'm also insane enough to be performing in all three. I'll give more details about it once everything is booked and in place, but it's something I've wanted to do for almost a year. And I've got a tentative date-- November 28th. More soon!

I also got paid-- not an extreme amount, but a modest sum for my work. That feels really good whether it happens for my performance or my production skills. Every time someone pays me to do something I love, I get butterflies. Is that silly?

Next up, Illusion Studio's first end of term hafla. I got to see my students perform, first time ever! Also, career belly dance vs. enthusiast belly dance. Oh and a roundup of fall performance preparations.

In conclusion, tell me about your experiences putting together your first show, or your favourite show, or maybe even something that went really well or really disastrously! Favourite show stories here!

Mini Update

I'm going to write a longer update about producing a show by myself for the first time later in the week, but for now I have a bunch of unrelated goodness to show you. I thought my head would explode a minimum of nine times last week, but I got through and apparently I fit the classic definition of insanity because I'm about to repeat the same act over again and I expect different results!

First, there aren't very many belly dancers in this half of Canada. There are even fewer who are super obsessed. And there are almost none crazy enough to try to make belly dance their careers. Monique Ryan is one of them, and as such she has been an incredibly dear friend to me since I met her just over a year ago. She dances solo and with the duo Cabaret Serpentine in Halifax, while her dance partner operates out of Toronto. I routinely send Monique the longest facebook messages in the history of the world to complain, ask for advice, gush over something or other. Recently, I've been really busy and so has she, so we were talking for the first time in awhile, and when I was freaking about how cool something she had done was, I realized I just had to post about it here.

Monique's performance level belly dance class learned an altered version of the Thriller choreography that was tweaked to use belly dance vocabulary. That's pretty cool. They started learning it long before MJ's sad death earlier this summer. Interesting timing. Although this is a hafla video, the group went on to perform it at a ZOMBIE WALK in Halifax shortly afterwards! That is the coolest thing ever! The video of the zombie walk performance is on facebook and the crowd reaction looks awesome. I love the crazy things that Monique comes up with and her execution is always flawless.

Monique Ryan and her performance class and their take on Thriller!

The second thing was a hilarious graphic design article I saw thanks to the Colorburned twitter account. I am passionate about design, still learning, but really interested in the nitty gritty of how to put things together to make just about everything clean, attractive and efficient. I also live with a developer, who is not a designer but who is passionate about the subject (don't get him started on bad fonts!) So I read tons of articles. I've been lucky enough to be able to design a lot of arts related stuff in the past year or so, for my group, for other groups and for myself. It seems like most people consider themselves to be inherently good at design (and some people probably are). It seems that people consider design and marketing to be "obvious", but that's totally not true!

So Ghislain Roy went ahead and wrote a how-to guide to driving a graphic designer crazy. Apparently it's a few years old and a classic, but since I'm very new to the land of putting things together to make them pretty and informative I thought I'd share. It's all about the silly requests and suggestions people get from clients when designing. I laughed so hard in a sad because it's true kind of way when I read it. You should read it! In my experience he's right about a few things in particular. Non-designers hate negative space, love Windows fonts and seem to pump their raw images straight out of an image compression artifactory. I'm not even very good yet, but I'm realizing that design of any kind has got to be the most frustrating possible career in existence.

More up later this week on producing shows!

Certification: Part 2

In Certification: Part 1 I talked about why it might be an ok idea to have certifications in belly dance, or at least a few really good ones. This is more about why I think we don't much of a separation between high quality and low quality.

I'd suggest that the belly dance community needs to start creating a better separation between legitimate certification and low-requirement, resume filler certification. Because belly dance needs certification in this part of the world, at least if parity to Western dance is the goal. But if it isn't high quality certification, it isn't going to accomplish much.

The reason I'd propose this separation and the consequent acceptance of high quality certification as important to professionals isn't happening quickly is complex and I'm probably wrong about most of my theories. First, it's early. In twenty years, I think things will be very different. Second, I think this goes for all dance and art and anything else, but belly dancers are mildly territorial about what they do, and so it can sometimes be hard to accept a technical standard, or even the assertion that there should be one. I am understating this.

Belly dance has had a willy nilly approach to technique that varies from person to person and region to region for a long, long time, and I don't think everyone is in agreement that that should change. A lot of women see belly dance as something any woman can do (and it is!) and so the idea of institutionalizing it is scary. I don't even know what I think about it half the time. But I do think the option to create something lasting, technical and standard should be there for those who want it.

Finally, because the cultural understanding doesn't exist (of ME culture or of belly dance as a part of Western culture) there isn't a lot of mainstream understanding of what belly dance is, and not a terrible lot of interest in learning about it, even when there is interest in watching. That means the onus is on us as dancers to know our stuff, and I don't know how many of us do.

I do modern belly dance, but it is ridiculously important to learn everything I can get my hands on about traditional and non-traditional belly dance forms of all kinds, traditional and non-traditional music, and belly dance related history. The more we know, the more that becomes a trickle-down cultural awareness (call it raq-onomics!) and the more respect belly dance will get as a legitimate art form. I mean, if we can't be bothered to learn about the history of our dance, how can we expect our audience to get where we are coming from when we get onstage?

Fortunately and unfortunately, our dance is subtle, complex and wonderful. I think standardizing it does have the potential to turn us all into bra-and-belted-clones, and that's not what most of us want. But it also has the capacity to give us tools that will let us express what we are really trying to say with our dance. Maybe it will help if we look at certification or standardized technique as a tool, a means, rather than a product or an end in and of itself. An artist doesn't see her art degree or her knowledge of paint brushes as a piece of art, but the art that she produces as a result of those things is improved as long as the certification adds rather than takes away from her creativity.

On a slightly tangential note, I was reading one of my favourite belly dance blogs, Adventures of the Tribal Dancer when I noticed that there were a few blogs in the blogroll that I hadn't spotted before. One of them was Megan Hartmann's blog. She's a fellow belly dancer living in a non-belly dance mecca but trying to make it, so I really get where she's coming from and devoured basically her whole blog in one sitting. You should too. But she also read this article and had some really interesting things to say about certification in particular:

"When I say I am level II, I believe it says that there is a certain standard of excellence that my technique MUST adhere to. I earned that right through my sweat, tears, sore muscles, and bruises. If you take ONE workshop with Suhaila, regardless of how you feel about the testing process, you will see that this training and format liberates you body to present and combination of movements you desire safely and effectively. Now, I’m not an elitist. I know tons of incredible dancers that aren’t certified. And I don’t look down on their choices — the format is NOT for everyone. But I find it incredibly offensive when people tell me I’ve wasted my money and time. I would never say that to a fellow dancer, and I don’t deserve it either."

Basically that's exactly what I'm saying. Certification isn't for everyone, but it is wildly helpful for some people and for some parts of the community and belly dance progress.

Ok I think I'm done here, but I am really curious about how other dancers feel about this. Especially the ATS types because a lot of certification talk revolves around Suhaila and I'm curious to know what the tribal perpsective on certification a la FCBD is. Especially given that a common understanding is crucial for tribal improv.

Certification: Part 1

I've been reading a lot of really heated discussion about a Gilded Serpent article that Miles Copeland wrote recently about contests, competitions and certifications in the belly dance world. His thesis seems to be that:

"in the end for me it’s “seeing is believing”! It is not the credits on your resume; it is what you deliver on stage, or at an audition, or in a workshop that counts. If you can’t pull it off there, fifty pages of credits are meaningless."

I've been unsure whether or not to throw my two cents in about this, because first, I'm not really the certification type myself, at least not right now, although I support their existence wholeheartedly. And second, I think a lot of people have made really great points about this subject already, on both sides. Third, it's really heated and I don't want to get yelled at!

So I'm going to talk generally about certification in the belly dance world because I come from a background in more typical Western dance and it's something I can grasp comparatively.

To preface, all of this is written from the perspective that most belly dancers want to make belly dance more accepted as compared to more established Western dance-- ballet, modern, ballroom, etc. That's inherently difficult because belly dance is still perceived as a folk dance or distinguished by stereotype in Western cultural understanding. Furthermore, this is definitely not everyone's goal, and I can't even say for sure what I think about it. So read this as one theoretical approach, and not my definitive thoughts on the matter.

I have a lot of respect for some certifications-- Suhaila's format, Fat Chance certifications-- to me those are pure formats which represent one standardized vision and that have a lot of meaning for the belly dance community, at least on this side of the world. We talk about becoming more respected and codified so that this dance can be elevated to the same prestige as other dance forms, and while I don't think truly great dancers need a piece of paper to be truly great, I also don't believe it can denied that we need more common language and understanding if we really expect belly dance to get better and give more technically and artistically. In other words, in creating those truly great dancers and having them speak the same language, certification is extremely helpful.

In the article, Miles mentions that professionals don't enter ballet competitions, for example, and that is functionally true, but where certification is concerned it's a different animal-- professional ballet dancers have almost always certified in one of the major ballet schools-- I was never a professional but I studied Cecchetti ballet and ISTD Jazz with girls who are. I see a lot of analagous content between FCBD and Suhaila belly dance certification and Imperial and Cecchetti ballet certification too. Two different major schools of thought, two different functions being served, two methods that produce high quality, structured, technical approaches to dance that art and emotion can be layered onto.

With that being said, I do imagine that the two belly dance schools I mentioned were exempt from what Miles was saying about certification--his problem seems to be with false or misleading credentials. I'm all about fixing that. Right now in most cases, a belly dance resume doesn't have a lot of meaning, and I'd argue that isn't true in the case of a lot of other dance. For example, if a ballet dancer's resume says she studied at the National Ballet, in most cases you can be reasonably sure of a competent dancer. So what do we do about it?

So I have some vague approximations of ideas about why this is such a major issue and how on earth it can be fixed, which I will post in Certification: Part 2.

Dance-iversary: Part 2

So, if you haven't read part of one of my dance-iversary entry, here it is. I talked about when I decided to go all the way and what's happened since then, looking back. Looking forward, here's looking at next August 18th. This seems like a really good time to establish some goals. So, without further ado, my goals for year two of Heather Sara trying to make it as a professional belly dancer. For our mutual benefit, these are divided into categories.

Technical Goals:

• Reach a testing level of quality with the Level 1 Suhaila stuff I'm working on now (I don't know if I have interest in actually testing, however I'm not in a hurry to decide-- I have time!) I am working on this now, but I obviously have (in my opinion) quite a ways to go, although the half time stuff is really starting to sink in properly, and I think I can do just about anything at quarter time.
  
• Start poking around at the Suhaila Level 2 material. Full time movement makes me want to puke.
  
• Do some hardcore study of American Tribal Style. It's not a style that I feel I would be likely to teach or perform, but I feel like I steal a lot of my arms and posture from ATS and it did birth tribal fusion which is definitely a close, close cousin (arguably sibling, even) of what I do. So I feel like I need to know that well.
• Study at least one traditional style of belly dance-- right now I am considering beginning some lessons with a teacher in an Algerian style. She was my first teacher, but that was eight years ago now, so I could probably use a refresher ;)
• Try to take a workshop with at least one new instructor (I have two or three lined up with instructors who I know a little better).
• Make sure not to wait too long before making arrangements to go study with Audra again. She's helped my dance more than any one other person.
  
• Continue to study one of modern or ballet at any given time (Ballet is being offered at Illusion this fall, so that's awesome). They have had a salutary influence on my dance over the past year in particular as I've tried to find my voice, and I think further cross-training will be beneficial.
  
• Learn to sew better. Learn to use my sewing machine.
  

Business Goals:

• Improve my ability to sell me and my talents, abilities to students, businesses and events. I am beginning to realize that the ability to sell yourself doesn't magically appear one day when you wake up and are legitimate, it's cultivated as much as anything else, and sometimes I've noticed it has no correlation to ability or training at all! So, that.
• Market my studio locally and create a better following of both dedicated and casual dancers. I want Illusion to be a place where students feel fulfilled regardless whether they want to dance professionally or never step foot on a stage.
• Finish the design of my web site and work with Jay to get it programmed and online. Sub-goal, buy my domain name.
  

Artistic Goals:

• Put together at least one small showcase of really serious dancers (of perhaps a variety of disciplines) who take their dance seriously and want an opportunity to perform serious or meaningful pieces that they just don't find venues for locally. I've talked about this to a couple of people now, and it seems to bother a number of them. I estimate it will probably be a for dancers/by dancers kind of event in the sense that I don't know how much general public interest there will be. In this case, I'm ok with that.
• Keep looking for my voice. I don't know if a person ever finds their voice, but as long as I have one to use most of the time, I think I can make do. Find new artistic challenges instead of getting in a technically obsessed rut. There are way more than enough dancers who love technique over emotion.
• I have one really hard, really painful emotional issue I want to tackle in dance over the next year. I don't have to perform it, and I don't have to finish it this year but I want to start trying.
• Start serious work on the "body" of dance work that I want to start creating. I have a number of perspectives on time and memory that I want to put together and start dancing.
  

Performance Goals:

• When I feel ready, take advantage of another opportunity to perform outside Newfoundland (again with the getting outside my echo chamber thing)
• Perform "You are the Blood" at some point (probably related to point one, because I don't feel particularly able to put it out in a regular show here). Or, if that stops inspiring me to the same degree, some other piece with a similar degree of importance and emotional value to me.
  

Ok I know I have a whole year, but that's a lot of goals, so I'm going to leave it at that.

Tell me! Regardless whether you dance or do something else (I'm aware of an increasing number of non-dancers who read)-- do you have special goals you're working towards right now? Short, mid and long term goals? A day when you re-evaluate (like me)? Tell me how your goals work.

Dance-iversary: Part 1

Scary.

It's been one year since I decided I wanted to be a belly dancer when I grew up. I had recently finished my degree, I was 21, just performed outside Newfoundland for the first time and I thought I knew everything about belly dance. The important thing is that I promptly learned how little I knew, I haven't really performed outside Newfoundland again (Winter Sparkle potentially excepted), and I want to be a belly dancer when I grow up even more now.

I was in the metro in Montreal with my sister when it hit me all of a sudden. We had just said goodbye to the other OhMaya girls who were about to hop on a plane and come home to Newfoundland, after our first workshop away experience. At various points throughout the sixteen or so hours of dance that weekend I had felt peaceful, excited, stupid, knowledgeable, happy, frustrated, flattered and embarrassed. But I had also felt determined. Not once did I feel like giving up or not dancing anymore. By Monday, that feeling had started to grow.

We went to Ethereal Tribal's studio for a private lesson with Andrea Fryett, and when got the metro again afterwards, I was quiet for a long time after we said goodbye to the girls. We wandered down to wait for the train and all of a sudden I exploded and told Amanda that I was sure, more than anything ever, that I definitely for sure wanted to be a belly dancer, professionally, for my job, for my whole job some day. It all kind of went from there, but I'll always remember that second in the station, starting at the fluorescent lights in the ceiling, when it dawned on me. A real live epiphany. The fact that it happened after one of the most grueling and scary weekends of my life (I've done way worse now though!) is all the more affirming to me. I want this, more than I did a year ago, if that's possible.

I've gone away to study a bunch of times now and I'm more hooked than ever. I've dumped 80+ hours into those workshops this year. Hundreds of hours of personal practice. Dozens and dozens of hours of choreography and marketing.

What do I have to show for myself?

I don't know!

I'm a way better dancer, technically, artistically-- in every way, I'm pretty sure. I'm challenging myself all the time to get better by going away and forming relationships with my peers in dance (in terms of dance type and level) instead of just contenting myself by being a big fish in a small pond. That's gotten to be very important to me. I say in the sidebar that it's hard to make a go of professional dance in Newfoundland, but I rarely elaborate on the hows and whys. The reality is that Newfoundland dance (at the very least, belly dance) is an echo chamber and since not a whole lot gets filtered in it's easy for things here to stagnate. Too many metaphors, but you get the idea. Hell, I'm pretty sure that I've done more professional/out of province training than anyone else in St. John's, and possibly Newfoundland at this point. That's not really a bragging point, so much as a depressing point-- I haven't even been dancing three years fully yet.

I've performed tons, gotten comfortable onstage, tried many different voices on for size and worked my ass off to get better. I've opened a studio with some great girls to awesome praise and media interest.

A little part of me was looking at this one year thing as a milestone, to see how much better I'd be. And I am, but it's more subtle than that little part hoped. More of a period of growth than of explosion. But the important thing is that one year is a tiny, tiny amount of time, and I've got years to hone what I do and get better. I need to be less critical of what I do and learn to see what I actually am. I've got a voice (this week!) and I'm not afraid to use it.

Ok, look for Part 2 of this entry a bit later! It will include, duh duh duh, my goals!