Change is coming. I hate change.

Road trip buddies for life! Me, Jolie, Lecia and Brandye in my car.

I got hit with a bit of a bombshell on Wednesday. My teacher/mentor/troupe director/road trip buddy for life Jolie is moving away. We have a little over a month of classes and troupe practices left before she has to start transitioning into her new life. She'll eventually be landing in San Francisco.

I've mentioned that I hate change, right? I especially hate when my friends move away, although living in AZ I've had to get used to that (AZ: Great Schools, Lousy Job Market. How's that for a catchy state slogan?). I spent Wednesday night in a morass of "everything sucks, what am I going to do, waaaaaaa" but luckily I already had a private lesson scheduled with Jolie on Thursday and she helped me get my head back on straight (see, this is why I need her around).

Really, I can't stay too upset because when Jolie first moved here, she said she was only going to be around for 6 months. I got about 1.5 more years with her than I planned, and I've become a better dancer and even a better person for it. Plus I am really happy for her, she has some great things happening in her life and I think she'll be a lot happier in SF than here. AND I'll get to see her at Tribal Fest, and SF is a place I could feasibly go for a vacation. And we live in the future, so I can get video dance lessons when I feel the need for some brain-breaking layers. So it's not like she's completely vanishing from my life, I just won't get those 3x a week dance classes and fun drives to Phoenix for dance events.

Tomorrow I'll get into what this means for my personal dance journey, but today I'd like to reassure any local friends/fans that the current plan is for SFOF/F&G to continue to perform together (we already have some shows planned for 2014!), and we WILL still be hosting Open Stage at Sky Bar because we all love it and there are at least 3 of us ready and able to run it. We have a lot of work and love put into our troupe and we want to keep it together.

So over all, I'm a bit concerned about this change, but I'm confident that everything is going to be great in the end, I just have to get through this awkward transition period without embarrassing myself by clinging to Jolie's leg and crying "DON'T LEAVE US!" (although if I could convince everyone else in SFOF/F&G to join me, it would make a great photo opp).

SFOF Class Card Sale -- Come Dance With Us!

Now is a really good time to start taking classes with Jolie Roberson of Skirt Full of Fire. Let me give you two really good reasons to come to class (assuming that you're local to Tucson, otherwise you're off the hook for this one):

1. Starting in October, Fire & Gold student troupe rehearsals will be open to everyone as we learn a group choreography to be performed at the holiday showcase. That's right, you'll get a performance opportunity without having to commit to being in a troupe. Our rehearsals are conveniently held right after the Wednesday night Choreography & Combinations class.

2. Until the 30th, Skirt Full of Fire is having a class card sale! You can save on 5 and 10 class cards, or really treat yourself and get a 30 day unlimited pass. Or if you're not sure whether you're ready to take the plunge, you can get two-for-one drop-ins. Check out the newsletter for complete details and links to purchase your cards.

Oh, ok, I lied, I'm going to give you THREE good reasons:

3. If you've followed my progress over the past few years, you may have noticed a steady increase in my skills, emotionality, confidence, good attitude, makeup and costuming. Now granted, some of that is due to my own hard work and dedication, but that wouldn't have been nearly as effective without a great teacher directing my work in the right direction. Jolie helps her students grow as dancers with great instruction, firm but gentle correction, and lots of encouragement. I can't recommend her highly enough and I'd really love to see more people in class growing alongside the current core group of students. Join us!

Momentum

I seem to have lost my momentum somewhere around November and I desperately need to find it again. I have such big plans for 2013 but I have been struggling to carve out time for practice. It doesn't help that this week has been weird... I've been out and about a lot, catching up on errands and getting massages and meeting with people.

Today's meeting was with Jolie. I will be assisting Skirt Full of Fire at Infinity: A Kinky Adventure in Phoenix next weekend. This is my first time doing a ride-along with the pro troupe and I am really excited to get a behind the scenes look at gigging (more than I get at the community shows that we do). Anyway, today's meeting was to discuss the details of that and what will be expected of me, but we also talked a lot about my professional development.

I really enjoy working with Jolie because she gives me the right mixture of praise and constructive criticism. I get a lot of "I've noticed you're getting a lot better at X, so keep practicing that but now let's focus on Y." Today was a lot of what I can do for my image, both from a physical standpoint and in my interactions with people. It's funny that a lot of what she suggested to me (play more with makeup, put more of a positive spin on things) was stuff that I had already put on my list of goals for 2013.

Anyway, all that talk made me want to take more action. I want to be practicing more and working on costumes and playing with my makeup and hair and journaling and having deep thoughts about what I'm doing, instead of goofing off on Facebook. I think I need to try having an actual schedule to adhere to, dividing up the various work that I need to do. Maybe that will help.

Off to brainstorm about how I can squeeze some practice in tomorrow...

Making it official

I came to some big decisions last week. One of them was to take a hiatus from the Tucson Tribal Belly Dance Collective. I've been so busy trying to learn the Fire & Gold choreos, and master my glow fans that I had not been practicing my ITS moves or working on the TTBDC set. I still love ITS but I'm finding that it's not really my focus right now. I'd rather do it casually, and break it out at parties with friends, than actually perform it in a troupe setting. Maybe I'll feel differently later, but for now my interests lie elsewhere.

And where is elsewhere? Other than F&G (which I'm really loving), I've decided that what I really want is to be a professional tribal fusion soloist. Dancing with a troupe is fun, but being a soloist gives me total creative control to express myself artistically, dance to the songs I love, and go crazy with costuming. As for being professional, well, if I'm going to do this, I might as well do it at the highest level possible.

So to make it official, I e-mailed Jolie last week and told her that was my goal, and I wanted to have a private lesson to evaluate where I was at and set me up with a good strict practice regimen (I'm pretty sure I blogged before about being baffled by how to structure my practice). Now I have a crazy amount of homework to do, focusing on drilling the hell out of my basics to undo some of the bad habits I've developed.

To give you an idea of what my days will be like now that I'm on this path, here's what today was like:

-Get up, get dressed, eat breakfast, check internet things.

-Private lesson with Jolie, set up practice schedule.

-Come home, get together some beadwork, deliver to Kate's house so it can be photographed for her upcoming book. Something not-dance related!

-Come home again, do chores because they ain't gonna do themselves.

-Decide I want to go ahead and start my practice regimen today. Get into a fight with iPod while trying to set up practice playlists. It thinks that one of the troupe songs is 32 minutes. It is not.

-Go to early dinner with husband, because I skipped lunch and I am staaaaaaarving.

-Go buy groceries.

-Come home for the third time today. Finish setting up play lists, spend about half an hour doing homework. No time to practice choreos or solos before class.

-Drive over to BreakOut Studios, coordinate with a troupemate who is placing an order of tribal jewelry for the troupe. Woohoo!

-One hour of Choreo class. Fun Mira Betz/Gypsy-influenced piece where we got to channel our inner machisma. I enjoyed the hell out of it and want to find a song that makes me feel that way for a solo.

-Over an hour of troupe practice because hey, less than 2 weeks til our big show!

-Come for the fourth and final time. Realize that I still have to update my blog and stretch. Devour all food in the house like a locust.

Always doing something!

Don't let the quiet around here fool you into thinking that I'm not a busy, busy dancer! Friday is the only day this past week when I didn't do anything dance-related, and that was because my dog had minor surgery and spent the night recovering from anaesthesia while sprawled out in my lap.

Yesterday I didn't dance, but I did go to BreakOut to see their Street Fair show (well, part of it... lunch was a SNAFU!). Not only were the junior and senior troupes amazing dancers, but I got to watch Jolie do an entirely improv number in her sparkly purple costume. She's such an inspiration on how to own the song and the crowd. Oh, did I mention that it was totally improv because she had never heard the song before? I'm in awe of dancers who can pull out an amazing show to unfamiliar music. Bravo!

Today I also haven't danced yet (but I will!), however I spent a couple of hours at a joint meeting of our local belly dance community group SABDA and the AZ chapter of MECDA. It's so important to be an active member of the community if you're even remotely serious about dance! Otherwise you'll never know what events are going on and where to see people perform and who is teaching what. I really liked the fact that today, most of the members of the MECDA board came down to give a presentation and answer our questions. We want to have a better connection with the Phoenix community and AZ as a whole.

Also there were Lebanese sugar cookies which are delicious.

A community of two

I was the only person to show up to Jolie's community class today, which didn't stop the two of us from dancing! After running through the choreography of the day (which was fun and let me practice the turns that so handily defeated me on Monday), Jolie had me do a little improv practice to try to work on my facial expressions and emotions. I tend to have two dance modes -- happy dancer and Goth dancer -- so I really need to work on broadening that and being comfortable expressing myself to the audience.

Now I also have my self-evaluation form that I need to fill out with a troupe. It's a chart! That I need to fill in! Where are my colored pencils?

New and Exciting!

Well, hello there! I pretty much took last week off from dancing and blogging, because working at the bead show was pretty exhausting and honestly, after over a year of daily practice, I felt like I needed just a little break. There were tiny bits of chair dancing here and there, and lots of balancing things on my head for the amusement of my booth-mates, but no dedicated practice. And you know what? I'm fine with that.

But now it's a new week and gem show is mostly behind me, and I'm back to my regular dancing ways! Not only that, but tonight was the first meeting of Fire & Gold, Jolie's student troupe. I am so excited to be part of it, and I love how our first choreography is shaping up! I also love that tonight was relatively low key, because I am still wiped out from the show. Things were at just the right level for me to throw myself fully into it, but still have some energy left over for the rest of the night.

Teacher Profile: Jolie Roberson

A few months ago, Jolie Roberson blew into town from Chicago and turned my dance life upside down! There I was, wanting to branch out from ITS and hone my solo skills, and also wishing that I could take a drills class to really perfect some basics. There she was, ready to make me regret my wish by making me layer half-boxes over a tick-tock shimmy.

Jolie's classes are the perfect thing for the dancer who wants to be challenged. They start with a muscle-building warm-up (which usually involves crunches, push-ups, and other forms of torture... I mean exercise) and then move on to the dancing! The focus is on tribal fusion, with elements of ballet and modern dance.

The Choreo class usually focuses on some aspect of dance within the choreography -- whether it's expressing certain emotions, or traveling, or directing movement with your arms, there's almost always some central lesson to take away and apply to other dances.

Bellydance 101 tricks you with its name, making you think it will be easy. It is not. The moves may be basic, but Jolie focuses on training you to do them muscularly, with control, at various speeds, and layered over things that you don't think they should be layered over. Sometimes she comes up with layering ideas that even she struggles with, and we all get to be frustrated together.

Drills and Technique is like a more advanced version of 101, with more layers and doing things for longer. One night we had to spend two entire songs layering belly rolls over vibration shimmies. It's a great class for discovering what your strengths and weaknesses are then working on how to improve them.

Jolie teaches a couple of other classes that I haven't taken yet, and has more classes coming up on her schedule in February. She's also available for private lessons. For more information, you should visit her website Skirt Full of Fire.

So much layering!

Oh my goodness. Lots and lots of layering and stuff at Jolie's classes tonight. Lots of leg work. Lots of shimmies. Lots of belly rolls. I am utterly and completely exhausted, and sore in numerous places. I definitely got my money's worth tonight! I'm going to go die now.

We braved the cold

Day 353 of practice.

Another cold night at BreakOut Studios. Brooke and I were the only ones who braved it and we were rewarded for our dedication with a semi-private lesson tailored to our specific needs, and with lots of feedback on our individual solos at yesterday's performance, and how to work to be even better in the future.

I had a good time. Jolie is adept at telling me what I need to work on, while framing it in a way that makes it clear that she believes that I can and will conquer it. It was also good to be in class with Brooke who is at a similar place to me, dance-career wise. Sometimes it's just me and Fonda, or me and Kamrah (a local pro and teacher who is really amazing), and I feel like I am a bit of a lump next to the pros!

Anyway, Jolie gave me a lot to think about and work on, which is good since BreakOut and Plaza are both closed next week so I'll have a lot of home practice time.

What a difference a week makes

Day 339 of practice.

I don't know what happened... maybe I broke through a wall. Maybe I just needed some introspection. Maybe I was holding myself back. But whatever happened, tonight I felt frickin' awesome at Jolie's class. We did 2:16 of a relatively difficult choreography and while there were a couple of parts I was a little iffy on, over all I felt really comfortable with the non-bellydance elements and like I was on top of it, fully committing, and most of all having FUN even when I was really cold. I really really enjoyed myself and I feel like I danced at my potential and didn't let my mistakes keep me down.

And of course, part of the fun was that it was just Jolie, Fonda and I so it was a kind of relaxed, intimate atmosphere and Fonda and I were having fun joking around about alternate choreography and how we should do a Gothic Fusion Horror Circus piece. More and more adjectives kept piling on throughout the night.

I felt so good when I got home that I also did a quick run-through of my solo and played with some different moves and ideas. I'm starting to feel better about the possibility of performing this piece at the Holiday Belly Dance show here in Tucson on the 18th, although I need to work on the emotional part as well as the moves. I'm great at roleplaying, but I have no acting experience so I don't know how well I'm going to do at portraying different moods on my face. Plus there's the costuming... I want to buy lots of new bits for it and the budget just ain't there!

Makeup Workshop

Day 337 of practice.

Today I went to a 3-hour makeup workshop taught by Jolie (and hosted by my former carpool buddy Dawn who I do not get to see often enough but have seen 2 days in a row now, yay!). This was really good for me because I honestly do not know what I'm doing with makeup. I only started wearing it at age 27 and I have pretty much taught myself how to apply it which means I was doing a lot of things wrong. Not even from a stage makeup point of view, but just from a not looking awful point of view. I feel confident that with a little practice, the things I learned today will help me look better for performances big and small but also for date nights with my husband.

Not really dancing but good for my dance career so it is pretty much counting as my practice for the day. By the time I got home it was cold and rainy and gross and I did not feel like doing anything more than stuffing myself full of pasta and then relaxing on the couch in fleece pajamas. Look, I don't do cold, OK? And we're having lows in the 30s before it's even officially winter. I did do some glute isolations and my shoulder stretches and that is it!

Drum solo

Day 325 of practice.

We did some drum solo choreo in Jolie's class tonight. Like everything in her classes it was HARD! The song was fast and so it was tricky to keep up, even if the move was something I knew. I did have a lot of fun, though. It felt good to get a good workout in class and we were soon warm enough that it didn't matter that there still isn't a heater in our studio.

It also felt good to be well enough to do the warm-up again! My cough is almost all gone, and probably would be entirely gone if not for the dust and hookah smoke that I inhaled this weekend (don't worry, I wasn't smoking, but other people at Aura were, so it was secondhand hookah).

Made of Awesome

Day 320 of practice.

This week has been full of frustrations, so I'm happy to say that the dance-related areas of my life were pretty awesome today! First I had a private lesson with Jolie, and she helped me work on my next solo, using emotion and gesture like we learned in Monday's class. It was admittedly very strange having someone there while I started working on a solo -- usually even my husband doesn't see an in-progress solo until I'm pretty comfortable with it. But it was also cool to get feedback at the very start, so that I knew what direction to go in. I'm excited and I hope I get the chance to perform it soon -- but not too soon because I need time to work on it :)

Also, having a big mirror to dance in front of was pretty nice, although it feels a little narcissistic to be staring at myself while I dance. I'm sure I'll get used to it.

Then in the evening I finally made it back to Fonda's Dance Loft class, where we had a very special treat -- Friendly neighborhood drummer Carl was there to provide live music! He's going to be a regular fixture at classes for the near future, so we can learn more about dancing to live drumming and playing rhythms on our zills. We did a lot of zilling tonight which is great, I was feeling bad because I haven't practiced my zills since troupe rehearsal on Sunday. It was also so good to see my classmates again and be in the fun, relaxed atmosphere of Fonda's class.

I can tell that I'm starting to feel better, because after all of that, and even though I'm a little tired, I still feel like doing more dancing!

Back to classes

Day 312 of practice.

Well, my cough is stubbornly lingering but I went to Jolie's classes anyway. I just stretched my way through the workout warmup part of it, with the teacher's blessing because she doesn't want me to DIE in her class. Although I think that might be good advertising for her: "Did you hear about the teacher whose classes were SO hardcore that one of her students fell over dead from the warmup?"

Had some fun with movement and shimmy layering. It felt good to be in class again, with friends and learning new things.

Coughing my brains out

Days 307-310 of practice, sorta.

Well, my year of dance kind of fell apart with this sickness. I flat out did not practice on Thursday and Friday. I was so sick, and in such a bad mood from being sick, that it just didn't happen. But you know what, I'm okay with that. I've been doing this for over 300 days and I only missed one before, also when I was sick. So I think I've proven that I can practice every day. I'm going to continue onward, having acknowledged the fact that sometimes I am physically and/or mentally incapable of doing anything that truly resembles dancing. From now on, sick days will be for non-physical dance journey enrichment -- maybe I'll spend the day watching videos on YouTube, or sorting through new music, or reading a belly dance magazine or on-line articles.

Anyway, the weekend was full of dance. I went to the Plaza de Anaya Intensive, featuring Elizabeth Strong and Silvia Salamanca. I couldn't fully participate, due to low energy and coughing fits, but even sitting on the sidelines and taking notes when I got too tired was fun and inspiring. Plus the show pretty much knocked my socks off! Other fun parts of the weekend were carpooling with Jolie and getting to know her better, spending the weekend with my great friend Jen, and being paired up with awesome fellow Tucsonan Gina and my beading belly dance friend SaraBeth for an exercise in upper Egyptian group dancing :) All that and I got a badass femme fatale hairclip from local vendor extraordinaire Kyla, as well as DVDs from both instructors so I can pick up more of their style when my health improves.

Now I'm left with a horrendous cough but a strong desire to dance (especially since my husband found more awesome music tonight), so I'm facing a week of going to my dance classes but dancing at partial capacity -- Jolie has already given me permission to skip the torturous crunches, push-ups and hip bridges during her warm-ups, probably because she's had to listen to me cough all weekend :)

A very happy Halloween!

Day 304 of practice.

What a fun, eventful day I have had so far. I worked some practice into my day, some zilling and working with the heavy friggin' veil. Then I got dressed up in my dryad costume and handed candy out to trick-or-treaters for a little bit until it was time to go to class. No one else showed up to class, so this belly dancing dryad enjoyed a private lesson with Jolie.

I have a love-hate relationship with private lessons. On the one hand it is great to find out what you need to work on and have individual attention to get it done right. On the other hand, there's always those little moments where you go "ARGH I AM BAD AT EVERYTHING I AM THE WORST DANCER EVAR!" But Jolie's a lot of fun and we chatted a lot about things while we drilled, so it kept me mostly relaxed and not stressing so much about all the ways I was messing up.

Now I am beat and it is time to remove my pretty dryad costume and makeup (I drew leaves on my face with sparkly olive eyeliner) and enjoy some faerie beer.

Limbs fall off

Day 298 of practice.

The problem with having Jolie's classes on consecutive days is that my poor body takes a beating! Then I have Fonda's class on Weds and 3 hours at Plaza on Thurs, so I don't really slow down until Friday. I have a love-hate relationship with this current schedule. On the one hand, I LOVE that I have 8 hours of class a week before I even factor in troupe practice, performances, and workshops. On the other hand, I rarely get a lazy evening at home anymore.

Anyway, tonight's classes involved lots of rib taxims and mayas and taxims and horizontal figure 8s with slow 4-4 shimmies layered on top. Lots of tricky stuff so it was another good, challenging night. But I'm so tired and hungry that it feels like my limbs are all going to fall off!

So much fun!

Day 297 of practice.

I just really had a great time in Jolie's class tonight. I guess I was in a good mood and the right mindset to start with, and then I just synced up with the material and really got into it. Maybe it helped that I didn't have to layer anything over a maya? (Well, we did one slow maya with a simple arm thing over it as part of the choreo, but that was easy). I even volunteered to be in a video of the minute plus of choreo we learned, and I'll post that once the other student says she's OK with it.

I'm really enjoying being in some classes that are really challenging me mentally and physically on a regular basis. There are invariably challenges in all of my other classes from time to time (there was this one passing move in DC skirt that I kept messing up even though it was conceptually simple), but Jolie's class are constant challenges, mindfucks, and struggles. I feel like I'm really going to grow as a dancer during the time that I spend studying with her.

But my glutes hate her. Haaaaaaate.

On the floor!

Day 290 of practice.

In tonight's class, Jolie had a small piece of floorwork in the choreography, which means I'm probably going to have bruises on my knees. But it was worth it to learn a cool way to get down to the floor! Besides, while it may still be 100 degrees here, I don't think I'm going to wear shorts this week so what does it matter if my knees are a little battered?

At first I didn't want to take this class, but I'm glad I did. Learning choreography isn't my thing, but Jolie uses it to teach us certain concepts. Tonight, for instance, was about switching between fast and slow, and also learning to be still. Good exercises to stretch my brain!