An hour a day

About 1 3/4 years ago, I started this blog to chronicle my attempt to dance for half an hour a day for a year. After that year ended, I kept up daily practice for a while but eventually I fell off the wagon, and lately I have not been doing hardly any home practice at all. This is simply Not Acceptable. I work from home and I have plenty of time on my hands, time which I waste on the internet. I could be a much better dancer than I am, if I just practiced harder.

So over the weekend, I was struck with inspiration. It was time to be really strict with myself and set a time for dancing every weekday. Dancing right after I got up just wasn't working... there was too much "Ok, but first I need to..." because sometimes it is hard to dance when the floors need sweeping and the laundry needs doing and the dogs want their breakfast, and the next thing you know, it's two in the afternoon. So fine. I'll dance in the afternoon, from 3-4pm. That gives me plenty of time to get everything else out of the way -- housework, correspondence, listing items on Etsy. And anything that isn't done by 3pm is just going to have to wait.

Today I gave it a try. At 3pm I parked myself in front of my mirror with a glass of iced tea and an oven timer set for one hour. I set my iPod on shuffle and let the songs dictate what I was going to drill. Then I worked on some troupe choreo and my solo for this weekend, a little playtime to a song I'm in love with, and a quick shimmy drill, then spent the last 8 minutes stretching while I was nice and warm -- so, so warm.

As always, once I got started it was easy to keep going. I love to dance, after all! And I let myself play a bit between drilling, if a song didn't strike me as being appropriate for drilling.

Things I learned today:

1. I need a bigger glass of iced tea tomorrow.
2. Doing snake arms for a 6 minute long song really sucks when you spent the previous night doing arm work with fire fans. Ouch.
3. I am actually making progress with chaine turns. In fact, I kept doing them in the silence after the song ended, because I was on such a roll.

I'm looking forward tomorrow!

Indecision

The hardest part about practicing at home is deciding what to practice. Some things are a given -- right now I have to practice the F&G choreography, and I have to work with my glow fans. But what else should I work on? Layering over shimmies? Improving the range of motion in my taxim? Freshen up my ITS, which has been a bit neglected lately? More emotionality?  Hands? Sword? Veil?

I should probably sit down and come up with some sort of plan and schedule, to make sure that everything gets practiced. Otherwise I tend to neglect things. And let's face it, if I want to work my way up to being a professional belly dancer (and I do!), I need to develop good practice habits.

As for tonight, I decided it was a great idea to do snake arms with glow fans. I should probably do that every day to build up a little muscle! And I did some shimmies with a bit of layering on top.

Snaaaaaake Aaaaaaaarms

I did so many snake arms tonight. All the snake arms! Ok, not really all of them, I had to focus on my taxim at one point and drop my arms to try to figure out what was up with my hips. But I did spend an entire five minute long song doing snake arms and pretending like it was no big deal (it was a big deal, my muscles were really protesting after 3-4 minutes but I toughed it out).

Over all, I really enjoyed the classes tonight, even though our room was really cold (50 degrees tonight and the class before us decided it was an awesome idea to have the garage door open!) and I had trouble with some of the material. I was just in a really good mood and ready to dance. I need that kind of mindset more often.