How did I do?

So, how well did I do with my goal of a year of practice? I did miss some days -- maybe a week total. It's one thing to say that I'll practice even when I'm sick, and quite another to actually do it. I am a bit disappointed that I didn't truly practice for half an hour every day, but I realize now that in some ways that was an unrealistic goal for me.


That said, there were days when I was perfectly healthy and I still slacked off a lot. I practiced, but it wasn't honest, dedicated practice that would really improve me as a dancer. In 2012 I think I need to focus on quality more than quantity, especially if I want to move past some of my current obstacles.


Before I started 2011, I posted 5 things I wanted to work on in my year of practice. Let's see how I did with them!


1: Get better at group dancing.

I must have succeeded with this one, since I'm now in a troupe! Spending time in Fonda's class, which is smaller and more prone to having newbie dancers, forced me to spend more time leading and get more comfortable with it. I've also been working on my peripheral vision so I don't have to stare at the leader!

2: Hone my solo technique.

Thank goodness for Jolie's classes! I'm definitely a much more well-rounded soloist.

3. Improve my zill playing.

Anaya gave me no choice on this when they decided that we had to play rhythms other than a gallop! If you've been following my blog for a while you know that at one point I was zilling every day to try to get a handle on what Anaya was throwing at me. I'm still not good enough to comfortably zill solo, but I do better in groups than I used to.

4. Revisit props I learned this year but never practiced at home.

I revisited sword, which I've used twice in performances with Fonda's class, and I learned veil, skirt, and skirt & fan. I did not, however, revisit my palm flames. Not bad!

5. Backbends!


Somehow I never got around to this! I guess I just got too busy with classes and life and things.


I also went above and beyond my goals in some ways. I pretty much expected that I would spend 2011 continuing to take whatever classes were offered on Thursdays at Plaza de Anaya. I had no idea that I would end up taking Fonda's class, and that Jolie would come to Tucson and rock my world two nights a week. Unfortunately this level of classes is not sustainable given how much it costs, and when Jolie moves away I probably won't be able to replace her classes with something else, but it's been fun while it lasted.


And then there's the workshops. I said I was going to take less of them in 2011, to save some money and maybe get to go to a festival instead, but Kim wouldn't stop bringing amazing people to Plaza! My goodness! I had workshops with Mira Betz, Deb Rubin, Rachel Brice, Silvia Salamanca, and Elizabeth Strong. That's just the visiting teachers at Plaza. I also took a couple of workshops from local teachers. I studied sword with Miriam Amaya at the Desert Shakedown. I had workshops with Anaya and Jolie down here in Tucson. 


I was also able to perform a lot. I performed as a soloist, I did a duet with Jen/Sata, I danced in student recitals and I joined Anaya Tribe and danced at numerous events across the Phoenix metroplex.


All in all, 2011 was an amazing year. I'm going to have to work hard to top it in 2012!

Good bye, 2011!

Day 365 of practice. One. Freaking. Year!

I did it! Mostly! Yes, I missed a few days due to being sick but I never gave up. I danced every day that I could. I danced at home, at class, in New York and New Jersey. I danced in bed, in line at the post office, in chairs of various sorts, and in the car. I danced on stages indoor and out, alone and with friends. I danced regardless of my furnace breaking, my shower breaking, my cooler breaking. I danced my freakin' heart out!

The one-year retrospective will have to wait. I've just finished ringing in the New Year with alcohol and dance and I do not have the focus to go back through my blog and see what goals I set at the start of this and how I did with them.

Anyway, today's practice was good ol' multi-tasking while I cleaned, chair dancing while I beaded, and then dancing to a song which may well be my next solo -- which is funny because it's a cover of a song I did a solo to back in May! Guess I can't get away from Wandering Star! It felt really good to really dance, to be well enough to move and enjoy it, to rock out while I was cleaning and to sink into a new song and to just feel like myself again.

Thank you all for joining me for this journey. I started out for a year of practice but now I'm looking forward to a lifetime of practice -- hopefully with less sick days ;) Check in tomorrow to see how it starts out!

Dress Rehearsal

Day 350 of practice.

My new bra is done-ish (I may yet do more to it, but it's wearable now), so I had a quick dress rehearsal to make sure that everything would play nice together and that none of the embellishments would fly off my bra if I had a sudden shimmy attack. Everything seems great and I am extremely excited about my new costume and my solo, which is the closest I've ever come to choreographing something.

Tomorrow is the Plaza de Anaya student recital, so I should probably also practice my zills for that, as we have to do something a little new and different. I am surprisingly confident about playing zills on stage now, as long as I am not leading and zilling.

By the way... day 350! Only 15 days left in the year! Hard to believe.

Holy crap, it's December

Day 335 of practice.

There's just one month left of my year of practice! Can't believe 2011 is almost over.

Tonight's practice was 2 hours of Anaya Tribal classes. I'm happy that they've been adding more challenges for the level 3-4 students in the level 1-2 class. Tonight we had to play 3-3-7 on our zills while the newbies learned 3s, and we had to layer shimmies over our Turkish and Arabic. I am slowly getting better at that. Turns out that most of my problems with dance all stem from just being too tight, so as I relax more and stretch all my tight places more, these problems will go away. Also I have to keep practicing, of course.

I also added some items to my Plaza de Anaya gift registry! Yes, that's right, Plaza has a registry this year, so that your friends, family, and significant others can make sure to buy you the right dance pants. Wait... there are no pants on my registry! What is wrong with me?

Three hundred!

Day 300 of practice.

Woohoo... 65 more days to go until my year of practice is complete!

So anyway, I lied when I said I was doing 8 hours of class this week... it's actually only 7. I'm going to have to forgo sword in favor of keeping my carpool going. It's a shame, because I love sword, but gas is just too expensive to keep making the drive myself. Especially since I have to drive up twice a week until Thanksgiving week, when I will finally have a respite.

Class tonight was good... It was the start of a new session, which means lots of new faces in the beginner class. Level 3&4 consisted of perfecting the zills and lead changing with one specific move for 50 of the 60 minutes of class. Needless to say, those muscles are pretty tired, and so am I.

9 months!

Day 273 of practice.

9 months of daily practice under my jingly green belt! I bought myself a present yesterday, beautiful teal lace harem pants (swoooooon), and I let myself take it easy today because DANG am I tired! Went to bed at 1:30am and woke up at 4am, 6am, 8am, and 9am. That sort of bad sleep is not acceptable after 3 hours of dance class and three hours of driving to and from dance class.

Anyway, I am SUPER EXCITED about my dance future because starting next week I'll be taking classes with a new teacher! Not that my current teachers aren't awesome, but these classes will be more focused on technique and solo material, which I really want some formal education on. My solo stuff is really a combination of isolations, basic tribal moves, and crap I made up. I get lots of compliments on my solos, but I know it's mostly because of the energy/emotion of my pieces and the fact that people like the veil work I've been doing lately. I want to take it to the next step beyond that!

More later... Now I need to sleep, and I'd better not wake up repeatedly!

Half a year down!

Day 183 of practice.

More than half the year is gone and I'm still dancing every day! Go me! Woohoo!

Today's practice was nothing special, I did isolations in the car on the way to a party in Phoenix. Really too tired to actually dance, but there will be plenty of time for dancing tomorrow and Monday. Hooray, 3 day weekend!

One Five Oh

Day 150 of practice.

Woohoo, 150 days of practice, despite burn out and frustration and questions on where I'm really going with dance!

Just as I planned to, I spent today's practice working with my skirt, after tearing down the table that was taking up valuable living room space. I printed up the descriptions of the moves we learned in class last week and stumbled my way through them, then put on some music and danced them to the best of my ability. I did well on some, but the really long combo is going to take weeks, possibly months of practice to work into my muscle memory, and my memory memory.

I also did spins, to practice my spotting, and worked on my Arabic shimmy (still sucks, but I haven't been practicing it as much as I should). That didn't quite total up to half an hour, so I think I'll do some arms or abs or something before bed.

Fast and slow and a third of the way there

Day 122 of practice.

Wow, is a third of the year really behind me? I guess it is!

Today's practice was a little bit of dancing while cleaning earlier, working on my fast layered shimmies homework, and doing some really slow arm drills and floreo practice. Mira Betz talked about tempo changes during the workshops last month, so that's been on my mind lately and has me listening to music a little differently and working on the sort of syrupy slow dancing that Cari exhorts us to strive for in Anaya Tribal classes. Usually I dance too fast, because I'm an impatient person, but I'm starting to understand the dramatic impact of moving super slow, and then throwing in something fast where the music calls for it, then slinking back into slow. I played with it a little bit in my Convivio solo, but I didn't get super-slow because I wasn't thinking that way yet and also I always dance faster when I'm nervous!

Saturdays are hard!

Day 120 of practice... four months!

I find it hard to get the necessary practice on alternate Saturdays, as we host a roleplaying game at our house (did I mention I'm a nerd?). Today was especially hard because instead of spending the afternoon at home, cleaning for the game and dancing, we went out for lunch with my family.

I did get some practice today... I did some sloooooooow hip circles while talking with my husband. I've been into doing things really slow the past couple of days, now that I have more muscle control it's fun to take advantage of it. I also danced a little bit while doing some quick cleaning. And I drilled knee shimmies and did some arm drills while actually playing the game.

Also I got a cool gift today from my brother! He got me a Fire Fans DVD! It has how-tos and inspirational performances! I can't wait to watch it and then start learning!

Mira Betz and The Big 100!

Day 100 of practice. Woohoo! *throws confetti* (^^^^ Look, it's me with Mira Betz!)

Doesn't the title of this blog post make it sound like some sort of children's novel? But no, this is the story of how Mira Betz and Plaza de Anaya and my wonderful Tempe dance friends made days 99 and 100 of my daily dance goal really awesome!

First of all, I want to say that Kimberly of Plaza de Anaya is one of the best people in the world. She's so sweet, and she works so hard to not just provide dancers in the Valley and beyond with a great place to dance, but to bring us the best workshop teachers. So I want to publicly thank her for all that she does to make my dance life, and that of so many of my friends, so much better! Luv ya, Kim!

And my friends and classmates bring a lot to my dance and social life, too! Usually when I go up for workshops, I stay at Casa de Meghan, but this weekend Meghan had a lot going on, so Rosie and Nahks offered to let me crash with them, just hours before I was due in town. Not only did they give me a place to sleep, they even cooked me a super-yummy lunch before I headed home, and talked nerdy with me! I love that I've found people who love dance AND gaming AND SF/F novels as much as I do! Also, I need to mention that Rosie and Meghan performed beautifully at Saturday night's show, a wonderfully choreographed dark, dramatic, feathery fusion number that made me so proud of them! And I helped -- in the tiniest way, by stitching down some lace on Meghan's bustle. LOL.

But now, MIRA BETZ!!!! Wow. I have taken a decent amount of workshops in the slightly-less-than-two-years that I've been formally taking belly dance classes. Usually I learn some things, take away a few good tidbits, but whatever combos and choreos we learn get forgotten, because I take insufficient notes and have no one to practice with. I was really excited when I saw that Mira's workshops were going to be all technique instead of specific moves, because that's really what I want more of, ways to refine the moves I know and develop more of my own. I knew this weekend was going to be good, and a lot of fun, but I had no idea that it would be amazing.

Seriously, every time I take a workshop with a dancer that I really admire, I jokingly think to myself "Maybe some of her talent will rub off on me!" This is the first time that I've felt like it actually might. Well, not so much HER talent, but she gave all of us the tools to hone our own talent, to each be the best dancer we can, whether we dance Egyptian or American Cabaret or ITS or Gothic Tribal Fusion. She imparted so much wisdom and advice that I literally feel like this weekend changed my life -- it's shown me the path to be the dancer that I want to be, how to get myself out of the rut of ho-hum daily practice and work hard to perfect even the most boring beginner moves.

If you have a chance to take workshops with Mira, I totally recommend it. In fact, not just recommend it, I say DO IT NO MATTER WHAT! If you have to sell plasma and live off of ramen for a month just to afford the workshop, it will totally be worth it. I've never had an instructor inspire me so much, or make me work so hard! And on top of that, she's just plain funny, so even when we were working really hard, she kept the mood light and I never felt stressed, even when I was struggling to layer a rib circle over a vine step (yes, for some reason I am vine step impaired). It helps that she encourages failure as a way of learning, so I felt like even if I messed up, I was trying, and I was learning, and I got pretty much every exercise right at least once, through sheer persistence.

Although my muscles hurt, I am so energized from this amazing weekend. I feel like I could gush on and on in this blog post, or I could clean my entire house, or make a necklace, or go dance for half an hour, or work on one of my novels, or tackle any of a number of other projects. This is so what I needed, and I hope I can find a way to make this feeling last.

(Oh yeah, I'll post about my Day 100 reward tomorrow!)

Threeeeee moooooonths!

Day 90 of practice!

Virtual confetti for everyone! Today marks 90 days/three months of daily (except that one day that I was sick) practice! Hurrah! And this was a milestone that I rung in with style -- three hours of awesome classes at Plaza de Anaya! Dancing with friends, and working hard on my zills, and learning drum rhythms. Good times, good times indeed!

I thought about buying myself something special to celebrate today, but I decided to wait for day 100, since it will coincide with the Mira Betz workshops and I'm hoping maybe she will bring some nice merchandise, as most of the traveling teachers do seem to bring costume goodies along. And if she doesn't, well, I'll still be at the studio and I can buy myself something special!

I did order a veil tonight, but only because the Ren Faire veil lady didn't work out. She had 1/2 circle veils when I went this past weekend, but not a GREEN one! She said she might have it this weekend, but I'm not going back out and when I tried to go to her website to contact her about maybe having it shipped, my browser got hijacked due to that injection thing that was going around the 'net. WAY too much hassle! I should have ordered from the lady who sells through Plaza to start with.

Go away, funk!

Day 75 of practice -- yeah! 75!

Still in a funk, so much so that I almost didn't go to class at The Dance Loft. But really, I just bought a membership and a class card last week, I need to make the effort to be consistent.

It was good to get out of the house, see Fonda and my classmates, and get some practice. We did basic tribal moves and zills. Once again Fonda praised my zills, which made me wish that I played as well at home alone as I do in a room full of people!

Practicing for tomorrow

Day 70 of practice -- hey, that's 10 weeks!

Today's practice consisted of the usual bits of casual practice throughout the day as I cleaned the house, and running through my veil solo several times in costume, to make sure my veil wasn't going to catch on anything. I also decided that I'm going to go with Turbo Tabla 4 for my solo in Performance Prep class, because it's short, its fun, and I already know it well.

I'm excited to perform with my veil tomorrow! Woohoo!

*yawn* Tired!

Day 59 of practice -- two months!

I had to wake up early for a doctor's appointment today. You'd think that being up early would mean more time for dance, but no. Not only did I have a very Mondayful Monday, but being poked and prodded left me feeling pretty bleh, so I opted for some gentle belly isolations and floreos tonight. Tomorrow, I intend to ring in my third month of dance with massive practice. Maybe it will even be warm enough to take my zills for a walk! Attention weather: this is Tucson. It should be warm enough for shorts now.

Now of course, since I had to get up early, this body is ready for some sleep... and maybe some belly dance dreams?

FIFTY!

Day 50 of practice!

That's right, here I am quietly practicing belly rolls while my mother-in-law sleeps in our guest room. Sadly, no real dance practice for me. Someday, when our game room is finished, I can go out there and blast music when we have sleeping house guests, but for now I am drilling belly rolls and mayas and whatever else comes to mind, sans music.

315 more days to go. I think I can make it through the year!

Always warm up!

Day 45 of practice -- a month and a half!

I think it's Princess Farhana who says "Always warm up and cool down -- it's the law!" Well, I bent the law today and only warmed up my legs with a shimmy exercise, while neglecting my arms, and I paid the price! While practicing with my veil, I did something wrong and wrenched something in my left arm. Ow! Massaging and stretching has made it slightly better but it still hurts in some positions. Hopefully I'll sleep it off!

Before that, I managed to get two songs worth of veil practice. Afterwards, I worked on some mayas, taxims, and rib taxims, sans proper arm movement/position. Earlier in the day I did shimmies, traveling steps and whatever else came to mind as I went about my day through the house.

It looks like I'll be going with "Wandering Star" by Portishead for my veil routine. I like that it's slow, but has room for some shimmy accents to punch things up a bit.

Six weeks under my jingly belt!

Day 42 of practice. 42 days = 6 weeks!

I wasn't going to buy myself anything special to mark my six weeks of practice, but then I saw this beautiful tribal faerie pendant at the gem show and I just had to have her. When I asked how much, the vendor said "$25, but for you, $20" which I found funny, since we hadn't met before and hadn't spoken at all, since she was on the phone. Perhaps "for you" means "since the show is closing in 2 hours and it's one less thing to take home." Still. $20 for an awesome faerie! Happy day!

Practice tonight consisted of skipping around through my slow play list trying to decide on a song for my veil solo. It needs to be less than 5 minutes and the Stellamara song I've been practicing to is 5:01. Currently leaning towards Faith and the Muse or Portishead, but I'll need to practice some more to see what feels good. I also drilled all the new moves I learned last night, since there's no class next week (boo hoo!) and I want to make sure I don't forget them. I'm horrible about remembering long combos, I always forget some key part.

Now time to go window shop on Etsy for a veil I won't trip over!

One Month! WOOHOO!

Day 31 of practice. That's right! One whole month!

You'd think I would celebrate this milestone with some sort of really awesome practice, but I'm actually quite busy getting ready for gem show, so instead I did shimmies while cleaning the kitchen and making tea, and belly rolls while drinking tea and writing this blog post.

Suddenly, I am good at belly rolls. I mean, not amazing, I'm not going to flip quarters or anything like that, but they're so much smoother, I can feel the transition from upper to mid to lower abs, and they're not making me queasy. I guess the sporadic practice has done me a lot of good! I intend to practice them every day while I work at the gem show (I spend a lot of time sitting behind the counter packaging crystals, so I won't be weirding the customers out). After that it will be time to explore how to do flutters, because that would be a really nice trick to have available for my solo work.

I am really excited that I'm already 1/12th of the way through my goal of one year of practice!

Three weeks!

Day 21 of practice.

Here we are, three weeks in and I haven't given up yet! I also haven't changed my trend of late-night practice :) Just got done with my daily half-hour, dancing my way through my homework playlist (a mix of Lisa Gerrard, Wench, Dead Can Dance, Voltaire, Abney Park, and Beats Antique), playing with my veil, practicing the new Anaya Tribal combos I learned last night, and experimenting with solo moves.

Tomorrow should be a bit of a challenge, as I have a crazy-busy day. 12-5 I'll be working, helping a friend get ready for vending at the gem shows, then by the time I get home, my gaming group will be here to play some Legend of the Five Rings, which will probably last past midnight. Should I dance before work? Do belly rolls while I work? Dance during the dinner break at the game? Or dance after the game? I guess I'll have to see what feels good at the time, but it will be good practice for gem show itself, when I'll be working 8-10 hours a day and then socializing almost every night after work!