She was twenty, she was blonde, she had skin like a soft peach, a face to inspire poets and the sweetest of personalities. Anna gazed out at the world through clear, grey eyes, enhanced with expertly applied make up. Anna was beautiful
But Anna was fat.
Not to me, not to her friends, not to the others in the class. But in Anna’s mind, she was fat. When I looked at Anna I saw a glorious, sumptuous girl with dewy skin and plump arms like that of a baby. I confess at times I had an overwhelming desire to sink my teeth into those arms, they looked so succulent. But Anna wouldn’t have understood how much I loved the look of her. Because, like far too many women, Anna hated her body. Despite being beautiful, her perceived fatness defined her sense of self and stopped her doing the things a twenty year old should be doing. Dancing in nightclubs, lying in the sun on a foreign beach, wearing the latest fashions.
She came every week without fail, along with her friend Jess. Pretty, blonde, slimline Jess with the bubbly personality and the handsome boyfriend. The two of them were inseparable. I know it’s easy to categorise the friendship as the pretty one and the fat one, but I really don’t think it was like that. Because Anna honestly was beautiful. And gentle. And thoughtful. And oh, just the very best friend a girl could have.
She’d been coming to my classes for around a year. Always standing in the same place, gazing at me clear eyed, trying to replicate my moves. Sweetly thanking me after class, asking careful, thoughtful questions.
There was a time that neither of them had been around for a couple of weeks; but then they were back, same places as before. Happy, smiling, a little tanned, a lovely glow about the pair of them.
That night Anna hung back after class. Then came over to me, bright and bubbly and terribly excited about something. She wanted to tell me something wonderful, something so momentous and remarkable she just couldn’t keep it in. She wanted to tell me I’d changed her life.
“Charlotte!! We’ve been away on holiday and… and… I wore a bikini for the first time in my entire life!”
I know I’m an emotional person, but I’m crying right now as I remember that moment. Beautiful, sumptuous, gorgeous Anna confessed to me that until that holiday she’d never worn a sleeveless top. Never exposed her peachy arms outside of our classes. Kept herself hidden out of shame.
But, she said, since she’d been coming to my bellydance classes she’d realised gradually that yes, she was beautiful. That she didn’t need to be thin, she was lovely just as she was. She told me that recently she’d started to go clubbing with Jess wearing the latest fashions, rather than trying to cover herself up. And then, the biggest moment in her life she said, she bought a bikini to go away on holiday. And wore it on the beach. And felt proud of herself.
Time and time again women come up to me after class to tell me stories like this. How bellydance has helped them feel better about themselves, how they’ve learned to love their bodies, how they can now look at themselves in the mirror without fear.
One of the things people always ask when they phone about classes is what they should wear. I tell them to wear comfortable clothes they can move easily in and not to worry, they don’t have to show their belly. There’s always a laugh and a sigh of relief at that point. It’s what they’re most worried about - getting their bellies out in public. So they come along to class in baggy sweatpants and loose tops, well covered up, trying to hide at the back of the class, avoiding all sight of themselves in the mirrors.
Early on they buy themselves a coin hipscarf, then, as the months go on, the t-shirts get a bit shorter and the bellies start peeking out. The full midriff is usually out and proud by the intermediate class. And then the dressing up starts. The sparkly cropped tops, the rhinestoned classwear, the fancy tribal pants - all wide legged swishyness and drapery. And I smile to myself, remembering how afraid they were when they started.
The thing is, I truly believe all women are beautiful in their own ways. When I look at my class I see a rich array of lovely women - tall, short, slim or voluptuous. Red heads and brunettes, pale skinned and dark, fine featured or generous. All of them have their own personal beauty.
One of the most remarkable memories I have of my first show (see story here) was of the conversations my husband Paul had as people were leaving. One after another, men came up to him and remarked on how beautiful those dancing women were. But each time they would confide to him that there was one dancer who was particularly lovely, one who stood out amongst all the rest.
And you know what? Each man would single out a different woman. And not only that, but every one of the women who danced in that show had someone who thought she was the most beautiful of all. When I think about it, it seems the most remarkable thing I can imagine. We were all ordinary women, with insecurities and bits we hated,
but in those men’s eyes we were all beautiful and they loved
us. And each one of us had someone thinking we were the loveliest of all.
Of course men love us! They love our soft skin and our soft flesh. And each man is attracted to something different. Some men love skinny women, some like us chubby. Some go for a nice big backside, others are attracted to large breasts. It’s we women that stress about our cellulite or our stretch marks, not them. Just as some of us are attracted to big chunky men, others to willowy artistic types, so men love women of all shapes and sizes. Sex, love and chemistry is what makes the world go round.
And now you know the truth - every single one of us has someone who thinks we’re hot.
You can be absolutely sure of that.
Monday, 13 May 2013
Friday, 26 April 2013
How I learned to bellydance. The shocking truth!
This post continues from the story told here.
I was 25, not long out of college and I’d fallen in love. With a foreign culture and with a dance that seemed made for my body.
As a girl I'd been ballet mad, spending my Saturdays at the Lister School of Dance, the rest of the time reading and dreaming about ballerinas. I remember my first ever ballet class, aged five. I remember the pride and excitement of my first pair of pointe shoes, and the pain of the blisters that followed. I would paint my toes with surgical spirit and wrap lamb’s wool around them in a vain attempt to stop the skin rubbing off, but I have very soft feet and nothing would work. I also have a long big toe which made pointe work difficult and I really struggled with getting up and staying on those poor skinned toes during pirouettes and fouettés.
However, these problems paled into insignificance when I reached adolescence and the terrible truth emerged. I had hips. Proper childbearing hips. A nice small waist yes, but that doesn’t count for much in western dance. No, the big problem was those hips.
All ballet girls hold fear in them as they approach adolescence. Because no matter how hard you train, how dedicated you are, there’s one thing you really can’t control and that’s your developing body. It let me down completely at the age of 14 when I contracted a bad case of glandular fever and was ill for months. Banned from dancing for a year, by the time I was back in class it was too late - my adult body was well on its way and I was never going to be a dancer. I was too tall, too wide hipped, too chunky.
But if you’re a dancer you dance. It’s just what you do. And I always held the dream that one day I’d find a dance that could accept my body. So I trained to be a teacher, with dance as my primary subject and later took daily jazz classes at London’s newly opened Pineapple Dance Centre; working the phones in a marketing research company to pay the bills.
And then, in an Arabic nightclub I saw my first bellydancer and I knew this was it. This was a dance that was made for hips! A dance that seemed to celebrate a woman’s body rather than wanting to starve it into submission. A dance that gloried in the sensuality and sexuality of the feminine form rather than trying to keep women as girl children, denying them breasts, bellies or hips.
I would beg my Libyan boyfriend to take me to those nightclubs, night after night. And I'd sit staring. Trying to analyse what the dancers were doing. How did they move in such a sensual way but not seem overtly sexual? Music videos and R&B dancing these days use highly sexualised moves, but bellydance doesn’t (or at least shouldn’t) pout or thrust, there’s something far more pure about it, almost innocent. It’s as if the dancer is just letting her body be taken by the music.
At the end of the night I’d go back to my little flat in Clapham Junction and try to make the moves work on me. I’d stand in the middle of my room in the very early hours of the morning, shimmying and undulating. Then drop down to the carpeted floor to writhe and shiver like I’d seen that fiery Syrian dancer do just a few hours earlier.
Then I broke up with my boyfriend and I could no longer go to the nightclubs. The world of the Arabic nightclub was not one that Westerners ventured into alone and it was most certainly off limits to a young Western woman. I knew I had to find out more about bellydancing, but I had no idea how - in 1981 there were no bellydance teachers in London, no videos and certainly no internet.
It’s so easy to learn stuff today. Type bellydance into You Tube and you'll be presented with videos of dancers from every country in the world. A quick trawl of the internet and you’ll discover countless instructional DVDs and online courses, teaching you everything from absolute beginning moves through to the most complex specialist bellydance techniques. But when I started there was nothing. Even CDs hadn’t been invented!
I took a trip to the HMV record shop in London’s Oxford Street and there, in its then tiny World Music section, I found a single cassette tape. The Joy of Bellydance by George Abdo - a Lebanese singer living in America. With his long drooping moustache, sideburns, velvet bow tie and heavily frilled shirt, George Abdo was the very essence of 1970’s sexual allure. And the music, played by his band ‘The Flames of Araby’ was everything a young English girl wanted bellydance music to be. Exotic, sinuous, magical.
On the cover of the cassette a bellydancer, barely clad in skimpy chain-mail costume, posed dramatically, her nails long and silvery, eyes heavy with makeup. I dreamed of that dancer while George Abdo’s mellifluous voice transported me in my imagination to a perfumed tent in the desert. To be ravaged by a dark eyed sheik.
And then I found a book. A book on bellydancing. In a health food cafe in the scruffy south London suburb of Balham. I was riffling through the books on yoga and vegetarianism and there it was: How To Bellydance. I remember the moment I found it. Picked it up, flicked through it, saw the black and white line drawings. I couldn’t believe it! Beside myself with excitement I took it home and read it obsessively. I discovered the names of the moves I’d been trying to copy: figure of eight, snake arms, ribcage isolations. I learned how to do a bellyroll, how to do a backbend into a laydown. And how to use finger cymbals.
So yes, it's time to come clean. Time to admit the terrible truth. I might pride myself on my technique and my standards. Indeed, people tell me I'm one of the most respected bellydance teachers in the UK. And I'm proud to say that some of the best dancers in London come to my classes to learn from me.
But I can't deny it - I learned to bellydance from a book!
I was 25, not long out of college and I’d fallen in love. With a foreign culture and with a dance that seemed made for my body.
As a girl I'd been ballet mad, spending my Saturdays at the Lister School of Dance, the rest of the time reading and dreaming about ballerinas. I remember my first ever ballet class, aged five. I remember the pride and excitement of my first pair of pointe shoes, and the pain of the blisters that followed. I would paint my toes with surgical spirit and wrap lamb’s wool around them in a vain attempt to stop the skin rubbing off, but I have very soft feet and nothing would work. I also have a long big toe which made pointe work difficult and I really struggled with getting up and staying on those poor skinned toes during pirouettes and fouettés.
However, these problems paled into insignificance when I reached adolescence and the terrible truth emerged. I had hips. Proper childbearing hips. A nice small waist yes, but that doesn’t count for much in western dance. No, the big problem was those hips.
All ballet girls hold fear in them as they approach adolescence. Because no matter how hard you train, how dedicated you are, there’s one thing you really can’t control and that’s your developing body. It let me down completely at the age of 14 when I contracted a bad case of glandular fever and was ill for months. Banned from dancing for a year, by the time I was back in class it was too late - my adult body was well on its way and I was never going to be a dancer. I was too tall, too wide hipped, too chunky.
But if you’re a dancer you dance. It’s just what you do. And I always held the dream that one day I’d find a dance that could accept my body. So I trained to be a teacher, with dance as my primary subject and later took daily jazz classes at London’s newly opened Pineapple Dance Centre; working the phones in a marketing research company to pay the bills.
And then, in an Arabic nightclub I saw my first bellydancer and I knew this was it. This was a dance that was made for hips! A dance that seemed to celebrate a woman’s body rather than wanting to starve it into submission. A dance that gloried in the sensuality and sexuality of the feminine form rather than trying to keep women as girl children, denying them breasts, bellies or hips.
I would beg my Libyan boyfriend to take me to those nightclubs, night after night. And I'd sit staring. Trying to analyse what the dancers were doing. How did they move in such a sensual way but not seem overtly sexual? Music videos and R&B dancing these days use highly sexualised moves, but bellydance doesn’t (or at least shouldn’t) pout or thrust, there’s something far more pure about it, almost innocent. It’s as if the dancer is just letting her body be taken by the music.
At the end of the night I’d go back to my little flat in Clapham Junction and try to make the moves work on me. I’d stand in the middle of my room in the very early hours of the morning, shimmying and undulating. Then drop down to the carpeted floor to writhe and shiver like I’d seen that fiery Syrian dancer do just a few hours earlier.
Then I broke up with my boyfriend and I could no longer go to the nightclubs. The world of the Arabic nightclub was not one that Westerners ventured into alone and it was most certainly off limits to a young Western woman. I knew I had to find out more about bellydancing, but I had no idea how - in 1981 there were no bellydance teachers in London, no videos and certainly no internet.
It’s so easy to learn stuff today. Type bellydance into You Tube and you'll be presented with videos of dancers from every country in the world. A quick trawl of the internet and you’ll discover countless instructional DVDs and online courses, teaching you everything from absolute beginning moves through to the most complex specialist bellydance techniques. But when I started there was nothing. Even CDs hadn’t been invented!
I took a trip to the HMV record shop in London’s Oxford Street and there, in its then tiny World Music section, I found a single cassette tape. The Joy of Bellydance by George Abdo - a Lebanese singer living in America. With his long drooping moustache, sideburns, velvet bow tie and heavily frilled shirt, George Abdo was the very essence of 1970’s sexual allure. And the music, played by his band ‘The Flames of Araby’ was everything a young English girl wanted bellydance music to be. Exotic, sinuous, magical.
On the cover of the cassette a bellydancer, barely clad in skimpy chain-mail costume, posed dramatically, her nails long and silvery, eyes heavy with makeup. I dreamed of that dancer while George Abdo’s mellifluous voice transported me in my imagination to a perfumed tent in the desert. To be ravaged by a dark eyed sheik.
And then I found a book. A book on bellydancing. In a health food cafe in the scruffy south London suburb of Balham. I was riffling through the books on yoga and vegetarianism and there it was: How To Bellydance. I remember the moment I found it. Picked it up, flicked through it, saw the black and white line drawings. I couldn’t believe it! Beside myself with excitement I took it home and read it obsessively. I discovered the names of the moves I’d been trying to copy: figure of eight, snake arms, ribcage isolations. I learned how to do a bellyroll, how to do a backbend into a laydown. And how to use finger cymbals.
So yes, it's time to come clean. Time to admit the terrible truth. I might pride myself on my technique and my standards. Indeed, people tell me I'm one of the most respected bellydance teachers in the UK. And I'm proud to say that some of the best dancers in London come to my classes to learn from me.
But I can't deny it - I learned to bellydance from a book!
Friday, 5 April 2013
Sweat, struggle and wild imaginings!
I’m 54 years old. I’ve got arthritis in my knees, my toes, my right ankle and my spine. I currently have a torn cartilage in my left knee which is so painful it stops me sleeping at night. Yet later on today I’ll be leaping in the air, spinning like a top, then dropping to the floor, to roll over and then rise back up through an extended backbend.
I’ll be doing it vicariously of course. If I actually performed any of those feats right now, my torn cartilage would probably never recover. No, I’ll be doing it via five of the most exciting dancers I’ve ever worked with. Five young bellydance professionals who are giving me wings and enabling me to fly.
When I was younger I felt sure I could never teach dance - I thought I’d be insanely jealous of anyone who was better than me, or prettier, or more able to descend into the splits. I couldn’t imagine standing by and watching a lovely young woman dancing in my place, let alone helping her develop the ability to be better than I could ever be.
But the last twelve years have shown me how wrong I was. I’ve realised the intense pleasure of imparting knowledge; of seeing the joy and satisfaction women gain from moving to music; of helping bellydance students improve and become richer in their abilities; and now, of stretching excellent dancers further than they had ever expected to go.
I suppose I always had it in me. I have four siblings and although one of my brothers is older than me, I was very much the older sister. And as any big sister will know, younger siblings are terribly useful things - the ability to use them as actors in whatever game you wish to play goes some way towards compensating for all the responsibility that’s heaped on your shoulders throughout your childhood and teenage years.
My sister and younger brothers willingly played supporting roles in the plays of my childhood. Me as an eight year old blushing bride (my six year old brother as the groom, wearing an old raincoat, a flat cap and smoking a pipe.) Me as teacher, my three pupils sitting dutifully in front of me as I lectured them for hours. But most of all, me as director of countless musicals and plays which relatives were corralled into watching whenever they came to visit. When we knew a visit was forthcoming my siblings were expected to spend days rehearsing my vision for our latest show. They were remarkably dutiful and obliging so I got very used to the idea of expectant young faces looking up at me, awaiting instruction.
The girl guides were my next training ground. After a few years in the brownies and guides, I was made patrol leader (Chaffinch Patrol, 6th Cheltenham Girl Guides if you’re asking) and now had several teenagers under my command. They expected knots and flags; they got song and dance routines. The guide leader was a piano teacher and more accommodating of my artistic leanings than others might have been, but I blush when I think of those poor girls rehearsing Chattanooga Choo Choo week in and week out. Spending their precious evenings being bossed about by me as I tried to fashion non-dancing adolescents into a highly trained dance troupe.
So by rights I should always have been a dance teacher and choreographer/director. In fact, teaching is in my blood and I had grown up expecting to be a primary school teacher, like my mother. I went to an excellent teacher’s training college but it took just two weeks of teaching practice to make me realise I just wasn’t cut out for it. I was a truly dreadful school teacher - intimidated by the children, depressed by the surroundings. The tiny chairs, the smell of wax crayons, the chipped mugs in the staff room. My heart sank like a stone when I tried to picture myself there.
So I swapped my teaching degree for one in dance and decided I would be a dancer. The trouble was, I was never quite good enough or committed enough. A professional dancer needs to be practicing every single day. Nothing stands in the way of that practice, and nothing gives a dancer greater joy than performance. But both were a struggle for me. I have a fully equipped home dance studio these days but my computer is a far stronger pull than my ballet barre. Worse though, is the horrible truth that I hate performing.
That last fact will probably come as a surprise to many people, but performing makes me bad tempered and miserable. Not only that, but I have never experienced the fabled post-performance high; only an immediate, cruel, come down which can last for days. I don’t suffer from stage fright - I was pretty much brought up on stage (my first proper stage performance was at the age of eight) and when I’m on stage, walking through my choreography or standing waiting for the curtains to open, I feel like I’m at home. But the trouble is, I’m not as good a dancer as I want to be. I know I'm not and I never will be. Especially now I’m 54 years old with arthritic toes and knackered knees.
When I started bellydancing in 1981 there were no bellydance teachers in London. I learned by watching the dancers perform in the remarkable Arabic nightclubs of the time, going home to my little flat in Clapham Junction in the early hours of the morning and practicing, bleary eyed, until it was time to go off to work. In those days there was no concept of technique, it was just about trying to analyse how they did the moves and most of all, getting the feeling right. So, as a young performer my bellydance technique was very rough and ready. I would flit around the stage, shimmying and undulating and playing zills like a demon, but I didn’t really know what I was doing.
When I came back to it twenty years later everything had changed. The internet and videos had opened up an amazing world of bellydance and introduced us to the strong teaching technique of dancers from the US. I soaked up everything I could learn from workshops with visiting teachers and from the remarkable bellydance forum Bhuz.com.
But although I worked hard and despite having trained non-stop in dance from five to twenty-five, it was too late. By the time my bellydance technique was good enough for me to be up there with the very best of professional dancers world-wide, I was in my late forties and my body was letting me down badly. Twenty years of sitting at a computer desk had resulted in arthritis of my upper spine, the natural ageing process had stiffened my neck and all those early dance years had taken their toll on my knees and toes. The truth is I just can’t do the things a twenty year old can do. A backbend, head spin or big rippling undulation is actually not possible for me any more.
At times that’s been very hard to accept. It’s not just having to come to terms with the sight of my wrinkles on video footage of my dancing (we all have a fantasy image inside our heads of what our bellydancing self looks like - mine is 25 and gorgeous. Those videos lie I tell you!) No, the most difficult thing has been the fact that I have a incredibly strong idea of what I want my bellydance style to be. It’s thrilling and fabulous and unlike anything that has been done before. It’s just that my body won’t let me do it.
So that’s why I started to do the work I now do every Friday afternoon. In London’s Dance Works from 2pm until 6pm I work with five wonderful dancers who can realise my vision for me. I push them harder than they’ve been pushed before. Their bodies are young and strong and supple and I’m getting them to leap and spin; to drop into backbends and splits and become the fantasy bellydancers that have been populating my imagination for so long.
The unexpected result is that, over the past few months, I’ve felt as if I’m in some sort of a mania. Suddenly the half-formed ideas that have been floating around my imagination have flowered into vibrant life. And instead of seeing myself moving in my head, I’m visualising my dancers, who I know are able to do whatever I want and more. At times I’ve thought my head was about to burst with the noise and the images spinning around. Indeed, many nights I’ve been unable to sleep for the music and the pictures in my head. Then, in the morning, the first thing I see are more pictures, as my brain brings forward what it worked on when finally I slept.
It’s as if I’ve always been a choreographer but it’s all been bottled up inside me for fifty years and now it’s desperate to get out. And, far from being jealous of the abilities of my young company of dancers, I’m unbearably excited. My adrenaline is flowing right now as I think about the work we’ll be doing today. And while we’re working together I feel absolute joy. I know they feel the same way - last Friday was Good Friday and a holiday, but that wasn’t going to stop us. We were all there in the classroom working as hard as we could ever work.
I know that they hurt after our classes. I know that their bodies are sore and exhausted. But from what they tell me, they feel alive and deeply satisfied. That they are stretching themselves to the limits; that they are helping create something new and exciting; that they are pushing the boundaries of what our dance can be.
We’ll be premiering our work for the first time at Shimmy in the City in September - just one dance as a taster of what we can do. Raqia Hassan will be there and I can’t wait to talk to her about what it’s like to create a new style and have wonderful dancers executing it on your behalf. But mainly we’re working towards an exciting high profile show in January next year.
My five dancers will form the core of that show, which we hope will blow the audience away. My Project Lift Off girls will be dancing too - in three big group numbers. I just hope I can do them all justice with my choreography. I’m excited and I’m frightened in equal measure - I want so much and I really hope I can deliver the goods.
Oh, and I promise to spill the beans on who these wonderful dancers are very soon!
I’ll be doing it vicariously of course. If I actually performed any of those feats right now, my torn cartilage would probably never recover. No, I’ll be doing it via five of the most exciting dancers I’ve ever worked with. Five young bellydance professionals who are giving me wings and enabling me to fly.
When I was younger I felt sure I could never teach dance - I thought I’d be insanely jealous of anyone who was better than me, or prettier, or more able to descend into the splits. I couldn’t imagine standing by and watching a lovely young woman dancing in my place, let alone helping her develop the ability to be better than I could ever be.
But the last twelve years have shown me how wrong I was. I’ve realised the intense pleasure of imparting knowledge; of seeing the joy and satisfaction women gain from moving to music; of helping bellydance students improve and become richer in their abilities; and now, of stretching excellent dancers further than they had ever expected to go.
I suppose I always had it in me. I have four siblings and although one of my brothers is older than me, I was very much the older sister. And as any big sister will know, younger siblings are terribly useful things - the ability to use them as actors in whatever game you wish to play goes some way towards compensating for all the responsibility that’s heaped on your shoulders throughout your childhood and teenage years.
My sister and younger brothers willingly played supporting roles in the plays of my childhood. Me as an eight year old blushing bride (my six year old brother as the groom, wearing an old raincoat, a flat cap and smoking a pipe.) Me as teacher, my three pupils sitting dutifully in front of me as I lectured them for hours. But most of all, me as director of countless musicals and plays which relatives were corralled into watching whenever they came to visit. When we knew a visit was forthcoming my siblings were expected to spend days rehearsing my vision for our latest show. They were remarkably dutiful and obliging so I got very used to the idea of expectant young faces looking up at me, awaiting instruction.
The girl guides were my next training ground. After a few years in the brownies and guides, I was made patrol leader (Chaffinch Patrol, 6th Cheltenham Girl Guides if you’re asking) and now had several teenagers under my command. They expected knots and flags; they got song and dance routines. The guide leader was a piano teacher and more accommodating of my artistic leanings than others might have been, but I blush when I think of those poor girls rehearsing Chattanooga Choo Choo week in and week out. Spending their precious evenings being bossed about by me as I tried to fashion non-dancing adolescents into a highly trained dance troupe.
So by rights I should always have been a dance teacher and choreographer/director. In fact, teaching is in my blood and I had grown up expecting to be a primary school teacher, like my mother. I went to an excellent teacher’s training college but it took just two weeks of teaching practice to make me realise I just wasn’t cut out for it. I was a truly dreadful school teacher - intimidated by the children, depressed by the surroundings. The tiny chairs, the smell of wax crayons, the chipped mugs in the staff room. My heart sank like a stone when I tried to picture myself there.
So I swapped my teaching degree for one in dance and decided I would be a dancer. The trouble was, I was never quite good enough or committed enough. A professional dancer needs to be practicing every single day. Nothing stands in the way of that practice, and nothing gives a dancer greater joy than performance. But both were a struggle for me. I have a fully equipped home dance studio these days but my computer is a far stronger pull than my ballet barre. Worse though, is the horrible truth that I hate performing.
That last fact will probably come as a surprise to many people, but performing makes me bad tempered and miserable. Not only that, but I have never experienced the fabled post-performance high; only an immediate, cruel, come down which can last for days. I don’t suffer from stage fright - I was pretty much brought up on stage (my first proper stage performance was at the age of eight) and when I’m on stage, walking through my choreography or standing waiting for the curtains to open, I feel like I’m at home. But the trouble is, I’m not as good a dancer as I want to be. I know I'm not and I never will be. Especially now I’m 54 years old with arthritic toes and knackered knees.
When I started bellydancing in 1981 there were no bellydance teachers in London. I learned by watching the dancers perform in the remarkable Arabic nightclubs of the time, going home to my little flat in Clapham Junction in the early hours of the morning and practicing, bleary eyed, until it was time to go off to work. In those days there was no concept of technique, it was just about trying to analyse how they did the moves and most of all, getting the feeling right. So, as a young performer my bellydance technique was very rough and ready. I would flit around the stage, shimmying and undulating and playing zills like a demon, but I didn’t really know what I was doing.
When I came back to it twenty years later everything had changed. The internet and videos had opened up an amazing world of bellydance and introduced us to the strong teaching technique of dancers from the US. I soaked up everything I could learn from workshops with visiting teachers and from the remarkable bellydance forum Bhuz.com.
But although I worked hard and despite having trained non-stop in dance from five to twenty-five, it was too late. By the time my bellydance technique was good enough for me to be up there with the very best of professional dancers world-wide, I was in my late forties and my body was letting me down badly. Twenty years of sitting at a computer desk had resulted in arthritis of my upper spine, the natural ageing process had stiffened my neck and all those early dance years had taken their toll on my knees and toes. The truth is I just can’t do the things a twenty year old can do. A backbend, head spin or big rippling undulation is actually not possible for me any more.
At times that’s been very hard to accept. It’s not just having to come to terms with the sight of my wrinkles on video footage of my dancing (we all have a fantasy image inside our heads of what our bellydancing self looks like - mine is 25 and gorgeous. Those videos lie I tell you!) No, the most difficult thing has been the fact that I have a incredibly strong idea of what I want my bellydance style to be. It’s thrilling and fabulous and unlike anything that has been done before. It’s just that my body won’t let me do it.
So that’s why I started to do the work I now do every Friday afternoon. In London’s Dance Works from 2pm until 6pm I work with five wonderful dancers who can realise my vision for me. I push them harder than they’ve been pushed before. Their bodies are young and strong and supple and I’m getting them to leap and spin; to drop into backbends and splits and become the fantasy bellydancers that have been populating my imagination for so long.
The unexpected result is that, over the past few months, I’ve felt as if I’m in some sort of a mania. Suddenly the half-formed ideas that have been floating around my imagination have flowered into vibrant life. And instead of seeing myself moving in my head, I’m visualising my dancers, who I know are able to do whatever I want and more. At times I’ve thought my head was about to burst with the noise and the images spinning around. Indeed, many nights I’ve been unable to sleep for the music and the pictures in my head. Then, in the morning, the first thing I see are more pictures, as my brain brings forward what it worked on when finally I slept.
It’s as if I’ve always been a choreographer but it’s all been bottled up inside me for fifty years and now it’s desperate to get out. And, far from being jealous of the abilities of my young company of dancers, I’m unbearably excited. My adrenaline is flowing right now as I think about the work we’ll be doing today. And while we’re working together I feel absolute joy. I know they feel the same way - last Friday was Good Friday and a holiday, but that wasn’t going to stop us. We were all there in the classroom working as hard as we could ever work.
I know that they hurt after our classes. I know that their bodies are sore and exhausted. But from what they tell me, they feel alive and deeply satisfied. That they are stretching themselves to the limits; that they are helping create something new and exciting; that they are pushing the boundaries of what our dance can be.
We’ll be premiering our work for the first time at Shimmy in the City in September - just one dance as a taster of what we can do. Raqia Hassan will be there and I can’t wait to talk to her about what it’s like to create a new style and have wonderful dancers executing it on your behalf. But mainly we’re working towards an exciting high profile show in January next year.
My five dancers will form the core of that show, which we hope will blow the audience away. My Project Lift Off girls will be dancing too - in three big group numbers. I just hope I can do them all justice with my choreography. I’m excited and I’m frightened in equal measure - I want so much and I really hope I can deliver the goods.
Oh, and I promise to spill the beans on who these wonderful dancers are very soon!
Thursday, 14 March 2013
Remembering my first bellydance show
I walked into the long dressing room above the stage. All was colour and sparkle. Lightbulbs glowed around mirrors, glitter eyeshadow spilled across tables, sequinned bras hung from the backs of chairs. Half dressed, but full to the brim with uncontrollable excitement and fear, my girls primped and preened and yelped with laughter.
They turned and looked at me. And all talked at once. None of them had ever done anything like this before. The lightbulbs! The mirrors! The costumes! “Look Charlotte! Look! Look!!” I looked. And saw a room of excited women about to embark on something most people are truly terrified of - public performance. But more than that, what I saw was a room full of women who were comfortable in their own skins.
Someone had brought along a bottle of vodka, someone else a phial of Bach Flower Rescue Remedy. And so, between them, they came up with what I still think is the perfect cocktail for pre-show nerves - Vodka and Rescue Remedy!
I had my own fears but mine were different from theirs. I knew we hadn’t managed to sell many tickets. We had lots of promises but little hard cash. I wasn’t worried about the money - the small Women’s Institute Hall hadn’t cost that much to hire. But I was worried about the atmosphere in the hall and, most of all, the disappointment for the girls if, after months of hard work, they came out on stage to find themselves performing to only a few people.
Two weeks earlier I had sat in the hall all alone and imagined rows and rows of seats facing the stage. In my imagination I saw twenty people huddled in coats. Sitting, chilly and miserable in the two front rows as my girls desperately tried to entertain them with their shimmies and eights and hip drops.
So I had determined to do something about the atmosphere at least. I decided to set the room out with round tables, cabaret-style, reasoning that it would make the hall seem fuller and the audience more relaxed. I bought candles and nuts and olives, Lea and Heather talked their husbands into running a bar.
The day before the show I had arrived in the hall to find a small group of my girls hard at work, carrying swathes of chiffon to make drapes for the back stage wall. An elderly man I’d never seen before was painting a beautiful oriental-shaped window looking out onto stars and minarets. “Who’s he?” I asked. “We don’t know! We just found him here and Shelley flirted with him like mad until he offered to paint some scenery for us.”
On the day of the show itself we rehearsed on stage until the last minute. Paul worked the sound, my nephew Alasdair the lighting. The bar was being prepared, the tables set. At 7pm I lit the candles, gave Paul and Alasdair a hug, then said an urgent internal prayer, before climbing the rickety stairs up to the dressing room.
And now we were close to the moment for me to go down to the stage and confront my own fears. Like many people I have a fear of failure. It’s mostly a fear of being shown up as a fool for thinking I can do something. And, like most people I also have an internal critic. Mine sits on my right shoulder and spends a lot of time pointing out my many shortcomings. That critic knows that one of my greatest fears is of publicly being seen to fail. It never ever actually stops me from doing anything, but whenever I push myself, I know that fear and doubt will be my constant companions.
The girls were excitedly buzzing around, squeezing into costumes, sharing makeup, posing for photographs, sneaking another Vodka snifter. Thrilled to be there, telling me how wonderful everything was. But inside my head I was as low as I could possibly be. Knowing that no-one was going to turn up. Wondering what on earth I was doing trying to put on a show with fifteen women who had never been on stage before and who had been bellydancing for less than a year. Knowing that I really wasn’t up to the job and never had been.
And then the sound of feet running up the stairs, a frantic knocking on the door. Paul’s voice. “Can I come in?” A quick look round, everyone decent? I opened the door.
Paul burst into the room. “The hall’s full! We’re having to pass chairs over heads and tell people just to find anywhere they can to sit! You’re meant to be on in five minutes and they’re still queuing down the High Street! You’ve got a hit on your hands girls!!”
The excitement rose several notches. And as my fear abated, theirs lifted. “Oh my God, we’re going to go out on stage in front of hundreds of people!!”
I turned round to them, told them they were wonderful. They were my girls and they were gorgeous. Everyone would love them, they were going to be fabulous! And at that moment someone sprayed glitter up into the air. The girls looked upwards. And glitter rained gently down onto their glowing faces.
I don’t remember much of the actual show. But Shelley remembers standing in the wings waiting to go on stage and seeing a line of girls in the wings opposite; their costumes and excitement mirroring hers. I remember them all sitting around on the stage, playing finger cymbals as one by one they got up to dance short solo numbers within a bigger group dance. I remember Louisa, blonde and dressed to kill in very little, burning up the stage as she danced a dramatic drum solo.
And I remember Chantal. Not the Chantel who now teaches at Hipsinc. No, this first Chantal was the quietest, the shyest of all my students. A young woman with a dark beehive, milk white skin and dark eyes. Who hardly spoke a word in class but whom I had noticed as time had gone on and realised was a lovely dancer. I had asked her if she would dance a solo and very quietly she had agreed. I had taught her a gentle, fluid veil solo and now she danced. Softly, with reserve, but with such tenderness and beauty that every man in that hall fell in love with her.
I know the bar ran out of alcohol and the guys had to run out and buy more during the second half. And I know how many men made a point of saying to Paul that every single woman in that show was so beautiful. Which was when I realised that men don’t expect us to be supermodels. They love us for being women, with all our lovely soft flesh and our lumps and bumps and our imperfections.
I remember the applause from the audience that seemed to go on forever. And the wonderful bouquet of flowers they presented me with at the end of the show. I remember seeing the vicar in the audience, cheering his head off. And Chantal being dragged off into the night by her boyfriend; a wonderful Mona Lisa smile on her face, a look of lust on his. And I remember Lea calling out: “come on girls, let’s go and raise some more money - we’ll charge them a quid a shimmy!!” And seeing them in amongst the audience, laughing and shimmying and rattling the collection tins. As the bar ran out of alcohol once again and the audience refused to go home.
And finally I remember standing at the back of the hall, watching all the laughter and mayhem and joy. And thinking to myself. “This would make an amazing film.”
They turned and looked at me. And all talked at once. None of them had ever done anything like this before. The lightbulbs! The mirrors! The costumes! “Look Charlotte! Look! Look!!” I looked. And saw a room of excited women about to embark on something most people are truly terrified of - public performance. But more than that, what I saw was a room full of women who were comfortable in their own skins.
Someone had brought along a bottle of vodka, someone else a phial of Bach Flower Rescue Remedy. And so, between them, they came up with what I still think is the perfect cocktail for pre-show nerves - Vodka and Rescue Remedy!
I had my own fears but mine were different from theirs. I knew we hadn’t managed to sell many tickets. We had lots of promises but little hard cash. I wasn’t worried about the money - the small Women’s Institute Hall hadn’t cost that much to hire. But I was worried about the atmosphere in the hall and, most of all, the disappointment for the girls if, after months of hard work, they came out on stage to find themselves performing to only a few people.
Two weeks earlier I had sat in the hall all alone and imagined rows and rows of seats facing the stage. In my imagination I saw twenty people huddled in coats. Sitting, chilly and miserable in the two front rows as my girls desperately tried to entertain them with their shimmies and eights and hip drops.
So I had determined to do something about the atmosphere at least. I decided to set the room out with round tables, cabaret-style, reasoning that it would make the hall seem fuller and the audience more relaxed. I bought candles and nuts and olives, Lea and Heather talked their husbands into running a bar.
The day before the show I had arrived in the hall to find a small group of my girls hard at work, carrying swathes of chiffon to make drapes for the back stage wall. An elderly man I’d never seen before was painting a beautiful oriental-shaped window looking out onto stars and minarets. “Who’s he?” I asked. “We don’t know! We just found him here and Shelley flirted with him like mad until he offered to paint some scenery for us.”
On the day of the show itself we rehearsed on stage until the last minute. Paul worked the sound, my nephew Alasdair the lighting. The bar was being prepared, the tables set. At 7pm I lit the candles, gave Paul and Alasdair a hug, then said an urgent internal prayer, before climbing the rickety stairs up to the dressing room.
And now we were close to the moment for me to go down to the stage and confront my own fears. Like many people I have a fear of failure. It’s mostly a fear of being shown up as a fool for thinking I can do something. And, like most people I also have an internal critic. Mine sits on my right shoulder and spends a lot of time pointing out my many shortcomings. That critic knows that one of my greatest fears is of publicly being seen to fail. It never ever actually stops me from doing anything, but whenever I push myself, I know that fear and doubt will be my constant companions.
The girls were excitedly buzzing around, squeezing into costumes, sharing makeup, posing for photographs, sneaking another Vodka snifter. Thrilled to be there, telling me how wonderful everything was. But inside my head I was as low as I could possibly be. Knowing that no-one was going to turn up. Wondering what on earth I was doing trying to put on a show with fifteen women who had never been on stage before and who had been bellydancing for less than a year. Knowing that I really wasn’t up to the job and never had been.
And then the sound of feet running up the stairs, a frantic knocking on the door. Paul’s voice. “Can I come in?” A quick look round, everyone decent? I opened the door.
Paul burst into the room. “The hall’s full! We’re having to pass chairs over heads and tell people just to find anywhere they can to sit! You’re meant to be on in five minutes and they’re still queuing down the High Street! You’ve got a hit on your hands girls!!”
The excitement rose several notches. And as my fear abated, theirs lifted. “Oh my God, we’re going to go out on stage in front of hundreds of people!!”
I turned round to them, told them they were wonderful. They were my girls and they were gorgeous. Everyone would love them, they were going to be fabulous! And at that moment someone sprayed glitter up into the air. The girls looked upwards. And glitter rained gently down onto their glowing faces.
I don’t remember much of the actual show. But Shelley remembers standing in the wings waiting to go on stage and seeing a line of girls in the wings opposite; their costumes and excitement mirroring hers. I remember them all sitting around on the stage, playing finger cymbals as one by one they got up to dance short solo numbers within a bigger group dance. I remember Louisa, blonde and dressed to kill in very little, burning up the stage as she danced a dramatic drum solo.
And I remember Chantal. Not the Chantel who now teaches at Hipsinc. No, this first Chantal was the quietest, the shyest of all my students. A young woman with a dark beehive, milk white skin and dark eyes. Who hardly spoke a word in class but whom I had noticed as time had gone on and realised was a lovely dancer. I had asked her if she would dance a solo and very quietly she had agreed. I had taught her a gentle, fluid veil solo and now she danced. Softly, with reserve, but with such tenderness and beauty that every man in that hall fell in love with her.
I know the bar ran out of alcohol and the guys had to run out and buy more during the second half. And I know how many men made a point of saying to Paul that every single woman in that show was so beautiful. Which was when I realised that men don’t expect us to be supermodels. They love us for being women, with all our lovely soft flesh and our lumps and bumps and our imperfections.
I remember the applause from the audience that seemed to go on forever. And the wonderful bouquet of flowers they presented me with at the end of the show. I remember seeing the vicar in the audience, cheering his head off. And Chantal being dragged off into the night by her boyfriend; a wonderful Mona Lisa smile on her face, a look of lust on his. And I remember Lea calling out: “come on girls, let’s go and raise some more money - we’ll charge them a quid a shimmy!!” And seeing them in amongst the audience, laughing and shimmying and rattling the collection tins. As the bar ran out of alcohol once again and the audience refused to go home.
And finally I remember standing at the back of the hall, watching all the laughter and mayhem and joy. And thinking to myself. “This would make an amazing film.”
Saturday, 2 March 2013
On The Button, Voted Best Bellydance Blog!
I'm absolutely thrilled that On The Button has been voted Best Bellydance Blog in an international competition organised by Daily Bellydance Quickies!
Thank you so much to everyone who voted for me, I'm really grateful and incredibly happy that so many people enjoy reading the blog. It was a very tight contest with only two votes between the top two - myself and Princess Farhana's Missives From the Royal Palace, which is very amusing because Princess Farhana is actually staying with me right now - it's been bellydance swords at dawn I tell you!
And do check out the Daily Bellydance Quickies! Mahin Sciacca sends out a daily email to your inbox. It might be a bellydance tip or a short combination or a zill pattern. Or it might be a video of a great dancer or a recommendation for a book. Whatever it is, it's always interesting.
And on a totally unrelated note, this blogger programme has just randomly sent an old post from this blog to my inbox, and presumably to everyone who is subscribed. It did the same thing last month and I have no idea why!! So apologies if you had an email with a post about me restarting the blog - it's actually from May last year and I can't for the life of me work out why it got sent out!
Thank you so much to everyone who voted for me, I'm really grateful and incredibly happy that so many people enjoy reading the blog. It was a very tight contest with only two votes between the top two - myself and Princess Farhana's Missives From the Royal Palace, which is very amusing because Princess Farhana is actually staying with me right now - it's been bellydance swords at dawn I tell you!
And do check out the Daily Bellydance Quickies! Mahin Sciacca sends out a daily email to your inbox. It might be a bellydance tip or a short combination or a zill pattern. Or it might be a video of a great dancer or a recommendation for a book. Whatever it is, it's always interesting.
And on a totally unrelated note, this blogger programme has just randomly sent an old post from this blog to my inbox, and presumably to everyone who is subscribed. It did the same thing last month and I have no idea why!! So apologies if you had an email with a post about me restarting the blog - it's actually from May last year and I can't for the life of me work out why it got sent out!
Tuesday, 19 February 2013
Restaurants and haflas. Two very different worlds
The last blog post I wrote - about my youthful bellygram career - resulted in a fascinating discussion on my Facebook page, in the course of which I mentioned that I increasingly feel uncomfortable about restaurant dancing. I'll explain more...
I think ours is a very schizophrenic dance form. Bellydancing exists, I would argue, in two very different worlds. On the one hand we have the world of dance classes and haflas. A primarily female world, it’s one where we learn about the fascinating dance and culture of the middle east. It's a world where it doesn’t matter what age or what dress size you are. Where women are encouraged and supported and recognised as beautiful and special.
In this world, haflas and showcases give us the opportunity to perform a wide variety of styles grouped under the general banner of bellydancing. We dance baladi, saidi, khaleeji, sharqi. We whip out a stick or a set of wings, set the audience alight with a drum solo, or move them to tears with an Om Khalsoum number. We experiment with fusion: tribal, gothic, hip hop or samba. Or keep it pure, with none so pure as Egyptian.
It’s wonderful participating in these events. Our audiences are wildly appreciative. They whoop and zhagareet and clap along at the drop of a hip. Forgiving us when we go wrong, not caring about our age or our stretch marks. Every clever belly trick, every quivering shimmy, is recognised and applauded. We are given space and time and attention.
Then there’s the other world. The world of the restaurant dancer. A world that (with a few notable exceptions) only the young, beautiful and slender may enter. A world where we have to dance whilst squeezing between tables, trying to avoid waiters and taking care not to step on broken glass or spilled humous. This is a world where the (mixed) audience cares not a jot for the authenticity of our performance, they just want to look at the pretty girl in the sparkly costume. Sadly, a few of them really wish we weren’t there and some just can’t bear to watch, especially when we get up close.
And, however appreciative the audience at a restaurant, in most cases we are never able to properly dance. There will only be space for a bit of undulating, a few isolations and pops and of course, some of our very best shimmying. Our job is to create a party atmosphere. A taste of the exotic. And, in most cases, to get up close and personal with the punters.
Maybe it’s my age, maybe it’s because I’ve just been around too long; but I find myself increasingly uncomfortable when I’m in a small space and a dancer’s naked flesh is very close. I don’t think I’m a prude and I love the sight of a beautiful body, male or female. But the tight layout of many restaurants means that at times I find my eyes just a bit too close to a bouncing pair of partially covered breasts for comfort. I know that many men really don’t know where to look when a bellydancer comes up to their table. And actually I understand how they feel. I can imagine that for some men it might sometimes feel a little too near to lap dancing.
I’m sure that one of the reasons bellydance isn’t taken seriously as an art form is that most people only see a bellydancer in a restaurant setting. Where she can’t dance properly and where the flesh on show is not only close, but is highlighted by the costuming and by those few movements we have at our disposal. A bellydance bra really pushes the breasts up high. And then we do a chest bump! What’s a man to think? That it’s art?
But! Restaurant bellydancing is great! People love it. Most diners in a Middle Eastern restaurant really enjoy seeing a bellydancer - she’s exotic, she’s lively and she lifts the atmosphere wonderfully. People often ring me to book my gorgeous colleague Chantel Phillips to dance at an event. “She’s amazing”, they say, “we saw her dance at a restaurant and she was incredible!”
Because, of course, restaurants not only offer bellydancers regular income, but they're also a public showcase. They are the only venues a professional bellydancer can perform for the general public and be paid too!
But we’re caught in a vicious circle. Our only public platform doesn’t enable us to dance properly. So we’re not taken seriously. Here in the West, no-one outside the world of haflas and monthly showcases sees our ‘real’ dancing, so no mainstream promoter is ever going to put on a bellydance show. And so the circle winds round and binds us in to the chest bumps and the belly pops and the association with pole dancing or worse.
I just wish that there were other opportunities for professional dancers to perform. In spaces where we can really stretch our legs and showcase our dance skills. And that's why all my energies are currently channelled into trying to create a new bellydance style for the big stage. A style to thrill the general public and keep them coming back for more. A style to capture the attention of journalists and mainstream promoters. A style with drama and excitement and big ideas. Bellydance for the future.
I’ve started work on my dream properly now. In January I started to develop my new way of dancing in my Project Lift Off classes in London. We used far more drama, more dynamic range, greater extension in our movements - leg kicks, jumps, dramatic floorwork. My Extreme Bellydance classes are part of it too, of experimenting with different ways of moving. Incorporating exciting footwork, jumps, leaps and spins. And the exploratory process will continue throughout the coming year - in all my classes in London and Croydon.
And, most excitingly, I’ve gathered together a small company of six superb full-time professional dancers who will be exploring the future with me. We start this Friday, working experimentally to create something that we hope will be really amazing. We have until September to create the style (when we will showcase it for the first time at Shimmy in the City). And we’re giving ourselves a year to create a show to thrill.
We première the show next January in London and we are beyond excited about it. We believe it’s the future. That we can move bellydance forward and create new opportunities for dancers and new experiences for audiences.
Whatever happens, it's the start of an exhilarating journey! Maybe to a different bellydance world...
I think ours is a very schizophrenic dance form. Bellydancing exists, I would argue, in two very different worlds. On the one hand we have the world of dance classes and haflas. A primarily female world, it’s one where we learn about the fascinating dance and culture of the middle east. It's a world where it doesn’t matter what age or what dress size you are. Where women are encouraged and supported and recognised as beautiful and special.
In this world, haflas and showcases give us the opportunity to perform a wide variety of styles grouped under the general banner of bellydancing. We dance baladi, saidi, khaleeji, sharqi. We whip out a stick or a set of wings, set the audience alight with a drum solo, or move them to tears with an Om Khalsoum number. We experiment with fusion: tribal, gothic, hip hop or samba. Or keep it pure, with none so pure as Egyptian.
It’s wonderful participating in these events. Our audiences are wildly appreciative. They whoop and zhagareet and clap along at the drop of a hip. Forgiving us when we go wrong, not caring about our age or our stretch marks. Every clever belly trick, every quivering shimmy, is recognised and applauded. We are given space and time and attention.
Then there’s the other world. The world of the restaurant dancer. A world that (with a few notable exceptions) only the young, beautiful and slender may enter. A world where we have to dance whilst squeezing between tables, trying to avoid waiters and taking care not to step on broken glass or spilled humous. This is a world where the (mixed) audience cares not a jot for the authenticity of our performance, they just want to look at the pretty girl in the sparkly costume. Sadly, a few of them really wish we weren’t there and some just can’t bear to watch, especially when we get up close.
And, however appreciative the audience at a restaurant, in most cases we are never able to properly dance. There will only be space for a bit of undulating, a few isolations and pops and of course, some of our very best shimmying. Our job is to create a party atmosphere. A taste of the exotic. And, in most cases, to get up close and personal with the punters.
Maybe it’s my age, maybe it’s because I’ve just been around too long; but I find myself increasingly uncomfortable when I’m in a small space and a dancer’s naked flesh is very close. I don’t think I’m a prude and I love the sight of a beautiful body, male or female. But the tight layout of many restaurants means that at times I find my eyes just a bit too close to a bouncing pair of partially covered breasts for comfort. I know that many men really don’t know where to look when a bellydancer comes up to their table. And actually I understand how they feel. I can imagine that for some men it might sometimes feel a little too near to lap dancing.
I’m sure that one of the reasons bellydance isn’t taken seriously as an art form is that most people only see a bellydancer in a restaurant setting. Where she can’t dance properly and where the flesh on show is not only close, but is highlighted by the costuming and by those few movements we have at our disposal. A bellydance bra really pushes the breasts up high. And then we do a chest bump! What’s a man to think? That it’s art?
But! Restaurant bellydancing is great! People love it. Most diners in a Middle Eastern restaurant really enjoy seeing a bellydancer - she’s exotic, she’s lively and she lifts the atmosphere wonderfully. People often ring me to book my gorgeous colleague Chantel Phillips to dance at an event. “She’s amazing”, they say, “we saw her dance at a restaurant and she was incredible!”
Because, of course, restaurants not only offer bellydancers regular income, but they're also a public showcase. They are the only venues a professional bellydancer can perform for the general public and be paid too!
But we’re caught in a vicious circle. Our only public platform doesn’t enable us to dance properly. So we’re not taken seriously. Here in the West, no-one outside the world of haflas and monthly showcases sees our ‘real’ dancing, so no mainstream promoter is ever going to put on a bellydance show. And so the circle winds round and binds us in to the chest bumps and the belly pops and the association with pole dancing or worse.
I just wish that there were other opportunities for professional dancers to perform. In spaces where we can really stretch our legs and showcase our dance skills. And that's why all my energies are currently channelled into trying to create a new bellydance style for the big stage. A style to thrill the general public and keep them coming back for more. A style to capture the attention of journalists and mainstream promoters. A style with drama and excitement and big ideas. Bellydance for the future.
I’ve started work on my dream properly now. In January I started to develop my new way of dancing in my Project Lift Off classes in London. We used far more drama, more dynamic range, greater extension in our movements - leg kicks, jumps, dramatic floorwork. My Extreme Bellydance classes are part of it too, of experimenting with different ways of moving. Incorporating exciting footwork, jumps, leaps and spins. And the exploratory process will continue throughout the coming year - in all my classes in London and Croydon.
And, most excitingly, I’ve gathered together a small company of six superb full-time professional dancers who will be exploring the future with me. We start this Friday, working experimentally to create something that we hope will be really amazing. We have until September to create the style (when we will showcase it for the first time at Shimmy in the City). And we’re giving ourselves a year to create a show to thrill.
We première the show next January in London and we are beyond excited about it. We believe it’s the future. That we can move bellydance forward and create new opportunities for dancers and new experiences for audiences.
Whatever happens, it's the start of an exhilarating journey! Maybe to a different bellydance world...
Monday, 21 January 2013
Backbends and Bellygrams
There was only one place to hide - a narrow cupboard in the corner. The problem was that it had a slatted wooden door, so if I moved I’d be seen. It was cramped too, but I had no choice. I climbed in quickly and shut the door behind me before I could be discovered.
Then I heard voices. There were four of them. The boss (a man I had only seen once, but who, I could tell, was strong and powerful) and his three employees. The big man entered first, the others followed, quiet and subdued.
When the big man spoke he was clearly angry. His rage was controlled, held in check, but anyone could tell there was trouble ahead for his three shaken colleagues. He started to berate them. Told them how they’d messed up, how they’d lost him money and credibility. One was in hotter water than the others and, with a cold voice, the boss outlined how, while the target of his wrath had been away, the job had gone dreadfully, terribly wrong.
The man being accused was clearly shaken. It was sounding bad.
The big man’s invective was coming to a head. “To see what I mean, JUST LISTEN TO THIS!!!” He pressed a button. The room filled with bellydance music. I leapt out of the cupboard, headed for the man on the far left and started to gyrate and shimmy, before dropping down to the floor and writhing in front of the shocked employee.
It was the man's birthday. And I was the surprise. Thank goodness he was young or I think we could have been calling an ambulance!
The place was an advertising agency in Covent Garden, the year was 1982 and I’d been booked as a bellygram. Singing telegrams and strippergrams were all the rage at the time: out of work actors dressed as police officers, nuns or gorillas would appear out of the blue and proceed to sing or strip to embarrass a birthday boy or girl. As far as I knew, I was the only bellygram in London. I would climb on to my motorbike (dressed head to toe in black leather if you’re asking…) and ride off to a venue somewhere in London where I would find a place to change secretly. At the appointed time I’d burst into the restaurant or bar, place my Sony Walkman on the floor or table and proceed to dance and undulate around the victim. I did a mean backbend and some pretty sultry floor work in those days too.
I remember changing in a freezing outside toilet in a slightly dangerous looking pub in the Old Kent Road, directing the heat of the hand-dryer onto my icy body before parting the crowds in the public bar. I jumped up on tables in restaurants, shimmying my way through the plates and glasses. And I got up on the antique polished desk of the manager of The Who, went down into a backbend and laid myself out in front of him, while his laughing staff looked on.
Yesterday, on Facebook, someone asked me what I thought about bellydancers who advertise themselves as exotic dancers and perform in nightclubs alongside pole dancers or strippers. The questioner pointed out that, by doing so, they are perpetuating the perception of bellydance as a sleazy activity, rather than a serious dance form. I think it’s a fascinating question and one that goes right to the heart of how bellydance is viewed.
These days most professional bellydancers want to be seen as serious dancers - as artists. They want people to understand that bellydance is an ancient dance form with its roots in the folk culture of the Middle East. That it's a richly textured and challenging dance which deserves to have a place alongside Western mainstream styles such as jazz or hip hop. And I’m one of them. I want bellydance to be appreciated by a far wider public as the beautiful, rich and fascinating dance form that it is. I want to hold my head up high amongst the ballet and West End dancers and choreographers and I want aspiring bellydance professionals to undergo the type of tough physical training that those dancers have always expected, so that we can be the very best performers possible.
So, in the light of the question I was asked yesterday, I look back at that 24 year old girl, undulating on the floor in front of a shocked advertising executive and I wonder what I think of her.
Well, firstly I have to say that I was just doing what I had seen Syrian and Palestinian dancers doing in the Arab nightclubs in London (see blog post here). In those performances there was a lot of jumping up in the air and dropping to the floor to shiver and undulate. And in front of a large crowd of Arab men too. Men who would most certainly have assumed those dancers were prostitutes.
Those of us who bellydance in the West have to accept that in the Arab world, bellydancers are considered to be prostitutes. And truthfully, many of them are. At the very least, they are behaving in a way that is far outside social norms. Bellydance has never been something that nice Arabic girls do in public. It’s true that Arab girls absolutely love to dance and will almost certainly dance at home with their female friends. But in public? No. If a Muslim woman dances in public in front of of a mixed audience she is believed to be the very worst kind of woman. And in countries like Egypt, professional bellydancers have to live with the shame of knowing that what they do is considered wicked by the majority of society.
So in trying to promote bellydance as a high art, we in the West are being revisionist. We are trying to create a bellydance culture that feels acceptable to us, that we can be proud of. There is nothing wrong with trying to change the way that bellydance is viewed, but we can’t hide from the fact that ‘exotic dancer’ is exactly what bellydancers traditionally were.
I also have to look back at my younger self and admit that I was fascinated by the sexual sub-culture of London. I was thrilled to be part of it, to walk around Soho at night and feel that, as a bellydancer I belonged to that dark, slightly dangerous underworld. I’ve always loved the ‘other’ in society - the exotic, the experimental, the people who push at the boundaries.
Of course in a perfect world I’d also love bellydance to be accepted by mainstream society, for people not to look down on the dance I make my living from. But I also rather like the fact that when I say I’m a bellydancer I know I’m immediately interesting to most people. I’m different and, yes, exotic. And I know that many of my students feel the same. It’s a giggle to tell people at drinks parties that you are a bellydancer.
Indeed, I’m prepared to guess that for many of us in the West, the exoticism and slightly risqué reputation is one of the things that drew us to bellydance in the first place. There’s something excitingly naughty for many women in learning to bellydance and I think we should accept that. Even embrace it.
That doesn’t mean of course, that we can’t disapprove of certain things. It’s everyone’s prerogative to dislike and, yes, disapprove. Personally I don’t like heavily sexualised bellydancing. I don't like seeing loads of chest bumps in a dance and I can’t abide a pouty face or a floor hump. And don't get me started on the dancers who shake their breasts or backsides in men's faces! But even if I don't like it, I don’t want to shut that dancing down, just as I don’t want to stop ‘commercial’ R & B dancing on music videos, even though I personally dislike it. Instead I want to create something that in my mind is ‘better’ and put it out there in the hope that people will love it and choose it over the other.
And I have to admit that I did my fair share of ‘floor humping’ in the past. Not least on that beautiful polished antique desk, behind which sat The Who’s manager. I’d jumped up there because I’d never seen anyone look quite so bored with my performance as Bill Curbishley did that day. I suppose when you’re the manager of The Who it’s hard to be impressed and I would imagine you get to see an awful lot of semi-naked young women in the course of your job. But his staff had paid for me as a birthday treat for him, and were now crowded in the doorway, excitedly watching me dance.
I leapt up on the desk, did a full backbend and then descended slowly down onto my knees and then my back in front of him. I undulated, I belly rolled, I fluttered. I was 24 years old, I was in great shape, I was dressed in very little and I knew I looked amazing. Surely I’d get a reaction from him now!
He looked down, held my eye, took his cigar out of his mouth. And said: “Mind the desk love.”
Oh well, you can’t win them all.
Then I heard voices. There were four of them. The boss (a man I had only seen once, but who, I could tell, was strong and powerful) and his three employees. The big man entered first, the others followed, quiet and subdued.
When the big man spoke he was clearly angry. His rage was controlled, held in check, but anyone could tell there was trouble ahead for his three shaken colleagues. He started to berate them. Told them how they’d messed up, how they’d lost him money and credibility. One was in hotter water than the others and, with a cold voice, the boss outlined how, while the target of his wrath had been away, the job had gone dreadfully, terribly wrong.
The man being accused was clearly shaken. It was sounding bad.
The big man’s invective was coming to a head. “To see what I mean, JUST LISTEN TO THIS!!!” He pressed a button. The room filled with bellydance music. I leapt out of the cupboard, headed for the man on the far left and started to gyrate and shimmy, before dropping down to the floor and writhing in front of the shocked employee.
It was the man's birthday. And I was the surprise. Thank goodness he was young or I think we could have been calling an ambulance!
The place was an advertising agency in Covent Garden, the year was 1982 and I’d been booked as a bellygram. Singing telegrams and strippergrams were all the rage at the time: out of work actors dressed as police officers, nuns or gorillas would appear out of the blue and proceed to sing or strip to embarrass a birthday boy or girl. As far as I knew, I was the only bellygram in London. I would climb on to my motorbike (dressed head to toe in black leather if you’re asking…) and ride off to a venue somewhere in London where I would find a place to change secretly. At the appointed time I’d burst into the restaurant or bar, place my Sony Walkman on the floor or table and proceed to dance and undulate around the victim. I did a mean backbend and some pretty sultry floor work in those days too.
I remember changing in a freezing outside toilet in a slightly dangerous looking pub in the Old Kent Road, directing the heat of the hand-dryer onto my icy body before parting the crowds in the public bar. I jumped up on tables in restaurants, shimmying my way through the plates and glasses. And I got up on the antique polished desk of the manager of The Who, went down into a backbend and laid myself out in front of him, while his laughing staff looked on.
Yesterday, on Facebook, someone asked me what I thought about bellydancers who advertise themselves as exotic dancers and perform in nightclubs alongside pole dancers or strippers. The questioner pointed out that, by doing so, they are perpetuating the perception of bellydance as a sleazy activity, rather than a serious dance form. I think it’s a fascinating question and one that goes right to the heart of how bellydance is viewed.
These days most professional bellydancers want to be seen as serious dancers - as artists. They want people to understand that bellydance is an ancient dance form with its roots in the folk culture of the Middle East. That it's a richly textured and challenging dance which deserves to have a place alongside Western mainstream styles such as jazz or hip hop. And I’m one of them. I want bellydance to be appreciated by a far wider public as the beautiful, rich and fascinating dance form that it is. I want to hold my head up high amongst the ballet and West End dancers and choreographers and I want aspiring bellydance professionals to undergo the type of tough physical training that those dancers have always expected, so that we can be the very best performers possible.
So, in the light of the question I was asked yesterday, I look back at that 24 year old girl, undulating on the floor in front of a shocked advertising executive and I wonder what I think of her.
Well, firstly I have to say that I was just doing what I had seen Syrian and Palestinian dancers doing in the Arab nightclubs in London (see blog post here). In those performances there was a lot of jumping up in the air and dropping to the floor to shiver and undulate. And in front of a large crowd of Arab men too. Men who would most certainly have assumed those dancers were prostitutes.
Those of us who bellydance in the West have to accept that in the Arab world, bellydancers are considered to be prostitutes. And truthfully, many of them are. At the very least, they are behaving in a way that is far outside social norms. Bellydance has never been something that nice Arabic girls do in public. It’s true that Arab girls absolutely love to dance and will almost certainly dance at home with their female friends. But in public? No. If a Muslim woman dances in public in front of of a mixed audience she is believed to be the very worst kind of woman. And in countries like Egypt, professional bellydancers have to live with the shame of knowing that what they do is considered wicked by the majority of society.
So in trying to promote bellydance as a high art, we in the West are being revisionist. We are trying to create a bellydance culture that feels acceptable to us, that we can be proud of. There is nothing wrong with trying to change the way that bellydance is viewed, but we can’t hide from the fact that ‘exotic dancer’ is exactly what bellydancers traditionally were.
I also have to look back at my younger self and admit that I was fascinated by the sexual sub-culture of London. I was thrilled to be part of it, to walk around Soho at night and feel that, as a bellydancer I belonged to that dark, slightly dangerous underworld. I’ve always loved the ‘other’ in society - the exotic, the experimental, the people who push at the boundaries.
Of course in a perfect world I’d also love bellydance to be accepted by mainstream society, for people not to look down on the dance I make my living from. But I also rather like the fact that when I say I’m a bellydancer I know I’m immediately interesting to most people. I’m different and, yes, exotic. And I know that many of my students feel the same. It’s a giggle to tell people at drinks parties that you are a bellydancer.
Indeed, I’m prepared to guess that for many of us in the West, the exoticism and slightly risqué reputation is one of the things that drew us to bellydance in the first place. There’s something excitingly naughty for many women in learning to bellydance and I think we should accept that. Even embrace it.
That doesn’t mean of course, that we can’t disapprove of certain things. It’s everyone’s prerogative to dislike and, yes, disapprove. Personally I don’t like heavily sexualised bellydancing. I don't like seeing loads of chest bumps in a dance and I can’t abide a pouty face or a floor hump. And don't get me started on the dancers who shake their breasts or backsides in men's faces! But even if I don't like it, I don’t want to shut that dancing down, just as I don’t want to stop ‘commercial’ R & B dancing on music videos, even though I personally dislike it. Instead I want to create something that in my mind is ‘better’ and put it out there in the hope that people will love it and choose it over the other.
And I have to admit that I did my fair share of ‘floor humping’ in the past. Not least on that beautiful polished antique desk, behind which sat The Who’s manager. I’d jumped up there because I’d never seen anyone look quite so bored with my performance as Bill Curbishley did that day. I suppose when you’re the manager of The Who it’s hard to be impressed and I would imagine you get to see an awful lot of semi-naked young women in the course of your job. But his staff had paid for me as a birthday treat for him, and were now crowded in the doorway, excitedly watching me dance.
I leapt up on the desk, did a full backbend and then descended slowly down onto my knees and then my back in front of him. I undulated, I belly rolled, I fluttered. I was 24 years old, I was in great shape, I was dressed in very little and I knew I looked amazing. Surely I’d get a reaction from him now!
He looked down, held my eye, took his cigar out of his mouth. And said: “Mind the desk love.”
Oh well, you can’t win them all.
Thursday, 3 January 2013
Teaching my first bellydance class
This is part of my life story, sections of which I'm publishing on my blog. You can read the previous section here.
It was frosty the day after the village cabaret and the hedgerows were white as Paul and I walked down the lane. The pub and church looked like they belonged on a Christmas card, standing bright and clear in the cold morning air. Like the houses in the village the church and pub are Victorian pretty. The hall on the other hand is as dull and utilitarian as a 20th century building could be. It squats across the road from its characterful cousins, low, brick-built and deeply, boringly rectangular.
Peer in through the windows and you’ll see scuffed wooden floors and the shabby little stage. But those floors are scuffed from decades of chairs pushed back after warm-hearted village lunches and lively Harvest Suppers, the participants full of good, home cooked food and copious quantities of wine.
Alcohol is rather a feature of the social life here in Markbeech. At the annual Royal British Legion dinner, where the older men of the village reputedly get plastered and tell stories of past glory, legend has it that Sir Robin Leigh Pemberton, then Governor of the Bank of England and that year’s keynote speaker, found one of the revellers in a ditch after dinner and had to pull him out before he could get into his chauffeur-driven Rolls Royce and head off home!
The lock to the front door of the village hall is tricky. There’s a knack to it that I’ve never quite mastered, but there’s always a lovely rush of warm air as the handle finally turns and you walk into the entrance hall. Warm because of the village nursery school held there every weekday. And because the view is held that it’s cheaper to leave the heating on constant rather than try and reheat such a big space from scratch every day. But there’s also the warmth of memories. Memories of happy evenings with friends.
There’s such a sense of community history when you enter a place like this. Markbeech villagers have been putting on shows and celebrating the signposts of the year in this hall for several generations. Stories are still told of the shows staged here by long-dead villagers before and during the second world war. When we arrived (aged 40 and 50 respectively) Paul and I were considered youngsters and the generation just above us were responsible for the parties and events. As a result the dress code was often dinner jackets and evening dress, yet there was an air of post-war austerity about meal choices and ticket pricing.
Ten years ago our age group started to take over proceedings and things changed a little. Meals got a bit fancier, more music was introduced, dress became more casual. And recently a lively younger team have started to introduce canapés and sparkling wine before dinner - a sign of the greater affluence of the generation who grew up in the 80s.
That morning Paul and I walked into a busy scene as friends cleared up the hall after the cabaret. Andro was up a ladder taking down the silver stars, Pam from next door was sweeping the floor. Serving dishes were being gathered to redistribute to their rightful owners, rubbish bags were piled high before being taken outside.
All the talk was of the success of the night before. Those of us who had performed were still high on adrenaline and audience members were full of excitement and praise. Of course people wanted to know where I learned to bellydance and so I told them a little of my story - how I had trained to be a dancer then had fallen in love with bellydance in a London nightclub in 1982 (see here).
When a group of women discover I’m a bellydancer there is always at least one person who will try out a bit of a wriggle, one who will say they’ve certainly got the belly for it, and invariably someone who will ask how you do it. On this morning there was a group of five or six women, ranging in age from around 40 to mid seventies. All were upper class, all beautifully spoken. And yes, like so many woman, they wanted to know how I did the wriggling.
Now, although I was originally self-taught, many years before I had been to classes with Jacqueline Chapman - one of the first bellydance teachers in London. A seemingly rather prim lady but with a penchant for dressing up in full performance costume to teach, Jacqueline has a killer way of teaching one of the key moves in bellydance. It’s called a figure of eight and it’s a smooth twisting movement in the hips.
Jacqueline tells her students to imagine they have a pencil where you’d never think a lady would tell you to have a pencil… She then instructs you to squeeze it and lift it up. In doing so, she’s getting you to lift the pelvic floor and thereby engage the core stability muscles. It also helps the posture; but most importantly Jacqueline then tells you to imagine drawing shapes, in particular circles and figures of 8, with that imaginary pencil.
It is a brilliant way of enabling women to visualise the movement. I’ve known bellydance teachers try to break down a figure of eight by showing a twist in the waist, then a transfer of weight followed by a half circle backwards with one hip, a twist in the opposite direction another transfer of weight and a half circle with the other hip. And I always think “Oh for goodness sake! Just teach them the bloody pencil technique!”
On this particular morning, Paul remembers a line of women of varying ages standing in front of me, one or two still holding brooms. He saw me lean towards them and whisper confidentially. Then he saw smiles start to spread across their faces, which grew into giggles and then outright laughter. My husband knew exactly what I was telling them.
He also says he had a sense of the men in the hall being excluded from a wonderful feminine secret. That there was something the women were about to do and enjoy that he could never be part of.
Andro remembers being high up on the ladder, looking down on the scene as we started to move. Me showing the women how to make the figure of eight. The line of women copying. And them laughing and exclaiming and laughing some more. I showed them how to shimmy their hips by moving their knees, how to roll their shoulders. And finally how to shimmy their shoulders by shaking them gently.
Now there are some bellydance teachers who don’t like to admit that this dance is in any way sexy. No they say, it’s a folk dance, a cultural dance from a Muslim part of the world (as indeed it is) and there should be nothing sexual about it. They say, for example, that women should never touch their own bodies when they dance (not even a hand on the hip) and they insist that when executing a shoulder shimmy the breasts should not move.
Excuse me people, if you're a woman how do you shake your shoulders without your breasts moving? It’s impossible to do it without the girls going too! They’re in the same region for goodness sake. OK maybe a bit lower now than they were when you were twenty, but even so! I've heard famous Egyptian teachers call it a breast shimmy and what's good enough for them is good enough for me.
So there they were, that beautiful winter morning, my lovely Markbeech ladies. Elegant, cultured, well bred. Standing in a line in front of me in our little village hall. Wriggling their hips and shaking their breasts.
And laughing and loving it.
It was frosty the day after the village cabaret and the hedgerows were white as Paul and I walked down the lane. The pub and church looked like they belonged on a Christmas card, standing bright and clear in the cold morning air. Like the houses in the village the church and pub are Victorian pretty. The hall on the other hand is as dull and utilitarian as a 20th century building could be. It squats across the road from its characterful cousins, low, brick-built and deeply, boringly rectangular.
Peer in through the windows and you’ll see scuffed wooden floors and the shabby little stage. But those floors are scuffed from decades of chairs pushed back after warm-hearted village lunches and lively Harvest Suppers, the participants full of good, home cooked food and copious quantities of wine.
Alcohol is rather a feature of the social life here in Markbeech. At the annual Royal British Legion dinner, where the older men of the village reputedly get plastered and tell stories of past glory, legend has it that Sir Robin Leigh Pemberton, then Governor of the Bank of England and that year’s keynote speaker, found one of the revellers in a ditch after dinner and had to pull him out before he could get into his chauffeur-driven Rolls Royce and head off home!
The lock to the front door of the village hall is tricky. There’s a knack to it that I’ve never quite mastered, but there’s always a lovely rush of warm air as the handle finally turns and you walk into the entrance hall. Warm because of the village nursery school held there every weekday. And because the view is held that it’s cheaper to leave the heating on constant rather than try and reheat such a big space from scratch every day. But there’s also the warmth of memories. Memories of happy evenings with friends.
There’s such a sense of community history when you enter a place like this. Markbeech villagers have been putting on shows and celebrating the signposts of the year in this hall for several generations. Stories are still told of the shows staged here by long-dead villagers before and during the second world war. When we arrived (aged 40 and 50 respectively) Paul and I were considered youngsters and the generation just above us were responsible for the parties and events. As a result the dress code was often dinner jackets and evening dress, yet there was an air of post-war austerity about meal choices and ticket pricing.
Ten years ago our age group started to take over proceedings and things changed a little. Meals got a bit fancier, more music was introduced, dress became more casual. And recently a lively younger team have started to introduce canapés and sparkling wine before dinner - a sign of the greater affluence of the generation who grew up in the 80s.
That morning Paul and I walked into a busy scene as friends cleared up the hall after the cabaret. Andro was up a ladder taking down the silver stars, Pam from next door was sweeping the floor. Serving dishes were being gathered to redistribute to their rightful owners, rubbish bags were piled high before being taken outside.
All the talk was of the success of the night before. Those of us who had performed were still high on adrenaline and audience members were full of excitement and praise. Of course people wanted to know where I learned to bellydance and so I told them a little of my story - how I had trained to be a dancer then had fallen in love with bellydance in a London nightclub in 1982 (see here).
When a group of women discover I’m a bellydancer there is always at least one person who will try out a bit of a wriggle, one who will say they’ve certainly got the belly for it, and invariably someone who will ask how you do it. On this morning there was a group of five or six women, ranging in age from around 40 to mid seventies. All were upper class, all beautifully spoken. And yes, like so many woman, they wanted to know how I did the wriggling.
Now, although I was originally self-taught, many years before I had been to classes with Jacqueline Chapman - one of the first bellydance teachers in London. A seemingly rather prim lady but with a penchant for dressing up in full performance costume to teach, Jacqueline has a killer way of teaching one of the key moves in bellydance. It’s called a figure of eight and it’s a smooth twisting movement in the hips.
Jacqueline tells her students to imagine they have a pencil where you’d never think a lady would tell you to have a pencil… She then instructs you to squeeze it and lift it up. In doing so, she’s getting you to lift the pelvic floor and thereby engage the core stability muscles. It also helps the posture; but most importantly Jacqueline then tells you to imagine drawing shapes, in particular circles and figures of 8, with that imaginary pencil.
It is a brilliant way of enabling women to visualise the movement. I’ve known bellydance teachers try to break down a figure of eight by showing a twist in the waist, then a transfer of weight followed by a half circle backwards with one hip, a twist in the opposite direction another transfer of weight and a half circle with the other hip. And I always think “Oh for goodness sake! Just teach them the bloody pencil technique!”
On this particular morning, Paul remembers a line of women of varying ages standing in front of me, one or two still holding brooms. He saw me lean towards them and whisper confidentially. Then he saw smiles start to spread across their faces, which grew into giggles and then outright laughter. My husband knew exactly what I was telling them.
He also says he had a sense of the men in the hall being excluded from a wonderful feminine secret. That there was something the women were about to do and enjoy that he could never be part of.
Andro remembers being high up on the ladder, looking down on the scene as we started to move. Me showing the women how to make the figure of eight. The line of women copying. And them laughing and exclaiming and laughing some more. I showed them how to shimmy their hips by moving their knees, how to roll their shoulders. And finally how to shimmy their shoulders by shaking them gently.
Now there are some bellydance teachers who don’t like to admit that this dance is in any way sexy. No they say, it’s a folk dance, a cultural dance from a Muslim part of the world (as indeed it is) and there should be nothing sexual about it. They say, for example, that women should never touch their own bodies when they dance (not even a hand on the hip) and they insist that when executing a shoulder shimmy the breasts should not move.
Excuse me people, if you're a woman how do you shake your shoulders without your breasts moving? It’s impossible to do it without the girls going too! They’re in the same region for goodness sake. OK maybe a bit lower now than they were when you were twenty, but even so! I've heard famous Egyptian teachers call it a breast shimmy and what's good enough for them is good enough for me.
So there they were, that beautiful winter morning, my lovely Markbeech ladies. Elegant, cultured, well bred. Standing in a line in front of me in our little village hall. Wriggling their hips and shaking their breasts.
And laughing and loving it.
Sunday, 16 December 2012
Creating a new style of bellydance
I’ve always struggled with the concept of authenticity. As I said in a past blog post: I’m not Egyptian, I’m from that most English of towns, Cheltenham Spa, and now live near its uptight and green-inked cousin, Tunbridge Wells. You can’t get much more English than that!
After many years of trying to recreate Egyptian styling and Egyptian sensibilities I finally came to the conclusion that in aiming to be ‘authentic’ I was in effect being its exact opposite. I was pretending to be something I am not. When I was trying to dance with the soul of an Egyptian woman I was certainly not being true to myself. And I believe that if I’m to communicate through my dancing I must say something that is real and true to me.
But what should I do, as an English, middle-class, ballet-mad girl who grew up into a jazz dancing young woman, studied contemporary dance for her degree but then fell in love with bellydance in her twenties? As for so many women, bellydance felt like it was made for me. The movements seem created for my body. They celebrate my curves rather than encouraging me to starve them away. And the first time I saw a bellydancer, and then tried the moves out for myself, I knew it was what I wanted to do.
But one of the major difficulties for me is that the dance I love comes from another culture. It’s middle eastern. So I don’t feel I own it, despite having danced and taught it for decades. And my inner conflict has been deepened recently by news stories highlighting the sometimes shocking treatment of women in the middle east. I read reports of organised gang rapes of women in Cairo, or the recent beheading of young men and women for dancing in mixed company at a wedding in Afghanistan, and I wonder what I, as a western feminist, am doing teaching a dance from a part of the world that thinks it is shameful and wicked for a woman even to dance socially with a man, let alone bellydance in public.
To be truthful I have sometimes even thought about giving up bellydance in recent months. It’s started to feel wrong to me. I’m a feminist, I believe in freedom and equality for women. So I’ve been deeply affected reading about the lives of women in that part of the world who seem to me not to have the freedoms and the respect that I take for granted.
I’ll also be honest and say too, that for a long time I’ve found the bellydance movement vocabulary narrow compared to the dance forms I grew up with. Much of that comes from the costuming - there is little opportunity for expansive leg gestures in a bellydance costume. A full chiffon skirt hides anything going on below the hip line and a modern lycra skirt is way too tight. And the weight! It’s hard enough work hauling all those crystals and sequins and stiffening around the stage, let alone trying to leap and twirl and soar.
And here we find ourselves back to the subject of culture. Leaping and twirling and soaring is not what a nice Egyptian girl does. Let’s face it, she’s not even meant to dance in public! I find it noticeable that the grand, exciting stuff in Egyptian dance: the jumps and leaps and dynamic movements are given to the men. The female vocabulary is far more internalised, smaller, more ‘feminine’.
I’m also painfully aware of the fact that bellydance as a performance art just doesn’t cut it with a western audience. Small, internalised isolations don’t work well on the big stage or even on TV. And the narrow dynamic range and lack of dramatic, exciting movements leave modern westerners frankly a bit bored. I believe it’s one of several reasons bellydance isn’t taken seriously here.
Yet bellydance is a truly beautiful dance form. And it has a remarkable ability to help women feel good about themselves and their bodies. Moreover, for me, as a musician (I’m a trained opera singer) it has a unique and very deep association with music. I adore the way a bellydancer tries to show the music through her body. To me it’s very profound and has the ability to deepen the whole experience, both for dancer and audience.
I'll always love traditional, culturally authentic bellydance, whether it's performed by Arabs, Turks or Westerners. And I really don’t want to give up the dance I love so much. Even if I am sometimes frustrated, often troubled by inner conflict.
But maybe, as with so much art, inner conflict, limitation and frustration is the mother of creativity. Because I’m finding that the limitations and the conflicts and the feeling of disassociation are driving me towards creating a new style of bellydance. My style of bellydance. Without constraints, without cultural baggage, without apologies. Just dancing the way it feels right to me to dance.
If I allow myself to break free from the cultural straightjacket what will happen? If I no longer have to worry about whether what I’m doing is ‘correct’ or ‘authentic’, what will my dancing and my teaching look like? Where might it go?
My thinking is also driven by my desire to create a large spectacular bellydance show sometime in the future. Whatever happens with the Hollywood film - whether it is made or not, and if it is, where it leads - all my creative energies at the moment are working towards trying to create a style of bellydance which will work on the big stage and appeal to a western audience.
I started with Project Lift Off - my initiative to try and raise British bellydance nearer to the professional standard of other styles of performance dance and to work with larger, more dynamic movements. But I’ve found myself terribly constrained by the desire to teach ‘authentically’. I’ve found it impossible to break free from the cultural and historical background of our dance. Of course I could ignore the cultural relevance. I could just teach bellydance moves without caring about their provenance, but that would go against my grain. I know bellydance has a cultural core and I can't ignore that.
So I’ve made a decision to stop trying to copy or recreate, and instead to create.
I’ve found it helpful to think in terms of creating a new style of dance. With a new name, so that I don’t feel I’m doing something inappropriate. Right now in my mind I’m calling it Western Oriental style bellydance. Because that to me is what I’m trying to create.
I’ve started by working with two superb young dancers who come to my Project Lift Off classes and who have agreed to be my muses - the clay for me to work with. And I’m going to start teaching jazz-bellydance classes at Dance Works in central London from January onwards, as a way of experimenting with marrying bellydance to the western dance forms that have influenced me and breaking away from my natural desire to do things ‘right’.
I’m sure there are people reading this who will think what I’m doing is wrong, or at the very least arrogant. But every style of dance has had its innovators, including bellydance - tribal and tribal fusion are wonderful, exciting styles which rightly take their place alongside Egyptian or Turkish bellydance. I’m just trying to do my bit. For myself, if no-one else!
And for those people who might think I’m rejecting Egyptian bellydance, please know this. I will never reject Egyptian bellydance, it’s part of my dance heritage. I may have deep inner conflict about cultural attitudes towards women and dance in the middle east, but I truly love the Egyptian people, women and men both. And I don’t believe that will ever change.
And I'm sure I will always teach classic Egyptian style bellydance. I love it and my students love it. I’m just trying to do something alongside it. To develop something that feels more like me, rather than trying to pretend I’m something I’m not.
It’s really exciting for me to be travelling down this road. Exciting and pretty scary too. I’ll write more about the journey as I travel it. And I hope some of you will come with me to see where it takes us. Hold tight, it could be an exciting ride!
After many years of trying to recreate Egyptian styling and Egyptian sensibilities I finally came to the conclusion that in aiming to be ‘authentic’ I was in effect being its exact opposite. I was pretending to be something I am not. When I was trying to dance with the soul of an Egyptian woman I was certainly not being true to myself. And I believe that if I’m to communicate through my dancing I must say something that is real and true to me.
But what should I do, as an English, middle-class, ballet-mad girl who grew up into a jazz dancing young woman, studied contemporary dance for her degree but then fell in love with bellydance in her twenties? As for so many women, bellydance felt like it was made for me. The movements seem created for my body. They celebrate my curves rather than encouraging me to starve them away. And the first time I saw a bellydancer, and then tried the moves out for myself, I knew it was what I wanted to do.
But one of the major difficulties for me is that the dance I love comes from another culture. It’s middle eastern. So I don’t feel I own it, despite having danced and taught it for decades. And my inner conflict has been deepened recently by news stories highlighting the sometimes shocking treatment of women in the middle east. I read reports of organised gang rapes of women in Cairo, or the recent beheading of young men and women for dancing in mixed company at a wedding in Afghanistan, and I wonder what I, as a western feminist, am doing teaching a dance from a part of the world that thinks it is shameful and wicked for a woman even to dance socially with a man, let alone bellydance in public.
To be truthful I have sometimes even thought about giving up bellydance in recent months. It’s started to feel wrong to me. I’m a feminist, I believe in freedom and equality for women. So I’ve been deeply affected reading about the lives of women in that part of the world who seem to me not to have the freedoms and the respect that I take for granted.
I’ll also be honest and say too, that for a long time I’ve found the bellydance movement vocabulary narrow compared to the dance forms I grew up with. Much of that comes from the costuming - there is little opportunity for expansive leg gestures in a bellydance costume. A full chiffon skirt hides anything going on below the hip line and a modern lycra skirt is way too tight. And the weight! It’s hard enough work hauling all those crystals and sequins and stiffening around the stage, let alone trying to leap and twirl and soar.
And here we find ourselves back to the subject of culture. Leaping and twirling and soaring is not what a nice Egyptian girl does. Let’s face it, she’s not even meant to dance in public! I find it noticeable that the grand, exciting stuff in Egyptian dance: the jumps and leaps and dynamic movements are given to the men. The female vocabulary is far more internalised, smaller, more ‘feminine’.
I’m also painfully aware of the fact that bellydance as a performance art just doesn’t cut it with a western audience. Small, internalised isolations don’t work well on the big stage or even on TV. And the narrow dynamic range and lack of dramatic, exciting movements leave modern westerners frankly a bit bored. I believe it’s one of several reasons bellydance isn’t taken seriously here.
Yet bellydance is a truly beautiful dance form. And it has a remarkable ability to help women feel good about themselves and their bodies. Moreover, for me, as a musician (I’m a trained opera singer) it has a unique and very deep association with music. I adore the way a bellydancer tries to show the music through her body. To me it’s very profound and has the ability to deepen the whole experience, both for dancer and audience.
I'll always love traditional, culturally authentic bellydance, whether it's performed by Arabs, Turks or Westerners. And I really don’t want to give up the dance I love so much. Even if I am sometimes frustrated, often troubled by inner conflict.
But maybe, as with so much art, inner conflict, limitation and frustration is the mother of creativity. Because I’m finding that the limitations and the conflicts and the feeling of disassociation are driving me towards creating a new style of bellydance. My style of bellydance. Without constraints, without cultural baggage, without apologies. Just dancing the way it feels right to me to dance.
If I allow myself to break free from the cultural straightjacket what will happen? If I no longer have to worry about whether what I’m doing is ‘correct’ or ‘authentic’, what will my dancing and my teaching look like? Where might it go?
My thinking is also driven by my desire to create a large spectacular bellydance show sometime in the future. Whatever happens with the Hollywood film - whether it is made or not, and if it is, where it leads - all my creative energies at the moment are working towards trying to create a style of bellydance which will work on the big stage and appeal to a western audience.
I started with Project Lift Off - my initiative to try and raise British bellydance nearer to the professional standard of other styles of performance dance and to work with larger, more dynamic movements. But I’ve found myself terribly constrained by the desire to teach ‘authentically’. I’ve found it impossible to break free from the cultural and historical background of our dance. Of course I could ignore the cultural relevance. I could just teach bellydance moves without caring about their provenance, but that would go against my grain. I know bellydance has a cultural core and I can't ignore that.
So I’ve made a decision to stop trying to copy or recreate, and instead to create.
I’ve found it helpful to think in terms of creating a new style of dance. With a new name, so that I don’t feel I’m doing something inappropriate. Right now in my mind I’m calling it Western Oriental style bellydance. Because that to me is what I’m trying to create.
I’ve started by working with two superb young dancers who come to my Project Lift Off classes and who have agreed to be my muses - the clay for me to work with. And I’m going to start teaching jazz-bellydance classes at Dance Works in central London from January onwards, as a way of experimenting with marrying bellydance to the western dance forms that have influenced me and breaking away from my natural desire to do things ‘right’.
I’m sure there are people reading this who will think what I’m doing is wrong, or at the very least arrogant. But every style of dance has had its innovators, including bellydance - tribal and tribal fusion are wonderful, exciting styles which rightly take their place alongside Egyptian or Turkish bellydance. I’m just trying to do my bit. For myself, if no-one else!
And for those people who might think I’m rejecting Egyptian bellydance, please know this. I will never reject Egyptian bellydance, it’s part of my dance heritage. I may have deep inner conflict about cultural attitudes towards women and dance in the middle east, but I truly love the Egyptian people, women and men both. And I don’t believe that will ever change.
And I'm sure I will always teach classic Egyptian style bellydance. I love it and my students love it. I’m just trying to do something alongside it. To develop something that feels more like me, rather than trying to pretend I’m something I’m not.
It’s really exciting for me to be travelling down this road. Exciting and pretty scary too. I’ll write more about the journey as I travel it. And I hope some of you will come with me to see where it takes us. Hold tight, it could be an exciting ride!
Thursday, 29 November 2012
How it all started!
This is part of my life story, sections of which I'm publishing on my blog. You can read the previous section here.
Imagine the scene: it’s an evening in late December and Markbeech village hall is decorated for Christmas. A tree sparkles in one corner, silver stars tumble from the ceiling. Flowers and candles adorn large round tables squeezed tightly together in the tiny hall. At the end of the hall is a small stage, the red velvet curtains hanging a little crookedly. Laughter fills the room.
Around the tables sit men and women of all ages, chatting animatedly. Everyone in the village is here and all are looking splendid. The men wear dinner jackets and bow ties; the women are in evening gowns and good jewellery. This is not fancy dress. This is just what we did ten years ago in Markbeech. Give us an excuse for a party and out would come the glad rags.
In the tiny kitchen across the corridor there's a slightly frantic air as Nicky and her team, in full length evening gowns and pearls topped by slightly crumpled aprons, manhandle giant casserole dishes or tip steaming potatoes out of enormous saucepans.
Nicky, wife of Charles, heir to the aristocratic family who founded Markbeech almost two hundred years ago, had spent the previous month organising the women in the village in preparing the feast about to be served. And only half an hour earlier the food had arrived, still hot from home kitchens, borne in enormous bowls and pans by beautifully-spoken women desperately trying not to trip over in long dresses and high heels.
In an ante-room off the main hall five or six people are waiting nervously. All wear large, outlandish hats topping off their evening dress. One woman has a model of Blackpool Tower on her head, another has a crescent moon, suspended from a wire coat-hanger. Paul and Andro are there, smart in dinner jackets, scripts in their hands. I’m there too.
I peer through the door to the main hall, look back at Paul and Andro: “They’re ready, let’s go!”
On the stage a piano strikes up a triumphal tune as the curtains open rather crankily. Charles, in slightly rumpled white tuxedo and unruly hair, is at the piano, thumping out the tune with gusto. The audience erupts in cheers as Paul and Andro stride out onto the stage.
The first-ever Markbeech Christmas Cabaret is underway!
Blackpool Tower appears. It's Ann, the Parish Clerk, reciting a witty Blackpool monologue. And the crescent moon is another Ann, our 80 year old ex-SOE operative, with a poem about an oyster singing to the moon. And as the evening continues, more crazily be-hatted villagers take the stage. Some of the poems and monologues are well known, but in amongst the party pieces are wonderful songs and stories telling of the rich cast of characters living in Markbeech. The audience are in raptures, shouting and cheering their friends on.
Then a hush descends. The stage is empty. Sinuous middle eastern music starts up. A character appears on stage entirely covered in a red veil. It glides around and quiet voices are heard asking who it could be. Suddenly the music changes to an up tempo bellydance piece, the character throws the veil off and shimmies and undulates around the stage, ending with a drop to the floor. There's a slight gasp, followed by cheers and whistles from the audience.
Now, I need to explain a couple of things. Firstly you need to know that even though it's only a tiny hamlet of thirty houses, Markbeech is full of creative people. Some might even say there’s an air of eccentricity here. Despite being slap bang in the middle of the UK’s stockbroker belt, where million pound houses are ten a penny, we are a village of writers, artists, musicians, photographers, designers and, yes, a secret bellydancer.
Secret, because in those days no-one knew I was a bellydancer. You see, Markbeech is posh. Proper posh. Much posher than I am. I might sound a bit upmarket, but I’m not really - I’m the daughter of a vacuum-cleaner salesman and a primary school teacher. I just managed to pick up a nice accent somewhere along the line. Whereas Markbeech is a village of gently aristocratic and well-connected families who can trace their lineage back hundreds of years. And when Paul and I moved there we were worried enough about the fact that we weren’t married - we didn’t dare let on that I used to be a bellydancer!
No, in those days I was known as a singer. I had actually given up dancing fifteen years previously and had concentrated all my artistic efforts on singing. I was a pretty good classically trained mezzo-soprano soloist, performing in oratorios and recitals, booked for weddings, funerals and all celebrations in between.
But as time went on Paul and I realised just how creative and unusual this tiny village is. Charles and Nicky would put on an opera every other year in the grounds of their ancestral home and Charles’ sister Joanna and her family were deeply involved in the opera and theatre worlds as well as running a gallery and library of historic photographs.
I’ve already mentioned our writer and photographer friends Andro and Marie-Lou, but Markbeech also boasts a wonderfully creative embroidery artist, two superb garden designers, a once-famous jeweller and a fine artist who paints gorgeous Pre-Raphaelite-style oil paintings and whose wife is portrayed, clad only in her long hair and a mermaid’s tail, on the sign for local pub, The Rock.
Ten years ago Paul, Andro, Marie-Lou and myself felt it was about time we harnessed some of the village creativity and decided to put on a cabaret between Christmas and New Year. We sent out an invitation to anyone who wanted to do a party piece and then Paul and Andro started writing amusing songs and monologues about the village and its characters. And I’m not being partisan when I say their comic writing is brilliant.
Embroidery artist Jacqi came up with the idea of the crazy hats as a way of ‘dressing’ the performers and the Christmas holiday was put aside for ten days of full-on rehearsals and preparations. In the meantime Nicky put together a menu and sent the ladies of Markbeech recipes and cooking instructions while Marie-Lou sourced curtains for the stage and decorations for the hall.
But what was I going to do? Everyone was used to hearing me sing. I was kind of a Markbeech staple act, wheeled out for Harvest Suppers or parties, singing anything from opera to Ivor Novello and usually accompanied by Charles on piano. But those who know me know I don’t like to rest on my laurels or take the easy route. I like to keep things moving, push my boundaries.
I knew it was time to dust off the sequins and come out to my neighbours and friends. But I have to tell you, the last time I bellydanced I was 26, slim and as fit as I was ever going to be. Now I was a 43 year old pre-menopausal matron with far too much weight and no dancing experience for 15 years.
I kept the secret until the very last minute. I even sang some silky cabaret numbers with Charles to put people off the scent. And as I changed in the loos I seriously wondered what on earth I thought I was doing, baring a very large amount of middle-aged flesh to the whole village!
In the event it was the older audience members who were the most open and enthusiastic in response to my unveiling; apparently some of the thirty year olds were horribly shocked. And honestly, it wasn’t the best bellydance I’ve ever done. I was very out of practice and my costume was pretty cheap and cheesy by the standards of what I wear these days. But I did it.
And it’s how it all began.
This is part of my life story, sections of which I'm publishing on my blog. You can read the next part here.
Imagine the scene: it’s an evening in late December and Markbeech village hall is decorated for Christmas. A tree sparkles in one corner, silver stars tumble from the ceiling. Flowers and candles adorn large round tables squeezed tightly together in the tiny hall. At the end of the hall is a small stage, the red velvet curtains hanging a little crookedly. Laughter fills the room.
Around the tables sit men and women of all ages, chatting animatedly. Everyone in the village is here and all are looking splendid. The men wear dinner jackets and bow ties; the women are in evening gowns and good jewellery. This is not fancy dress. This is just what we did ten years ago in Markbeech. Give us an excuse for a party and out would come the glad rags.
In the tiny kitchen across the corridor there's a slightly frantic air as Nicky and her team, in full length evening gowns and pearls topped by slightly crumpled aprons, manhandle giant casserole dishes or tip steaming potatoes out of enormous saucepans.
Nicky, wife of Charles, heir to the aristocratic family who founded Markbeech almost two hundred years ago, had spent the previous month organising the women in the village in preparing the feast about to be served. And only half an hour earlier the food had arrived, still hot from home kitchens, borne in enormous bowls and pans by beautifully-spoken women desperately trying not to trip over in long dresses and high heels.
In an ante-room off the main hall five or six people are waiting nervously. All wear large, outlandish hats topping off their evening dress. One woman has a model of Blackpool Tower on her head, another has a crescent moon, suspended from a wire coat-hanger. Paul and Andro are there, smart in dinner jackets, scripts in their hands. I’m there too.
I peer through the door to the main hall, look back at Paul and Andro: “They’re ready, let’s go!”
On the stage a piano strikes up a triumphal tune as the curtains open rather crankily. Charles, in slightly rumpled white tuxedo and unruly hair, is at the piano, thumping out the tune with gusto. The audience erupts in cheers as Paul and Andro stride out onto the stage.
The first-ever Markbeech Christmas Cabaret is underway!
Blackpool Tower appears. It's Ann, the Parish Clerk, reciting a witty Blackpool monologue. And the crescent moon is another Ann, our 80 year old ex-SOE operative, with a poem about an oyster singing to the moon. And as the evening continues, more crazily be-hatted villagers take the stage. Some of the poems and monologues are well known, but in amongst the party pieces are wonderful songs and stories telling of the rich cast of characters living in Markbeech. The audience are in raptures, shouting and cheering their friends on.
Then a hush descends. The stage is empty. Sinuous middle eastern music starts up. A character appears on stage entirely covered in a red veil. It glides around and quiet voices are heard asking who it could be. Suddenly the music changes to an up tempo bellydance piece, the character throws the veil off and shimmies and undulates around the stage, ending with a drop to the floor. There's a slight gasp, followed by cheers and whistles from the audience.
Now, I need to explain a couple of things. Firstly you need to know that even though it's only a tiny hamlet of thirty houses, Markbeech is full of creative people. Some might even say there’s an air of eccentricity here. Despite being slap bang in the middle of the UK’s stockbroker belt, where million pound houses are ten a penny, we are a village of writers, artists, musicians, photographers, designers and, yes, a secret bellydancer.
Secret, because in those days no-one knew I was a bellydancer. You see, Markbeech is posh. Proper posh. Much posher than I am. I might sound a bit upmarket, but I’m not really - I’m the daughter of a vacuum-cleaner salesman and a primary school teacher. I just managed to pick up a nice accent somewhere along the line. Whereas Markbeech is a village of gently aristocratic and well-connected families who can trace their lineage back hundreds of years. And when Paul and I moved there we were worried enough about the fact that we weren’t married - we didn’t dare let on that I used to be a bellydancer!
No, in those days I was known as a singer. I had actually given up dancing fifteen years previously and had concentrated all my artistic efforts on singing. I was a pretty good classically trained mezzo-soprano soloist, performing in oratorios and recitals, booked for weddings, funerals and all celebrations in between.
But as time went on Paul and I realised just how creative and unusual this tiny village is. Charles and Nicky would put on an opera every other year in the grounds of their ancestral home and Charles’ sister Joanna and her family were deeply involved in the opera and theatre worlds as well as running a gallery and library of historic photographs.
I’ve already mentioned our writer and photographer friends Andro and Marie-Lou, but Markbeech also boasts a wonderfully creative embroidery artist, two superb garden designers, a once-famous jeweller and a fine artist who paints gorgeous Pre-Raphaelite-style oil paintings and whose wife is portrayed, clad only in her long hair and a mermaid’s tail, on the sign for local pub, The Rock.
Ten years ago Paul, Andro, Marie-Lou and myself felt it was about time we harnessed some of the village creativity and decided to put on a cabaret between Christmas and New Year. We sent out an invitation to anyone who wanted to do a party piece and then Paul and Andro started writing amusing songs and monologues about the village and its characters. And I’m not being partisan when I say their comic writing is brilliant.
Embroidery artist Jacqi came up with the idea of the crazy hats as a way of ‘dressing’ the performers and the Christmas holiday was put aside for ten days of full-on rehearsals and preparations. In the meantime Nicky put together a menu and sent the ladies of Markbeech recipes and cooking instructions while Marie-Lou sourced curtains for the stage and decorations for the hall.
But what was I going to do? Everyone was used to hearing me sing. I was kind of a Markbeech staple act, wheeled out for Harvest Suppers or parties, singing anything from opera to Ivor Novello and usually accompanied by Charles on piano. But those who know me know I don’t like to rest on my laurels or take the easy route. I like to keep things moving, push my boundaries.
I knew it was time to dust off the sequins and come out to my neighbours and friends. But I have to tell you, the last time I bellydanced I was 26, slim and as fit as I was ever going to be. Now I was a 43 year old pre-menopausal matron with far too much weight and no dancing experience for 15 years.
I kept the secret until the very last minute. I even sang some silky cabaret numbers with Charles to put people off the scent. And as I changed in the loos I seriously wondered what on earth I thought I was doing, baring a very large amount of middle-aged flesh to the whole village!
In the event it was the older audience members who were the most open and enthusiastic in response to my unveiling; apparently some of the thirty year olds were horribly shocked. And honestly, it wasn’t the best bellydance I’ve ever done. I was very out of practice and my costume was pretty cheap and cheesy by the standards of what I wear these days. But I did it.
And it’s how it all began.
This is part of my life story, sections of which I'm publishing on my blog. You can read the next part here.
Monday, 19 November 2012
Welcome to my world
This is part of my life story, sections of which I'm publishing on my blog. You can read the previous section here.
Come with me. Let me take your hand and we’ll walk together. Past the pond where the moorhens nest and the trees are so tall; past the doctor’s house and the big new house we’re really not sure about. Just a few yards along the blackberried lane and here we are at the heart of the village.
See how low the cottages sit, how tall and foolishly fancy the chimneys are. Look how proudly the year 1879 is carved on the front. Mind you, that’s not so old to boast about - at least not for round here. Hever next door has a castle with a proper drawbridge and moat. Where poor Anne Boleyn was first courted by Henry VIII all the way back in 1526.
But still these houses feel old. And quaint. The whole village feels quaint. See the old school house in golden stone with its dedication to Queen Victoria’s jubilee on the front? They say it’s haunted by the ghost of Miss Brown, the schoolmistress. Geraldine and Jamie swear things flew through the air unaided when they lived there. Lights turned themselves on and off and footsteps were heard when they were alone in the house.
Next door is Clare’s tiny home. She moved into this little house after her husband Robin died. Outrageous, marvellous Robin DP, who, on his first day working at the Stock Exchange put half a client’s inheritance he’d been entrusted with on a single horse at Ascot. Which lost.
At the little crossroads, with the tree and the cast iron sign of of the Marked Beech that my husband Paul designed for the millenium celebrations, is the pub, The Kentish Horse. Kentish, rather than ‘of Kent’, because it’s west of the river Medway and because things like that matter round here. The pub is low slung like the houses. Low and whitewashed and welcoming. An open fire in the winter and a magical view across the Weald from the willow shaded garden in summer.
What do we have next to the pub? The church of course. And here in the churchyard, arranged side by side are Mike Roberts, Robin and Peter Bellamy. Old friends lying together, just as they once drank together and brought their children up together in the village.
If we turn the corner, we’re in Cow Lane, tiny Cow Lane, winding its way down towards Horseshoe Green. Walking down Cow Lane always makes me feel nostalgic for some reason. Maybe it's the way the hedgerows, softened by honeysuckle and hawthorn, make the lane seem slightly misty. Or is it the way the lane slopes gently downwards towards a half hidden pond and then opens out to a glorious view across the county border into Sussex? Whatever the reason, I always feel that I'm being drawn backwards in time - a time of baskets and bonnets and East End families coming down for the hop picking.
Along Cow Lane, the vicarage is as grand as Victorian vicarages can ever be. Steve the city trader, who lives there now with his warm-hearted wife Jayne and their family, rises at 5am to take the train from our tiny unmanned station up to the City. In the past, before the cuts, the station master would often call round the wives in the village: “Mrs Roberts? Just to let you know, the down train is delayed tonight, so don’t come to pick up Mr Roberts until 6.15.”
Before Steve, the vicarage was home to Ann - one of many redoubtable elderly women round here who worked for the Special Operations Executive during World War 2. Desperate to do her bit for the war effort, Ann managed to talk her way into this secret organisation of British spies by pretending she spoke Chinese. Posted, aged 19, to Shanghai, her adventures included being billeted overnight in a Chinese brothel (her honour protected by a group of young British officers) and hiding thousands of pounds of government money in her handbag to exchange it on street corners at vastly inflated rates. Not officially sanctioned of course, but such money laundering activities resulted in the Shanghai office of the SOE actually turning a profit during the war.
As I continue along Cow Lane I always pause at Old Farm. To admire its crazily steep cat-slide roof, to peer through at the rich tangle of roses and clematis in the beautiful old garden but also to imagine my dear friends inside. Andro Linklater upstairs writing - his mind soaring across centuries and oceans as he writes his stories of the founding of nations. And Marie-Lou, cooking in her big country kitchen or working on her beautiful food photographs.
This is the village I’ve lived in and loved for the past sixteen years. Markbeech, a tiny hamlet on the highest ridge of the beautiful High Weald of Kent. A hidden corner of what’s known as The Garden of England; rich in history, even richer in community. A place where we can still leave our doors unlocked and where the social life revolves around laughter-filled suppers with neighbours who have become true friends. Where Harvest Supper or the annual New Year’s Day booze-fuelled lunch are attended by almost everyone. Because they are great, joyous, heart-filling affairs.
I’ll never forget my first Markbeech Parish lunch - an annual summer event held in Andro and Marie-Lou’s magical garden. In one corner the two hosts wrestled chickens and burgers over a bank of blazing barbecues; in the other, tables groaned with salads and puddings which had arrived in bowls and tupperware from every home in the village.
I stood at the top of the garden and looked out at the deep old-fashioned double borders, flanked by shaded lawns rolling down to a magnificent view over fields populated by lazy cattle. Around 70 people sat chatting on the lawns; beer, wine or Pimms in one hand, a filled paper plate in the other. Everyone was talking, all were sitting with friends.
And as I gazed around I realised, with a real sense of wonder, that I knew more than 60 of these people well enough to sit down and be welcomed into their group. Paul and I had lived in the village for less than a year, but already we knew over 60 people - had been invited to their homes, had shared food and laughter with them and could strike up conversation with any one of them at any time.
How different from urban Croydon where we had previously lived. Please don’t get me wrong, I love Croydon, indeed I’m a town girl at heart. But a quick ‘hiya, how are you doing’ is all that is expected in terms of neighbourliness there. And the strangest thing was that, after less than a year, this tiny place with its slightly eccentric characters and its long sense of history felt more like home than anywhere I had ever lived.
You can read a later section of my life story here
Come with me. Let me take your hand and we’ll walk together. Past the pond where the moorhens nest and the trees are so tall; past the doctor’s house and the big new house we’re really not sure about. Just a few yards along the blackberried lane and here we are at the heart of the village.
See how low the cottages sit, how tall and foolishly fancy the chimneys are. Look how proudly the year 1879 is carved on the front. Mind you, that’s not so old to boast about - at least not for round here. Hever next door has a castle with a proper drawbridge and moat. Where poor Anne Boleyn was first courted by Henry VIII all the way back in 1526.
But still these houses feel old. And quaint. The whole village feels quaint. See the old school house in golden stone with its dedication to Queen Victoria’s jubilee on the front? They say it’s haunted by the ghost of Miss Brown, the schoolmistress. Geraldine and Jamie swear things flew through the air unaided when they lived there. Lights turned themselves on and off and footsteps were heard when they were alone in the house.
Next door is Clare’s tiny home. She moved into this little house after her husband Robin died. Outrageous, marvellous Robin DP, who, on his first day working at the Stock Exchange put half a client’s inheritance he’d been entrusted with on a single horse at Ascot. Which lost.
At the little crossroads, with the tree and the cast iron sign of of the Marked Beech that my husband Paul designed for the millenium celebrations, is the pub, The Kentish Horse. Kentish, rather than ‘of Kent’, because it’s west of the river Medway and because things like that matter round here. The pub is low slung like the houses. Low and whitewashed and welcoming. An open fire in the winter and a magical view across the Weald from the willow shaded garden in summer.
What do we have next to the pub? The church of course. And here in the churchyard, arranged side by side are Mike Roberts, Robin and Peter Bellamy. Old friends lying together, just as they once drank together and brought their children up together in the village.
If we turn the corner, we’re in Cow Lane, tiny Cow Lane, winding its way down towards Horseshoe Green. Walking down Cow Lane always makes me feel nostalgic for some reason. Maybe it's the way the hedgerows, softened by honeysuckle and hawthorn, make the lane seem slightly misty. Or is it the way the lane slopes gently downwards towards a half hidden pond and then opens out to a glorious view across the county border into Sussex? Whatever the reason, I always feel that I'm being drawn backwards in time - a time of baskets and bonnets and East End families coming down for the hop picking.
Along Cow Lane, the vicarage is as grand as Victorian vicarages can ever be. Steve the city trader, who lives there now with his warm-hearted wife Jayne and their family, rises at 5am to take the train from our tiny unmanned station up to the City. In the past, before the cuts, the station master would often call round the wives in the village: “Mrs Roberts? Just to let you know, the down train is delayed tonight, so don’t come to pick up Mr Roberts until 6.15.”
Before Steve, the vicarage was home to Ann - one of many redoubtable elderly women round here who worked for the Special Operations Executive during World War 2. Desperate to do her bit for the war effort, Ann managed to talk her way into this secret organisation of British spies by pretending she spoke Chinese. Posted, aged 19, to Shanghai, her adventures included being billeted overnight in a Chinese brothel (her honour protected by a group of young British officers) and hiding thousands of pounds of government money in her handbag to exchange it on street corners at vastly inflated rates. Not officially sanctioned of course, but such money laundering activities resulted in the Shanghai office of the SOE actually turning a profit during the war.
As I continue along Cow Lane I always pause at Old Farm. To admire its crazily steep cat-slide roof, to peer through at the rich tangle of roses and clematis in the beautiful old garden but also to imagine my dear friends inside. Andro Linklater upstairs writing - his mind soaring across centuries and oceans as he writes his stories of the founding of nations. And Marie-Lou, cooking in her big country kitchen or working on her beautiful food photographs.
This is the village I’ve lived in and loved for the past sixteen years. Markbeech, a tiny hamlet on the highest ridge of the beautiful High Weald of Kent. A hidden corner of what’s known as The Garden of England; rich in history, even richer in community. A place where we can still leave our doors unlocked and where the social life revolves around laughter-filled suppers with neighbours who have become true friends. Where Harvest Supper or the annual New Year’s Day booze-fuelled lunch are attended by almost everyone. Because they are great, joyous, heart-filling affairs.
I’ll never forget my first Markbeech Parish lunch - an annual summer event held in Andro and Marie-Lou’s magical garden. In one corner the two hosts wrestled chickens and burgers over a bank of blazing barbecues; in the other, tables groaned with salads and puddings which had arrived in bowls and tupperware from every home in the village.
I stood at the top of the garden and looked out at the deep old-fashioned double borders, flanked by shaded lawns rolling down to a magnificent view over fields populated by lazy cattle. Around 70 people sat chatting on the lawns; beer, wine or Pimms in one hand, a filled paper plate in the other. Everyone was talking, all were sitting with friends.
And as I gazed around I realised, with a real sense of wonder, that I knew more than 60 of these people well enough to sit down and be welcomed into their group. Paul and I had lived in the village for less than a year, but already we knew over 60 people - had been invited to their homes, had shared food and laughter with them and could strike up conversation with any one of them at any time.
How different from urban Croydon where we had previously lived. Please don’t get me wrong, I love Croydon, indeed I’m a town girl at heart. But a quick ‘hiya, how are you doing’ is all that is expected in terms of neighbourliness there. And the strangest thing was that, after less than a year, this tiny place with its slightly eccentric characters and its long sense of history felt more like home than anywhere I had ever lived.
You can read a later section of my life story here
Friday, 12 October 2012
Partying with Dina
I know the question you’re all dying to ask… So what’s Dina like? You know, as a person…
Let’s face it, Dina is the biggest star in the bellydance firmament. She’s Lady Gaga, Madonna and Beyoncé rolled into one. The woman whose costuming and dance style changed bellydance forever. Who commands enormous fees and who has bellydancers screaming her name on the rare occasions that she performs in the West.
So really, she has every right to be the very biggest diva in a world where, frankly, a lot of diva behaviour goes on.
Of course Khaled and I were worried about what she’d be like. Would she be difficult? Would she be demanding? Would she expect us to run around her like servants. We had both experienced behaviour like that from other big stars we’d helped bring to the UK in the past.
But I have to report, Dina is a total darling!
Firstly, she’s tiny. And seems slightly shy. She does that dip thing so many of us do when she gets a compliment or when she meets someone for the first time. She sort of dips down and slightly away from you, as if not wanting to make herself too big and important. And she has a lovely sweet, shy smile.
She also has a great sense of humour. The audience got a sense of that in the Saturday night show as she joked and backchatted with them between her dances. And backstage she was really joyful and funny. I mentioned in my last post the cartoon run she did from the wings, winding herself up and going off like Roadrunner. And we could see that she was having the time of her life in the wings watching the show. We had assumed she’d be ensconced in her dressing room until her time came to dance. But no, there she was with the rest of us backstage, laughing and zhagareeting and clapping along to our performances.
But her sense of humour really shone at the Sunday evening dinner.
I have to tell you here and now - the Sunday evening event is billed as a relaxing dinner at the end of a busy festival. But in fact it always turns into the mother of all parties! Get together an international crowd of bellydancers who have been working hard all weekend (and going to bed early to be fresh for each morning’s workshops) and you’ll get the best party you’ve ever been to!
The restaurant had promised to clear a space for us to dance but when we arrived, the table that should have been moved away was still there. Occupied by two very elderly, very tipsy, ladies who had been there since lunchtime and were showing no sign of moving. We all got increasingly jittery as 8, then 9 o’clock came and went and still they stayed put.
Then they stood up and got their coats and you felt the tension in the restaurant tighten as we anticipated the moment we had been waiting for. Two waiters carried the table away and it all kicked off! Khaled immediately got up on his chair and started dancing. Aziza, not to be outdone was up on hers in an instant! It was the signal we all needed and the rest of the party went wild!
Then there was the remarkable moment when Dina got up to dance. We had put together a CD of mixed bellydance party music – Shaabi, pop, a few drum solos and some classic favourites. Suddenly Tahtil Shibbak came on and everyone looked to Dina. She got up from the table, pretended to elbow her way through the crowd and, memorably dressed in combat boots, trousers and a buttoned up cardigan, launched into a wonderful, lightly caricatured version of her signature dance. Laughing her head off all the way through.
As the party continued I think all of us were pinching ourselves to find ourselves dancing around in a circle with Dina. But none of us had a more memorable time than Behiye Binnaz, a lovely, popular girl in the local bellydance community, who suddenly found herself dancing in the centre of the circle with Dina, Kazafy and Khaled pretending to be her backing dancers. They were playing the part of the Ghawazee dancers who often appear in old films behind stars like Samiya Gamal. As people realized what was going on, we all joined in and Behiye was surrounded by the whole international crowd, joyfully clapping along and calling out her name.
I can’t begin to tell you the respect I felt for Behiye in managing to hold it together, when most of us would have blushed and run away. In her modesty, she did try to escape a few times, but we wouldn’t let her. So she danced and danced and danced. With some of the greatest names in bellydance cheering her on.
And then when the track finished and she sat down, her teacher, Ann Hall, came over and showed her the video she had taken of the moment. And Behiya wept rich tears of joy and disbelief.
What else to tell you? Well apparently there’s a video somewhere of Dina climbing a ladder outside the restaurant, but I haven’t seen that yet. And there was the beautiful moment when I saw Aziza and Dina, two dancers I admire more than any in the world, exchange glances of friendship and understanding. And what about the Debke line which snaked around the restaurant, filled with some of the biggest dance stars in the world?
But the biggest, most scandalous news I can give you? Dina had three puddings!! Yes THREE! Ice-cream, cake and chocolate brownie with cream and yet more ice-cream.
How on earth does she stay that tiny?
Let’s face it, Dina is the biggest star in the bellydance firmament. She’s Lady Gaga, Madonna and Beyoncé rolled into one. The woman whose costuming and dance style changed bellydance forever. Who commands enormous fees and who has bellydancers screaming her name on the rare occasions that she performs in the West.
So really, she has every right to be the very biggest diva in a world where, frankly, a lot of diva behaviour goes on.
Of course Khaled and I were worried about what she’d be like. Would she be difficult? Would she be demanding? Would she expect us to run around her like servants. We had both experienced behaviour like that from other big stars we’d helped bring to the UK in the past.
But I have to report, Dina is a total darling!
Firstly, she’s tiny. And seems slightly shy. She does that dip thing so many of us do when she gets a compliment or when she meets someone for the first time. She sort of dips down and slightly away from you, as if not wanting to make herself too big and important. And she has a lovely sweet, shy smile.
She also has a great sense of humour. The audience got a sense of that in the Saturday night show as she joked and backchatted with them between her dances. And backstage she was really joyful and funny. I mentioned in my last post the cartoon run she did from the wings, winding herself up and going off like Roadrunner. And we could see that she was having the time of her life in the wings watching the show. We had assumed she’d be ensconced in her dressing room until her time came to dance. But no, there she was with the rest of us backstage, laughing and zhagareeting and clapping along to our performances.
But her sense of humour really shone at the Sunday evening dinner.
I have to tell you here and now - the Sunday evening event is billed as a relaxing dinner at the end of a busy festival. But in fact it always turns into the mother of all parties! Get together an international crowd of bellydancers who have been working hard all weekend (and going to bed early to be fresh for each morning’s workshops) and you’ll get the best party you’ve ever been to!
The restaurant had promised to clear a space for us to dance but when we arrived, the table that should have been moved away was still there. Occupied by two very elderly, very tipsy, ladies who had been there since lunchtime and were showing no sign of moving. We all got increasingly jittery as 8, then 9 o’clock came and went and still they stayed put.
Then they stood up and got their coats and you felt the tension in the restaurant tighten as we anticipated the moment we had been waiting for. Two waiters carried the table away and it all kicked off! Khaled immediately got up on his chair and started dancing. Aziza, not to be outdone was up on hers in an instant! It was the signal we all needed and the rest of the party went wild!
Then there was the remarkable moment when Dina got up to dance. We had put together a CD of mixed bellydance party music – Shaabi, pop, a few drum solos and some classic favourites. Suddenly Tahtil Shibbak came on and everyone looked to Dina. She got up from the table, pretended to elbow her way through the crowd and, memorably dressed in combat boots, trousers and a buttoned up cardigan, launched into a wonderful, lightly caricatured version of her signature dance. Laughing her head off all the way through.
As the party continued I think all of us were pinching ourselves to find ourselves dancing around in a circle with Dina. But none of us had a more memorable time than Behiye Binnaz, a lovely, popular girl in the local bellydance community, who suddenly found herself dancing in the centre of the circle with Dina, Kazafy and Khaled pretending to be her backing dancers. They were playing the part of the Ghawazee dancers who often appear in old films behind stars like Samiya Gamal. As people realized what was going on, we all joined in and Behiye was surrounded by the whole international crowd, joyfully clapping along and calling out her name.
I can’t begin to tell you the respect I felt for Behiye in managing to hold it together, when most of us would have blushed and run away. In her modesty, she did try to escape a few times, but we wouldn’t let her. So she danced and danced and danced. With some of the greatest names in bellydance cheering her on.
And then when the track finished and she sat down, her teacher, Ann Hall, came over and showed her the video she had taken of the moment. And Behiya wept rich tears of joy and disbelief.
What else to tell you? Well apparently there’s a video somewhere of Dina climbing a ladder outside the restaurant, but I haven’t seen that yet. And there was the beautiful moment when I saw Aziza and Dina, two dancers I admire more than any in the world, exchange glances of friendship and understanding. And what about the Debke line which snaked around the restaurant, filled with some of the biggest dance stars in the world?
But the biggest, most scandalous news I can give you? Dina had three puddings!! Yes THREE! Ice-cream, cake and chocolate brownie with cream and yet more ice-cream.
How on earth does she stay that tiny?
Tuesday, 25 September 2012
Gala Show with Dina! Backstage stories!
There are twenty minutes to go
until curtain up. The audience is in the auditorium, the house lights are up
and backstage all is slightly frenzied final preparations.
Dina’s hairdresser (Hipsinc’s
very own Chantel) has just left, Orit has lost the friend who is meant to be helping her
dress, Aziza is in her dressing room cutting a thigh-high slit into the skirt
she just bought that afternoon to wear in her second set and I have only just
started my makeup. Which usually takes around an hour to get right.
We get the final call. Five
minutes to go until curtain up. Aziza and I reach the wings at the same time:
“OMG Charlotte, do you have any hairspray?” I don’t. The closest dressing room
is the boys’ – we’re not likely to find anything there. The next one is Dina. I
start to run to Dina’s dressing room to see if she has any hairspray Aziza can
borrow. But Khaled has overheard our conversation. “Don’t worry Aziza, Kazafy
has hairspray!”
You heard it here first. Aziza
was wearing Kazafy’s hairspray on stage at Shimmy in the City.
The show started and the audience
went crazy! Watching a great show from the audience is wonderful. The
performers are focusing all their attention on you and of course you see the
dance from the direction you are meant to. But the audience may or may not be
aware that off in the wings are all the other performers, having the time of
their lives. Clapping and zhagareeting and cheering their co-performers on.
At one point in the second half,
Dina turned to me and said: “I’m having a wonderful time! I’ve never done this
in my life before – stood backstage with everyone and watched from the wings.
It’s fantastic!”
And I have to tell you all, Dina
had the time of her life in London this year. She loved the teaching but she
absolutely adored performing for such an appreciative audience. She rarely
travels to international festivals (I think I’m right in saying Shimmy in the
City was only the third festival she had done outside Egypt) and it was amazing
for her to dance for an audience that was so genuinely (and loudly) excited to
see her.
All performers are in need of
appreciation. We all fear we are not quite good enough. And the pure joy
and pleasure on Dina’s face when she came off stage was a beautiful sight to
behold.
So would you like a few more insider
memories of backstage at Shimmy in the City?
Well, there was the fact that the
haze machine broke down during the first half. The technical team managed to
fix it during Prince Kayammer’s set, but there was a massive cloud of smoke for
no obvious reason during his drum solo. I panicked when I saw all that haze
because I knew it was meant for my own solo which followed. It was as I feared. Prince’s bright, perky drum solo, loads
of haze. My moody start, no haze. Such is life as a performer…
I think you also need to know that only a minute before that moody start I was frantically ironing my veil. As I mentioned in my previous blog, when you are organising a show you never have enough time for your own preparation. During Prince Kayammer's drum solo I was in the room known as 'wardrobe' listening to every beat of it through the backstage loudspeakers and trying to work out if it sounded like the music was coming to an end. If it did, and the applause started, I would have to dash to the wings and go on stage with a half ironed veil. I made it with about 30 seconds to spare!
And I'm dying to tell you about the remarkable sprint that Dina did at the end of every set. She would gesture to the sound technician to start her next piece of music and then literally run through the wings and into her dressing room, where Elena Eleftheriou was all set to help her out of one costume and into the next. Just over a minute later she would reappear back in the wings and do a crazy cartoon preparation, winding herself up for the next run on to stage, laughing all the way!
I think you also need to know that only a minute before that moody start I was frantically ironing my veil. As I mentioned in my previous blog, when you are organising a show you never have enough time for your own preparation. During Prince Kayammer's drum solo I was in the room known as 'wardrobe' listening to every beat of it through the backstage loudspeakers and trying to work out if it sounded like the music was coming to an end. If it did, and the applause started, I would have to dash to the wings and go on stage with a half ironed veil. I made it with about 30 seconds to spare!
And I'm dying to tell you about the remarkable sprint that Dina did at the end of every set. She would gesture to the sound technician to start her next piece of music and then literally run through the wings and into her dressing room, where Elena Eleftheriou was all set to help her out of one costume and into the next. Just over a minute later she would reappear back in the wings and do a crazy cartoon preparation, winding herself up for the next run on to stage, laughing all the way!
There was also the mad run with
Khaled through the main foyer and bar of the Fairfield Halls at about 9.30pm.
Me wearing a galabaya, him wearing a very tight, brief two-piece costume and a
large quantity of glitter and makeup. He needed to get from backstage to the
back of the auditorium for his second entrance and that was the only way to go. We got some very funny
looks I can tell you!
Then there was the moment we lost
Orit on the TV screen backstage and didn’t know what to do. The backstage screen
only shows the stage and about half of the auditorium and Orit had gone into
the audience to dance. Towards the end of her set she went high up into the
auditorium and we lost her. Then her music finished. And she didn’t reappear.
Where had she gone? Was she still
in the audience or had she decided to go out of one of the doors in the
auditorium to get backstage? We left it a couple of minutes to see if she would
reappear, but nothing. No music, but still no Orit. What to do? Should we bring
the house lights back down and start the next performance?
Thankfully, after what seemed
like an age to us (but was probably only half a minute) she reappeared and we
were able to wait for her to come back onto the stage. And we avoided the
embarrassment of bringing the lights down on one of the world’s top stars!
One of the best times for me was
the wonderful four minutes I spent watching my Project Lift Off girls perform.
I had decided to choreograph a crazy country sha’abi piece for the group, which
consisted of 19 dancers who had been regularly attending my courses for the
past few months. It included several fast, complex step patterns, some great
jokes, and a lot of characterization and theatricality.
I had frightened the life out of
them in the first rehearsal, six weeks earlier, when I told them that we had to
make sure the performance was really good, because not only would there be
around 400 experienced international bellydancers in the audience, there would
also be my Hollywood studio executive and the film writer. Oh and Dina, Aziza,
Orit and Kazafy would probably be watching from the wings!
I’m not sure they totally
believed the bit about Dina watching from the wings, and as one of the dancers
posted on my Facebook page after the event, she almost passed out when she
looked out into the wings and there was Dina watching!! There was also Khaled laughing
his head off at their antics and me, bursting with pride at the quality and
enthusiasm of their performance.
But possibly the memory I’ll
cherish forever is of Khaled and I standing in the wings watching Dina perform.
I was standing behind Khaled, my arms around him. He was clutching my hand. And
with tears in our eyes we whispered to each other that this was the dream we
had both held for years, but never quite imagined would really happen. And here
it was. And it was perfect.
Monday, 24 September 2012
Shimmy in the City workshops and show preparation!
Gosh it's been a crazy, full-on weekend! Non-stop work, an amazing show, and all topped off by the craziest party night I've ever experienced!
Saturday began with dancers congregating from every corner of the world to take workshops with some of the very biggest names in bellydance. Aziza and Kazafy kicked off in the morning and then the big moment came at 12.30 when the doors opened for Dina's technique workshop - the hottest ticket in town!
I was hidden in the theatre, preparing the show for the whole day, but I peeked in at one point to see everyone on the floor, gazing in rapt attention as Dina explained some fine point of technique to them. The feedback afterwards was just amazing. People were knocked out by her generosity of spirit, her superb teaching skills and her incredible technique. Any fears about the ability of such an enormous star to teach disappeared in an instant.
My day continued non-stop. I had allocated time slots for each star to come and rehearse and talk to the technical crew about their lighting and sound requirements, so there was a steady stream of performers coming through. Then there were dressing rooms to organise, programmes to fold, water and snacks to be organised and music to be checked. And I also had to try and remember to get my own rehearsal and lighting tech in!
With me throughout the day (and also on Friday) was Gwyn, the film writer. This weekend was the start of her research for the script she is writing for the Hollywood studio and it was an amazing opportunity to see behind the scenes at a big event. Gwyn's a keen bellydancer herself so I lost her several times in the souk, but she managed to control herself to an extent!
One of the drawbacks of organising a show is that you never get enough time to prepare for your own performance. Each year I tell myself I'll shut myself in my dressing room at least an hour before the show and get my makeup and hair done properly. I never manage it! There's always some last minute crisis. This time I had exactly twenty minutes to get changed and made up.
The truth must be told! I went on stage with my toenail paint smudged, the roughest face paint I've ever done, no glitter and no false eyelashes!! Well, as long as the dance was OK hopefully no-one noticed!
And now it's checkout time at the hotel. Dina has just left and Aziza and I have to pack up and leave. Aziza is staying with me for a few days so we can both chill and recover from the weekend. I'll try to write more later (it'll be tomorrow at the latest) because I know you're dying to know what it was like backstage. I can tell you now - it was fabulous!
Saturday began with dancers congregating from every corner of the world to take workshops with some of the very biggest names in bellydance. Aziza and Kazafy kicked off in the morning and then the big moment came at 12.30 when the doors opened for Dina's technique workshop - the hottest ticket in town!
I was hidden in the theatre, preparing the show for the whole day, but I peeked in at one point to see everyone on the floor, gazing in rapt attention as Dina explained some fine point of technique to them. The feedback afterwards was just amazing. People were knocked out by her generosity of spirit, her superb teaching skills and her incredible technique. Any fears about the ability of such an enormous star to teach disappeared in an instant.
My day continued non-stop. I had allocated time slots for each star to come and rehearse and talk to the technical crew about their lighting and sound requirements, so there was a steady stream of performers coming through. Then there were dressing rooms to organise, programmes to fold, water and snacks to be organised and music to be checked. And I also had to try and remember to get my own rehearsal and lighting tech in!
With me throughout the day (and also on Friday) was Gwyn, the film writer. This weekend was the start of her research for the script she is writing for the Hollywood studio and it was an amazing opportunity to see behind the scenes at a big event. Gwyn's a keen bellydancer herself so I lost her several times in the souk, but she managed to control herself to an extent!
One of the drawbacks of organising a show is that you never get enough time to prepare for your own performance. Each year I tell myself I'll shut myself in my dressing room at least an hour before the show and get my makeup and hair done properly. I never manage it! There's always some last minute crisis. This time I had exactly twenty minutes to get changed and made up.
The truth must be told! I went on stage with my toenail paint smudged, the roughest face paint I've ever done, no glitter and no false eyelashes!! Well, as long as the dance was OK hopefully no-one noticed!
And now it's checkout time at the hotel. Dina has just left and Aziza and I have to pack up and leave. Aziza is staying with me for a few days so we can both chill and recover from the weekend. I'll try to write more later (it'll be tomorrow at the latest) because I know you're dying to know what it was like backstage. I can tell you now - it was fabulous!
Friday, 21 September 2012
Shimmy in the City Day One!
Well, it's not often I admit defeat, but blogging throughout the day was way too ambitious given that I'm also running a pretty large international bellydance festival AND hosting the biggest star in the bellydance firmament! And I've got so many stories to tell you from today! Where to start?
Do I tell you about the wonderful atmosphere as dancers from Portugal, Russia, Japan, Singapore, Belgium, France and of course the UK, started to gather in the big ballroom of the Fairfield Halls? To compete, to perform, to support their friends, or just to watch and marvel.
Or should I try to describe the incredible colours of the souk? The fabulous costumes from the very best importers and costumiers the UK can boast.
Do I tell you about the moment that Dina, tiny, delicate and utterly beautiful, walked through the doors of the arrivals hall, wearing the biggest smile I've ever seen?
Or about the ripple that grew into a roar as she arrived at the hafla? And everyone got to their feet and clapped and cheered and zhagareeted until they could clap no more. Whilst Dina looked completely abashed and shy and adorable as she acknowledged our love and thanks for everything she has given our dance.
I could tell you about trying to cram four people (Khaled, me, Eman Zaki and Gwyn the film writer) into my small car along with eight enormous suitcases.
Or the surprise to see Dina's chauffeur appear in the hafla, in the guise of the leader of the band!
But it's late and I need to sleep. So I'll just leave you with a few pictures, including my favourite of the day - Eman and Khaled squashed together in the back of that car just after we had miraculously managed to fit everything in.
And here's the big moment we had been waiting for - Dina arriving at the airport.
And finally, Aziza, Orit and I dancing at the hafla, just before Dina's arrival.
I'll try to write more tomorrow. I'll be spending the day in the theatre, preparing the show. And then at 7.30 the curtains will open on the biggest, most exciting bellydance show the UK has ever seen! See you all there!
Do I tell you about the wonderful atmosphere as dancers from Portugal, Russia, Japan, Singapore, Belgium, France and of course the UK, started to gather in the big ballroom of the Fairfield Halls? To compete, to perform, to support their friends, or just to watch and marvel.
Or should I try to describe the incredible colours of the souk? The fabulous costumes from the very best importers and costumiers the UK can boast.
Do I tell you about the moment that Dina, tiny, delicate and utterly beautiful, walked through the doors of the arrivals hall, wearing the biggest smile I've ever seen?
Or about the ripple that grew into a roar as she arrived at the hafla? And everyone got to their feet and clapped and cheered and zhagareeted until they could clap no more. Whilst Dina looked completely abashed and shy and adorable as she acknowledged our love and thanks for everything she has given our dance.
I could tell you about trying to cram four people (Khaled, me, Eman Zaki and Gwyn the film writer) into my small car along with eight enormous suitcases.
Or the surprise to see Dina's chauffeur appear in the hafla, in the guise of the leader of the band!
But it's late and I need to sleep. So I'll just leave you with a few pictures, including my favourite of the day - Eman and Khaled squashed together in the back of that car just after we had miraculously managed to fit everything in.
And here's the big moment we had been waiting for - Dina arriving at the airport.
And finally, Aziza, Orit and I dancing at the hafla, just before Dina's arrival.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
