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!

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.