Commitment!

Tonight was all about committing to things. No, I'm not talking about dedication like I did yesterday, but about to committing to what you're doing at that moment. Combos and Choreography was a freakin' crazy sad lyrical piece with pretty much no belly dance in it. It was great practice for committing to unfamiliar moves, to not being "pretty" and to getting sad as all heck.

Then we FINISHED OUR CHOREOGRAPHY in troupe practice! Hooray! It's done! So of course we had to commit to that while we were doing it, dance like we meant it. I am pretty happy and excited. Practicing all week really helped, I felt comfortable with even the difficult parts, even if I messed them up, I knew what I was supposed to be doing. Now it's all about fine-tuning.

Lastly, I am now committed to doing a glow fan solo at our big troupe show on May 20th! This means I have to practice obsessively, which is pretty much what Jolie always expects of me anyway. It's nice to have a reputation of being a person who throws herself into things, even if it means that people then expect you to throw yourself into things and you can't be lazy.

And that's the secret truth about me. I am, at heart, a lazy person. If left to my own devices, I will happily spend all day goofing off on Facebook or reading a book. But having dance goals, and having a blog where I have to write about what I'm doing, keeps me motivated to actually do stuff. Being in a troupe really helps, because if I don't practice I'm not just failing myself, but I'm letting down my director and my fellow dancers. Between that and my intense hatred of being bad at things, I get motivated to actually practice instead of thinking about practice while I read another chapter.

Dedication

There's no way around it -- being a good dancer requires a lot of dedication. It means going to class every week, and practicing at home, and showing up to troupe rehearsals. It's hard to believe that once upon a time, I thought it was enough to take a single 1 hour class a week and occasionally practice a bit at home.

Today I had two hours of Tucson Tribal Belly Dance Collective practice. About half of the troupe was absent, but we made due without them and worked on our set as well as some general practice. It seems like the group is getting more comfortable with each other, which is good. It's important for us to be able to offer gentle corrections and to also not be shy about coming up with new ideas and sharing them with the group. Sometimes we get a little too caught up in new ideas, but it's all good.

I also ran the Fire & Gold choreo, which means I successfully made time for it every day this week! Dedication is the word of the day.

Class and Practice

My tattoo is healing nicely, so it's not slowing down my dancing. Hooray! Today I went to Jolie's community class, where we did a modified version of Monday's choreography, and lots of shimmies. I worked up a nice sweat!

This evening, I worked on the F&G choreo (getting better every day!) and the solos I'm going to present on Monday to possibly be used in our big show on May 20th. I have two pieces I'm working on, for a total of just under 7.5 minutes, with the idea that I can do either one, both, or neither depending on what we need.

I also made time for some stretching, because muscles need love, too!

Fun times at Open Stage

Tonight was the Open Stage at the Luxor Cafe, hosted by Safar Dance Company. I attended as an audience member this time and had a really wonderful evening watching all of the dancers and talking with people between sets. After the show I had a nice long chat with Jolie about what she would like to see me work on (among other things), and I am feeling pretty good about it.

Afterwards I came home and practiced our troupe choreo (less mistakes than ever!), and my Wandering Star solo. I'm taking it a little easy on the practice during the first few days of tattoo-healing, as the area is a little tender and the skin feels tight, which makes some positions uncomfortable. But over all I am feeling great and still so excited about my pretty beetle.

I am also incredibly TIRED, so it's off to bed with me!

My First Tattoo!!!

Squeeeee! I am so incredibly happy with my first tattoo! It's based on the Chrysina Gloriosa, a beautiful green scarab beetle that lives here in Arizona, and it was inked on to my back by Muriel Zao, who is completely awesome. He studio is lime green and has a curio cabinet full of skulls and insects, so I was pretty much destined to love her, but she also had a great attitude and a good sense of humor, which helped me be really relaxed about the fact that I was getting my first tattoo and it was not a little bittie thing (although it's not as big as it looks in the pic. It appears to take up half my back, but it is actually about the size of my hand).

This is just the first part of the tattoo, in a few months I will be going back to get some foliage spreading out from the beetle over my hips, because hip tattoos look amazing on belly dancers. And I'm already daydreaming about what I'll get after that. There's so many beautiful insects in the world! Will I get another beetle? A sphinx moth? A cicada?

I am really happy to say that I found the whole tattooing experience to not be as painful as I feared. I had a full and eventful day after my appointment, visiting with several of my Phoenix-area dance friends, dropping into Plaza real quick, and then I came home and ran through the Fire & Gold choreography, because every day means every day!

Now to see how I feel in the morning ;)

Work and Fun

Good times at class tonight. There were lots of fun conversations before class, about insects and chemical showers and other crazy things. I love dancing because it introduces me to so many interesting people from different walks of life -- massage therapists, astrophysicists, biologists, and more!

Once chatting time was over it was time for lots of drills and shimmies and discovering more things I'm bad at. Well I guess I already knew I was bad at a walking 3/4 shimmy on the down, but now everyone else knows it, too.

Tomorrow is a big day because I am getting my FIRST TATTOO!

Work harder!

For the record, I practiced hard yesterday after I blogged. I worked on the troupe choreo, and my own solo, and drilled various things, and had an amazing emotionality practice where in one song I managed to go from being cute and playful to being moved to tears, as the music changed. So there.

That said, I obviously need to work harder on the troupe choreo, as I had a few mistakes tonight and we have a month to get it perfectly polished for our first performance. Jolie wants us to run it at least once a day. It's a short song, so I should have no problem working it in. Ideally I'll practice it a few times a day, but we'll see. I have a dozen other things I need to work on, too!

The class before troupe practice was a lot of fun, we did a choreo that focused on more belly dance technique instead of modern technique, with an emphasis of dancing with attitude, as if we were each a soloist taking center stage and putting our emotion into it. I had fun with that, since the moves were familiar and mostly easy for me, and if I messed up, it was no biggie because it was just a class exercise and I'd fix it next time.