Exciting news! I’m off to China next month to represent UK bellydance!
Yes, in three weeks time I’ll be experiencing the biggest bellydance festival in China. And in China they certainly do things big!! The lineup is awesome - stellar names from Egypt, America and Turkey: Fifi Abdou, Rachel Brice, Didem and yes, a lot more. And they’ve invited representatives from every country, so there will be a truly international crowd there, making the most of the gala shows, haflas, workshops and bazaars. Plus of course the unparalleled opportunity for global bellydance networking.
It’s that last element that really made my mind up for me. To be honest, stellar line ups are what I do in my own festival (Shimmy in the City). Last year Dina, Aziza of Montreal, Orit and Gazafy; this year Raqia Hassan, Tito, Aziza of Cairo and Nour. So it’s not that I’m blasé about seeing great artists perform, it’s just that there’s no reason for me to travel five thousand miles for the pleasure.
No, the big thing for me is the opportunity to discuss current trends in bellydance with an international crowd. And in an environment where I’m not running around organising everything. Most excitingly for me, I’ll not only be performing in one of the gala shows, I’ll be giving a talk on my new bellydance style.
And my new bellydance style is what is exciting me beyond measure right now!
The brief I gave myself was to come up with a style that could help bellydance cross over to the general public. You can read my reasoning here. And I’ve spent the last six months working experimentally with my truly marvellous new company of dancers to create something exciting and inspiring. It needed to have its roots firmly in traditional bellydance - I’m not a fusion dancer and I have no desire to create a fusion style. I needed to see all the core bellydance vocabulary in there - to my mind it’s not bellydance if it doesn’t have camels, snake arms, eights or shimmies. But I wanted something else too - I wanted fire, drama, emotion and maybe even some storytelling. And I wanted my dancers to leap and soar and spin. To go beyond our usual bellydance boundaries, both emotionally and physically.
Thankfully, in my company I have five dancers who are wonderfully strong and flexible - not only bodily but in their open mindedness and their enthusiasm to embrace every challenge I throw at them. Agata, Caasi, Chantel, Itziar and Maelle are five of the very best dancers in London right now and I’m incredibly honoured and thrilled that they’re helping me realise my vision.
But it’s not just about amazing performance dance - about excellence on stage - I also wanted to create something that every bellydance student could enjoy. As I say in my earlier blog posting, I’ve struggled for years with the concept of authenticity - trying (and ultimately failing) to be more Egyptian, when honestly I’m as English as they come. I increasingly felt that, in the process of trying to be something I was not, I was losing the truth of myself as an artist. And I knew I couldn't be the only dancer who wanted to express herself through bellydance without trying to access a middle eastern personality.
I believe that traditional bellydance has something very special to give and I wanted to capture that in a new way, a way that would feel more Westernised (and therefore possibly more natural to a Western dance student) without losing the essential nature of bellydance. And, most gratifyingly, as I started to develop my new style and introduce elements of it into my classes, my students at all levels seemed excited and inspired by some of the things I was teaching them and the choreographies I was creating.
So where am I now? So far, with my company of dancers we’ve created a very contemporary theatrical style that’s looking amazing, I’ve gone a little way towards developing an oriental style that feels right, and now I’m working with a group of my London advanced students on an upbeat pop number. I’m showcasing the new style at the Saturday night gala show at Shimmy in the City in a theatrical piece performed by my new company, and the aforementioned pop number by my student group.
I ought to be intimidated by the fact that I’ll be showcasing this new style in front of none other than Raqia Hassan, who created the Modern Cairo style which took the bellydance world by storm more than a decade ago. But I know the Egyptians well enough to know how open minded they are and how generously they embrace new ideas in bellydance. And to be honest, it’s the Egyptians who have been most enthusiastic every time I’ve performed something a little bit different in the past.
I’ll never forget being in a question and answer session in a workshop with Fifi Abdou. Someone asked her what she thought of tribal fusion, with the clear inference that the questioner disliked the style herself and was expecting Fifi to be negative about it too.
“I love it” said Fifi. “I think it’s wonderful that dancers around the world are taking bellydance and developing it. It’s amazing to us that you love bellydance so much that you want to make it your own.” I tell you, Fifi had an even firmer grip on my heart from that moment on.
I’m so grateful to all my dancers who are on this journey with me and who are being so open and enthusiastic. If you’re coming to the Saturday show at Shimmy in the City I hope you enjoy their performances and I’ll be teaching a workshop in the style on Sunday from 12.30-3pm. If you’d like to try it out for yourself, you can check out the details and book for the workshop here.
I can’t wait!
Showing posts with label Teaching. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Teaching. Show all posts
Wednesday, 31 July 2013
Thursday, 13 June 2013
Teaching memories - early days at Croydon's Fairfield Halls
It’s true the room isn’t the most salubrious. There’s a bar at one end and those green walls and brown paintwork do lower the spirits somewhat. But roll back the carpet and there’s a beautiful sprung wooden dance floor just begging us to dance on it and tall mirrors along one of the long walls. The mirrors are too slender and too few to work for a dance class, but I've bought five nice big ones to fill in the spaces and there they stand, inviting the students to watch themselves as they move.
Most of all it’s private. Because I have the fear that my advertising will bring young men to laugh and jeer at us. But access to our room is down a long corridor to the very back of the building and if we close the big double doors there’s only a tiny window to peer through if you really want to see what’s going on.
So what is going on?
Well, it’s a nice big class, bigger than I could have dreamed. Every week around twenty five women of all ages and varying skin colour clatter into the room. They are Turkish and Greek and Pakistani and West Indian and, yes, white English too. But most of all there are those girls I always associate with Croydon: with skin the colour of milk coffee, an indeterminate heritage and an accent to burst your eardrums.
Nails are long, false and appliquéd. Hair is ironed straight or pulled back tightly into what’s known as a ‘Croydon facelift.’ And these Croydon girls are so fast talking and so feisty and funny that I fall in love with them instantly.
I’m going to veer off here, because I realise that once women become part of my life I tend to refer to them as ‘girls’. I got into a Facebook debate recently with some American dancers who were strongly objecting to being referred to as girls by dance teachers, saying it infantilises women and puts a dance student into a position of inferiority. I was mortified because I know I use it a lot, so I checked with my students. They were honestly perplexed at the idea that they might be offended.
In the UK we often use the diminutives ‘girls’ and ‘boys’ when we are talking with affection about people. Women will say they’re going for a night out with the girls and men will say they are going for a night out with the boys or the lads. It implies friendship and being part of a group. So when I talk about my girls, I kind of mean my gang, my people, whereas calling them ladies or women would distance me somewhat.
My girls are just as likely to be 80 as 18. They may be hairdressers or fund managers. But they’re my girls and I love them.
So here we are in my Croydon class. It's 2003 and I’ve started to develop a technique now - my own way of teaching. The classes are drop in style, which means new people are starting each week. Which of course means I do the 'pencil talk' each week.
We finish our warm up and then I go over to the new class members. I gather them closely around me and I lower my voice confidentially, as if I’m about to impart a big secret. The others exchange smiles and knowing looks. They know what I'm about to say.
The new women lean towards me and I quietly tell them: “I need you to imagine you have a pencil, where you don’t think I could possibly mean I want you to have a pencil.” Most understand immediately - I see the recognition move across their faces. And then they always laugh. So I continue: “I need you to squeeze that pencil and lift it up - the point facing downwards so you don’t do yourself an injury!” More laughter. “And then we’re going to draw with it!”
Every week I worry in case someone takes it badly, but the laughter always seems real and delighted. And the rest of the class look at them and laugh with them. And it feels like the new women have just been initiated into the sisterhood of bellydancers. They’ve had the pencil talk!
If you want to understand the pencil talk, see my posts here or here...
So here we are, we've had the pencil talk and despite the mirrors, we're standing in a circle, with me in the centre. The circle creates a sense of togetherness and means everyone can see me and I can see them. Most of all, it means they can take real pleasure in seeing each other trying out the moves. Moves that make the hips bounce, the flesh quiver and the whole body undulate. Moves that are beautiful, sensual, and more than a little flirty.
And they love expressing that flirtatiousness, in the way women so often do when they are together. See a group of women dancing at a nightclub, handbags in the centre of the circle? They’re probably dancing more for each other, than for the men watching.
And the women in my class feel safe, because in the circle they can see that everyone is finding it a bit more difficult than they’d expected; but they can also see how each of them is improving over the weeks. And the circle feels like they are sharing this experience.
And they're learning how to create circles and figures of eights with their hips - taking them backwards, forwards, up and down, how to make their hips nice and sharp for hip drops, snaps and hits, how to gently undulate forwards and back, how to create beautiful snake arms and of course how to shimmy their hips and shoulders.
And now some of them have been coming for several months and we need to start to put the moves they’ve learned into travelling steps. Side to side, forwards and back. Learning our lefts from our rights and how to transition from one move into another. It’s time to introduce an intermediate class.
Which is where the mirrors come in. We’d get far too muddled trying to do that in the circle, so now we move into lines. My back to them so they can copy me, and all facing the mirrors so they watch themselves at the same time.
It's scary for them at first. They don't like looking at themselves in the mirrors at the best of times, but a full length mirror in a room with shockingly unflattering lighting? No way! So I tell them how mirrors are not there for hating how big your bum is or beating yourself up for not sticking to that diet you started. No, they're there to check whether you're doing the move the same way I am. Nothing more than that.
And I notice how each one of them is starting to have her own place in the room by now. To my left or right, front row or back, next to their friend or right out on the edge. If anyone arrives late in class and the others are already in their lines, she’ll still head straight for that spot. And the line will move to accommodate her. Because everyone knows that’s her place.
The only thing that upsets the natural order of things is when someone realises which mirror is the slim one. Because of course every woman knows that some mirrors are fat, some are slim. It’s a very slight instance of the effect of fairground distorting mirrors - the glass doesn’t quite lay flat or something. But the result is a seeming couple of inches off the waistline of the viewer and there’s a sudden jostling for the space in front.
We’ve never really worked out which one is the slim mirror, and even if I did know, I’d never mark it. Each week I stack the mirrors away in a different order and I forget which one cheered them up so much. It cheers me up too. There’s nothing like a slim mirror for making you feel better about yourself. Until you move away and realise it was just an illusion.
And as the weeks go on I’m telling them how well they’re doing, and how gorgeous they’re looking (because they are) and they are starting to believe me now. They are feeling a little more feminine, a little bit lovelier, a little bit better about themselves day by day. I watch them coming into class tired and stressed from the office or the home. And as the hour goes on I see their tired bodies start to lift, their stiff shoulders drop, and their laughter starts to fill the room.
And after class I smile to hear the sound of that laughter blended with the jingle of coin hip belts ringing down the corridor as they leave for their buses, their cars and their trains.
My girls.
Most of all it’s private. Because I have the fear that my advertising will bring young men to laugh and jeer at us. But access to our room is down a long corridor to the very back of the building and if we close the big double doors there’s only a tiny window to peer through if you really want to see what’s going on.
So what is going on?
Well, it’s a nice big class, bigger than I could have dreamed. Every week around twenty five women of all ages and varying skin colour clatter into the room. They are Turkish and Greek and Pakistani and West Indian and, yes, white English too. But most of all there are those girls I always associate with Croydon: with skin the colour of milk coffee, an indeterminate heritage and an accent to burst your eardrums.
Nails are long, false and appliquéd. Hair is ironed straight or pulled back tightly into what’s known as a ‘Croydon facelift.’ And these Croydon girls are so fast talking and so feisty and funny that I fall in love with them instantly.
I’m going to veer off here, because I realise that once women become part of my life I tend to refer to them as ‘girls’. I got into a Facebook debate recently with some American dancers who were strongly objecting to being referred to as girls by dance teachers, saying it infantilises women and puts a dance student into a position of inferiority. I was mortified because I know I use it a lot, so I checked with my students. They were honestly perplexed at the idea that they might be offended.
In the UK we often use the diminutives ‘girls’ and ‘boys’ when we are talking with affection about people. Women will say they’re going for a night out with the girls and men will say they are going for a night out with the boys or the lads. It implies friendship and being part of a group. So when I talk about my girls, I kind of mean my gang, my people, whereas calling them ladies or women would distance me somewhat.
My girls are just as likely to be 80 as 18. They may be hairdressers or fund managers. But they’re my girls and I love them.
So here we are in my Croydon class. It's 2003 and I’ve started to develop a technique now - my own way of teaching. The classes are drop in style, which means new people are starting each week. Which of course means I do the 'pencil talk' each week.
We finish our warm up and then I go over to the new class members. I gather them closely around me and I lower my voice confidentially, as if I’m about to impart a big secret. The others exchange smiles and knowing looks. They know what I'm about to say.
The new women lean towards me and I quietly tell them: “I need you to imagine you have a pencil, where you don’t think I could possibly mean I want you to have a pencil.” Most understand immediately - I see the recognition move across their faces. And then they always laugh. So I continue: “I need you to squeeze that pencil and lift it up - the point facing downwards so you don’t do yourself an injury!” More laughter. “And then we’re going to draw with it!”
Every week I worry in case someone takes it badly, but the laughter always seems real and delighted. And the rest of the class look at them and laugh with them. And it feels like the new women have just been initiated into the sisterhood of bellydancers. They’ve had the pencil talk!
If you want to understand the pencil talk, see my posts here or here...
So here we are, we've had the pencil talk and despite the mirrors, we're standing in a circle, with me in the centre. The circle creates a sense of togetherness and means everyone can see me and I can see them. Most of all, it means they can take real pleasure in seeing each other trying out the moves. Moves that make the hips bounce, the flesh quiver and the whole body undulate. Moves that are beautiful, sensual, and more than a little flirty.
And they love expressing that flirtatiousness, in the way women so often do when they are together. See a group of women dancing at a nightclub, handbags in the centre of the circle? They’re probably dancing more for each other, than for the men watching.
And the women in my class feel safe, because in the circle they can see that everyone is finding it a bit more difficult than they’d expected; but they can also see how each of them is improving over the weeks. And the circle feels like they are sharing this experience.
And they're learning how to create circles and figures of eights with their hips - taking them backwards, forwards, up and down, how to make their hips nice and sharp for hip drops, snaps and hits, how to gently undulate forwards and back, how to create beautiful snake arms and of course how to shimmy their hips and shoulders.
And now some of them have been coming for several months and we need to start to put the moves they’ve learned into travelling steps. Side to side, forwards and back. Learning our lefts from our rights and how to transition from one move into another. It’s time to introduce an intermediate class.
Which is where the mirrors come in. We’d get far too muddled trying to do that in the circle, so now we move into lines. My back to them so they can copy me, and all facing the mirrors so they watch themselves at the same time.
It's scary for them at first. They don't like looking at themselves in the mirrors at the best of times, but a full length mirror in a room with shockingly unflattering lighting? No way! So I tell them how mirrors are not there for hating how big your bum is or beating yourself up for not sticking to that diet you started. No, they're there to check whether you're doing the move the same way I am. Nothing more than that.
And I notice how each one of them is starting to have her own place in the room by now. To my left or right, front row or back, next to their friend or right out on the edge. If anyone arrives late in class and the others are already in their lines, she’ll still head straight for that spot. And the line will move to accommodate her. Because everyone knows that’s her place.
The only thing that upsets the natural order of things is when someone realises which mirror is the slim one. Because of course every woman knows that some mirrors are fat, some are slim. It’s a very slight instance of the effect of fairground distorting mirrors - the glass doesn’t quite lay flat or something. But the result is a seeming couple of inches off the waistline of the viewer and there’s a sudden jostling for the space in front.
We’ve never really worked out which one is the slim mirror, and even if I did know, I’d never mark it. Each week I stack the mirrors away in a different order and I forget which one cheered them up so much. It cheers me up too. There’s nothing like a slim mirror for making you feel better about yourself. Until you move away and realise it was just an illusion.
And as the weeks go on I’m telling them how well they’re doing, and how gorgeous they’re looking (because they are) and they are starting to believe me now. They are feeling a little more feminine, a little bit lovelier, a little bit better about themselves day by day. I watch them coming into class tired and stressed from the office or the home. And as the hour goes on I see their tired bodies start to lift, their stiff shoulders drop, and their laughter starts to fill the room.
And after class I smile to hear the sound of that laughter blended with the jingle of coin hip belts ringing down the corridor as they leave for their buses, their cars and their trains.
My girls.
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, 3 January 2013
Teaching my first bellydance class
It was frosty the day after the village cabaret (read about it here) 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.
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.
Wednesday, 15 August 2012
How I teach - a clarification
Someone wrote to me via Facebook the other day with reference to a statement in my previous post Challenging and Changing the Way I Teach that "for years I’ve only taught moves that are manageable for the least fit at any particular level." She was concerned that the way I had written the post gave the impression that I teach to the level of the least able students in class - the 'lowest common denominator' and that I was thereby not challenging the more able students enough. That's definitely not the case so I replied to her to explain and she suggested I write up a clarification in my blog so there was no confusion. So here goes...
Like most bellydance teachers, I have a very wide mix of ages and fitness levels in every class. When I started teaching in Croydon my oldest student was 84 (see Memories of Lilian in this blog) I also had a student aged 75 who had recently had two hip replacements and was walking with a stick and another who was, by her own admission, mortally obese.
It would not have been safe or appropriate to have taught deep stretches or a jazz-style warm up for those women. So, given that I was focused on creating a class that was accessible to all, rather than one aimed at preparing professional dancers for a career in bellydance, I tailored my teaching accordingly.
All my classes are challenging in terms of moves - at beginners level, learning upwards 8s or the Egyptian Walk is a challenge for anyone. At improver/intermediate level I bring in more complex step patterns, prop work and short choreographies as well as more challenging moves. And I make the class more aerobic to encourage greater fitness. If students get as far as my Croydon advanced class (and this is not for everyone - I have to be convinced that a student can manage it) then they get a far more demanding class with very challenging technique and choreographies. At this level I also introduce some physically demanding drills and latterly I've brought in half an hour of the dance conditioning that I teach in my London Project Lift Off class.
Oh and a clarification too for those people who have said they don't have time to teach body conditioning as they want to spend the time teaching dance. I agree it's hard if you only teach an hour's class, but early on I decided to make my Croydon advanced class one hour 20 minutes long, so with 30 minutes of conditioning we still have nearly an hour of bellydance technique etc. And my Project Lift Off classes are two hours - so 45 minutes of body conditioning gives us loads of time for everything else! However, it's fair to say that I currently go to a demanding jazz class at the Pineapple which is an hour long, of which 35 minutes is dance conditioning and only 25 minutes is taken up with 'dancing'. And it's packed to the gunnels every week with dancers at both student and pro level.
It's also fair to say that until recently even my Croydon advanced class was aimed at a fitness level that I felt everyone in that class could achieve. I was aware that several of the women were unable to get down on the floor (or as they say, they can get down, but they can't get up again!) So I didn't teach floor work and I also didn't do deep stretches or strength work such as press ups. But I've had such remarkable results with my London Project Lift Off classes that I decided I would go ahead and introduce those things to the Croydon class. The ladies that struggle with floor work do the moves standing up and everyone does as much of the body conditioning as they can cope with and then sits and laughs at the rest of us if they retire defeated at any point!
I should also point out (as someone also mentioned on Facebook) that I have decades of experience in this stuff. As well as having a degree in dance and education, I was one of the first teachers of stretch classes in London in the early 80s and I have been a dancer for five decades. I also have a decent understanding of anatomy and physiology as well as a good knowledge of safe exercise and a deep interest in current exercise practice, injury prevention and sports science. And, at a time when people can qualify to teach Zumba in a weekend, I care passionately about standards in teaching.
I hope this clears up any ambiguities in my previous post and please do feel free to comment on anything I write - I'm always really happy to answer questions or comments. Most people tend to comment via Facebook or by private message or email but it would be lovely to get them in the comments box below, so that the questions and answers are there for everyone to see and join the debate. A couple of people have said that they have had trouble adding comments here on the blog, so I've changed some of the settings and hopefully it will work now. Do let me know if you still have trouble posting here and I'll try to sort out what's going wrong.
But of course, do also feel free to comment via Facebook or email if you prefer!!
Like most bellydance teachers, I have a very wide mix of ages and fitness levels in every class. When I started teaching in Croydon my oldest student was 84 (see Memories of Lilian in this blog) I also had a student aged 75 who had recently had two hip replacements and was walking with a stick and another who was, by her own admission, mortally obese.
It would not have been safe or appropriate to have taught deep stretches or a jazz-style warm up for those women. So, given that I was focused on creating a class that was accessible to all, rather than one aimed at preparing professional dancers for a career in bellydance, I tailored my teaching accordingly.
All my classes are challenging in terms of moves - at beginners level, learning upwards 8s or the Egyptian Walk is a challenge for anyone. At improver/intermediate level I bring in more complex step patterns, prop work and short choreographies as well as more challenging moves. And I make the class more aerobic to encourage greater fitness. If students get as far as my Croydon advanced class (and this is not for everyone - I have to be convinced that a student can manage it) then they get a far more demanding class with very challenging technique and choreographies. At this level I also introduce some physically demanding drills and latterly I've brought in half an hour of the dance conditioning that I teach in my London Project Lift Off class.
Oh and a clarification too for those people who have said they don't have time to teach body conditioning as they want to spend the time teaching dance. I agree it's hard if you only teach an hour's class, but early on I decided to make my Croydon advanced class one hour 20 minutes long, so with 30 minutes of conditioning we still have nearly an hour of bellydance technique etc. And my Project Lift Off classes are two hours - so 45 minutes of body conditioning gives us loads of time for everything else! However, it's fair to say that I currently go to a demanding jazz class at the Pineapple which is an hour long, of which 35 minutes is dance conditioning and only 25 minutes is taken up with 'dancing'. And it's packed to the gunnels every week with dancers at both student and pro level.
It's also fair to say that until recently even my Croydon advanced class was aimed at a fitness level that I felt everyone in that class could achieve. I was aware that several of the women were unable to get down on the floor (or as they say, they can get down, but they can't get up again!) So I didn't teach floor work and I also didn't do deep stretches or strength work such as press ups. But I've had such remarkable results with my London Project Lift Off classes that I decided I would go ahead and introduce those things to the Croydon class. The ladies that struggle with floor work do the moves standing up and everyone does as much of the body conditioning as they can cope with and then sits and laughs at the rest of us if they retire defeated at any point!
I should also point out (as someone also mentioned on Facebook) that I have decades of experience in this stuff. As well as having a degree in dance and education, I was one of the first teachers of stretch classes in London in the early 80s and I have been a dancer for five decades. I also have a decent understanding of anatomy and physiology as well as a good knowledge of safe exercise and a deep interest in current exercise practice, injury prevention and sports science. And, at a time when people can qualify to teach Zumba in a weekend, I care passionately about standards in teaching.
I hope this clears up any ambiguities in my previous post and please do feel free to comment on anything I write - I'm always really happy to answer questions or comments. Most people tend to comment via Facebook or by private message or email but it would be lovely to get them in the comments box below, so that the questions and answers are there for everyone to see and join the debate. A couple of people have said that they have had trouble adding comments here on the blog, so I've changed some of the settings and hopefully it will work now. Do let me know if you still have trouble posting here and I'll try to sort out what's going wrong.
But of course, do also feel free to comment via Facebook or email if you prefer!!
Tuesday, 31 July 2012
Changing the way I teach
This Sunday was the final session in my Project Lift Off course before the summer break. As ever, we left the class exhausted, smelly and spent; our hair wringing wet against the napes of our necks, our muscles trembling. I like to think we also left with our adrenaline running high, our spirits lifted and our determination stronger than ever.
In Project Lift Off I’m trying to do no less than change the face of British bellydancing (I’ve never been one for small challenges) and in our first, faltering steps I can see the beginnings of that metamorphosis. It’s not that I want to change bellydance itself - although within my personal remit is the desire to create a new style to live alongside existing ones - but to change the way ‘serious’ bellydancers view themselves.
I grew up as a dancer. From the age of five to twenty five dance was my central core - it was how I viewed myself, how I introduced myself. One of my earliest memories is of my first ballet lesson, aged five. I remember the large ornate, but slightly mottled, mirror in the classroom, I remember my pink ballet slippers, I remember struggling with the steps. But most of all I remember knowing that this was what I wanted to do.
I lived, breathed and slept ballet throughout my childhood, until late adolescence when my ever-widening hips and chunky legs shattered all my dreams. But my disappointment led me to discover contemporary dance and, later, jazz - both of which are more accepting of larger body types. At college I studied Laban and contemporary dance and after graduating spent every day doing jazz and jazz-ballet classes in the nascent Pineapple Dance Centre in London’s Covent Garden.
What all these dance forms have in common is a fierce discipline. The daily class is non-negotiable. Late arrival in class is frowned upon. The body is trained and stretched beyond normal limits and tiredness or sickness is just something to be worked through.
The daily jazz class at the Pineapple was taught by a fearsome black American. Entry was by invite only and those of us not yet admitted would press our noses against the misted up windows of the enormous studio, filled to bursting with dancers working their bodies to a state of exhaustion. Every so often one of us would pluck up the courage to ask if we could join. He’d look you up and down and usually say no. Then one day he might relent and you were in. But you could never rest on your laurels - one missed class you might get away with, three in a row and you were out, never to be allowed back. A holiday could be booked in advance, sickness wasn’t on the agenda.
I remember the joy and total fear I felt the day he said yes to me. It wasn’t yes, you can come tomorrow, it was yes, go and find a place at the back of class. I was finally in and I was working my body harder than it had ever been worked before. Forty-five minutes of press ups, sit ups, leg lifts, buttock clenches. Then half an hour of centre work - arms, legs, turns, jumps. And finally, for fifteen minutes at the end, the hardest, fastest, scariest jazz routine I had ever faced.
I started that class feeling out of place and not up to the job. My brain couldn’t compute the routine fast enough for my legs to keep up and my body felt weak and uncoordinated, despite years of dancing. But after a few months of daily class I was strong, supple and fast, able to manage a passable attempt at the routine and no longer feeling like I was about to die during the conditioning section.
The longest part of a typical jazz class isn’t the dancing, it’s the body conditioning, which prepares the body and gets it strong and flexible enough to dance. Ballet is the same - the barre and centre exercises form the majority of the work done. Actual dancing takes up only a short section at the very end of class. Contrast this to a bellydance class, where we typically do a short warm up and then we’re straight into ‘moves’.
This is largely because of hobbyist nature of our dance - most women who bellydance do it once a week for fun. They want to learn how to shimmy and undulate, not do the equivalent of a gym circuit for half the class. And I believe that my main job, for most of my students, is to give them a damn good time whilst learning to dance to wonderful music. After all, the vast majority of bellydance students have no desire or pretension to perform professionally.
But whether because of the hobbyist nature of the dance, or because many people view bellydance as a folk dance rather than an art form, even at the highest level we don’t treat ourselves like other dancers. We don’t work at strengthening our body, we don’t stretch it out. We might complain about our upper arms wobbling as we do a shoulder shimmy, but it doesn’t occur to us to do triceps dips in class to stop it happening.
And the truth is that for years I’ve only taught moves that are manageable for the least fit at any particular level. I have never expected even my most advanced students to do the splits or a deep backbend in class, because I know that few of their bodies are capable of either. And that goes for my own body too. But the result of my lack of dance conditioning in the intervening years between that daily jazz class and today, is that when I dance on stage I often find my legs don’t feel quite strong enough to carry me. And when I choreograph for even my most advanced students I give them what I know they are capable of, rather than what I would really love them to do.
So with Project Lift Off I decided that it was about time I started to work with bellydancers in the way teachers and choreographers work in other dance forms. To treat them like ‘proper’ dancers. To give them 45 minutes of tough, tough body conditioning in every class. To push them beyond what they think their limits are and then a bit further. To give them routines that their brains and their bodies can hardly handle. Because I know that that way we can all grow.
The truly remarkable thing for me personally, is the way my own body has responded. It’s been an inspiration and total revelation to me. I’m 54 years old and post-menopausal. I assumed I would have to direct the most demanding parts of the conditioning without doing it myself. I certainly didn’t expect my ageing body would get much stronger or particularly flexible. But it has responded exactly the way it did 35 years ago, and just as fast. Every muscle is building strength and length, I’m almost down in the splits and even my old creaking knees are responding to the demands I’m putting on them with a sigh of relief. In fact my whole body seems to be thanking me for making it work, as if that’s what it was made for.
And I’m by no means the oldest in my class. The wonderful, inspirational Ann Hall is challenging even the youngest in stamina, strength and flexibility. And I know she won’t mind me saying she’s racing towards her seventh decade.
And what of the impact on our dancing? Well, it’s early days yet - Project Lift Off has only been going a few months - but I’m already noticing significant improvements in everyone’s dancing, myself included. I’m noticing far greater flow and connection; stronger, more explosive movements as well as more beauty in grace and line; and much faster assimilation of complex routines from everyone.
We’re about to start on our next adventure - a big performance piece for the main Saturday night show at Shimmy in the City. It’s a challenge for me to choreograph for twenty dancers, most of whom have only been studying with me for a few months. But even more, to try and create something interesting and dynamic without putting impossible demands on the dancers at the stage they are right now. I've decided to create a lively sha’abi piece to a classic number which I hope will lift the audience’s hearts.
Wish us luck!
In Project Lift Off I’m trying to do no less than change the face of British bellydancing (I’ve never been one for small challenges) and in our first, faltering steps I can see the beginnings of that metamorphosis. It’s not that I want to change bellydance itself - although within my personal remit is the desire to create a new style to live alongside existing ones - but to change the way ‘serious’ bellydancers view themselves.
I grew up as a dancer. From the age of five to twenty five dance was my central core - it was how I viewed myself, how I introduced myself. One of my earliest memories is of my first ballet lesson, aged five. I remember the large ornate, but slightly mottled, mirror in the classroom, I remember my pink ballet slippers, I remember struggling with the steps. But most of all I remember knowing that this was what I wanted to do.
I lived, breathed and slept ballet throughout my childhood, until late adolescence when my ever-widening hips and chunky legs shattered all my dreams. But my disappointment led me to discover contemporary dance and, later, jazz - both of which are more accepting of larger body types. At college I studied Laban and contemporary dance and after graduating spent every day doing jazz and jazz-ballet classes in the nascent Pineapple Dance Centre in London’s Covent Garden.
What all these dance forms have in common is a fierce discipline. The daily class is non-negotiable. Late arrival in class is frowned upon. The body is trained and stretched beyond normal limits and tiredness or sickness is just something to be worked through.
The daily jazz class at the Pineapple was taught by a fearsome black American. Entry was by invite only and those of us not yet admitted would press our noses against the misted up windows of the enormous studio, filled to bursting with dancers working their bodies to a state of exhaustion. Every so often one of us would pluck up the courage to ask if we could join. He’d look you up and down and usually say no. Then one day he might relent and you were in. But you could never rest on your laurels - one missed class you might get away with, three in a row and you were out, never to be allowed back. A holiday could be booked in advance, sickness wasn’t on the agenda.
I remember the joy and total fear I felt the day he said yes to me. It wasn’t yes, you can come tomorrow, it was yes, go and find a place at the back of class. I was finally in and I was working my body harder than it had ever been worked before. Forty-five minutes of press ups, sit ups, leg lifts, buttock clenches. Then half an hour of centre work - arms, legs, turns, jumps. And finally, for fifteen minutes at the end, the hardest, fastest, scariest jazz routine I had ever faced.
I started that class feeling out of place and not up to the job. My brain couldn’t compute the routine fast enough for my legs to keep up and my body felt weak and uncoordinated, despite years of dancing. But after a few months of daily class I was strong, supple and fast, able to manage a passable attempt at the routine and no longer feeling like I was about to die during the conditioning section.
The longest part of a typical jazz class isn’t the dancing, it’s the body conditioning, which prepares the body and gets it strong and flexible enough to dance. Ballet is the same - the barre and centre exercises form the majority of the work done. Actual dancing takes up only a short section at the very end of class. Contrast this to a bellydance class, where we typically do a short warm up and then we’re straight into ‘moves’.
This is largely because of hobbyist nature of our dance - most women who bellydance do it once a week for fun. They want to learn how to shimmy and undulate, not do the equivalent of a gym circuit for half the class. And I believe that my main job, for most of my students, is to give them a damn good time whilst learning to dance to wonderful music. After all, the vast majority of bellydance students have no desire or pretension to perform professionally.
But whether because of the hobbyist nature of the dance, or because many people view bellydance as a folk dance rather than an art form, even at the highest level we don’t treat ourselves like other dancers. We don’t work at strengthening our body, we don’t stretch it out. We might complain about our upper arms wobbling as we do a shoulder shimmy, but it doesn’t occur to us to do triceps dips in class to stop it happening.
And the truth is that for years I’ve only taught moves that are manageable for the least fit at any particular level. I have never expected even my most advanced students to do the splits or a deep backbend in class, because I know that few of their bodies are capable of either. And that goes for my own body too. But the result of my lack of dance conditioning in the intervening years between that daily jazz class and today, is that when I dance on stage I often find my legs don’t feel quite strong enough to carry me. And when I choreograph for even my most advanced students I give them what I know they are capable of, rather than what I would really love them to do.
So with Project Lift Off I decided that it was about time I started to work with bellydancers in the way teachers and choreographers work in other dance forms. To treat them like ‘proper’ dancers. To give them 45 minutes of tough, tough body conditioning in every class. To push them beyond what they think their limits are and then a bit further. To give them routines that their brains and their bodies can hardly handle. Because I know that that way we can all grow.
The truly remarkable thing for me personally, is the way my own body has responded. It’s been an inspiration and total revelation to me. I’m 54 years old and post-menopausal. I assumed I would have to direct the most demanding parts of the conditioning without doing it myself. I certainly didn’t expect my ageing body would get much stronger or particularly flexible. But it has responded exactly the way it did 35 years ago, and just as fast. Every muscle is building strength and length, I’m almost down in the splits and even my old creaking knees are responding to the demands I’m putting on them with a sigh of relief. In fact my whole body seems to be thanking me for making it work, as if that’s what it was made for.
And I’m by no means the oldest in my class. The wonderful, inspirational Ann Hall is challenging even the youngest in stamina, strength and flexibility. And I know she won’t mind me saying she’s racing towards her seventh decade.
And what of the impact on our dancing? Well, it’s early days yet - Project Lift Off has only been going a few months - but I’m already noticing significant improvements in everyone’s dancing, myself included. I’m noticing far greater flow and connection; stronger, more explosive movements as well as more beauty in grace and line; and much faster assimilation of complex routines from everyone.
We’re about to start on our next adventure - a big performance piece for the main Saturday night show at Shimmy in the City. It’s a challenge for me to choreograph for twenty dancers, most of whom have only been studying with me for a few months. But even more, to try and create something interesting and dynamic without putting impossible demands on the dancers at the stage they are right now. I've decided to create a lively sha’abi piece to a classic number which I hope will lift the audience’s hearts.
Wish us luck!
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