Skirt Work

Fire & Gold Belly Dance is hoping to add a skirt choreography to our repertoire soon, so I felt like it was time to dust off my skills. As such, I took a solo I'd done in the past and added some skirt work to it. It's fun, it's sassy, and it makes for such pretty pictures!

I think 25 yard skirts are one of the most fun "props" out there. There's something about spinning around and swishing your skirt that brings back memories of being a little girl, playing dress up, and dancing around in floofy dresses. This is the grown-up version of that. I'm really looking forward to seeing what my troupe does with them!

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.

Cool Air! (Not the Lovecraft story)

Day 129 of practice.

Oh, blissfully sweet cool air! Our cooler was fixed this morning, so the house is finally at a tolerable temperature and I can finally dance! Of course, I still did arm drills for most of my practice because I was feeling tired, but I did get up, put on a skirt, and practice some moves and some turning/spotting! In the process I found that I spin much better in one direction than in the other. I could stay pretty steady in the one, but then the other would find me stumbling. Or maybe I was just dizzy. Anyway, turns are much more fun with a big 25 yard skirt on. Deep down inside I am still a pretty, pretty princess who just wants to put on a floofy skirt and spin around the house.

Costume Closet

Day 124 of practice.

If there's one thing this blog needs more of, it's pictures. Here's one of my costume closet! There are a few things in there that belong to my husband, but most of it is mine. Some of it will hopefully go away when we have a costume swap meet here in Tucson (maybe this month?). I made some unwise costume purchases when I was a young dancer, and now I have a lot of things I'll never wear, taking up valuable space that could be occupied by dance pants.

I had to skip class due to timing issues and continued malaise (although I am better today than yesterday), so instead I practiced some skirt moves and more hand and arm drills. I am determined to have beautiful, fluid, boneless-looking arms some day! Also, as part of skirt practice I did lots of spins with spotting and I seem to be getting better with that. Oh, and as part of my warm up I did my layered shimmy homework. It was definitely a multi-faceted practice.

Obliques, glutes, psoas, etc etc.

Day 101 of practice.

Today was mostly about cleaning the house, which meant that I had music playing all day and I did little practice shimmies here and there, but I don't want to let that become too major of an element of my daily practice. I'm going to try to move away from even letting that count for the half-hour total, since it's really hard to focus on good posture and using the right muscles when I've also got my arms full of laundry. It is still a great way to practice walking shimmies, and to get to know new music, but it's not the best use of my practice time and should really be considered a bonus.

I did make time for some real practice. I did some of the homework that Mira gave us, practicing glute and oblique shimmies, ovary crushers (take that, ovaries!), pelvic floor muscle exercises, and really just mulling over a lot of what she said in the workshops. I'm going to do more of the isolations while I read tonight, since they can be done lying down.

I also ran through my solo, but I asked Chris to watch me, which through me off because I was performing for him instead of focusing on the moves. I definitely need to put more work into it tomorrow, run it a few times and make up for being kind of screwy tonight.

My plan was to have a picture of my Day 100 reward, but I got busy, so I'll just describe it... A black 25 yard skirt with silver stripes. It's so pretty! A few of my friends have them (and Meghan and Rosie wore them for their performance this weekend), and I've been really wanting one of my own because it's so beautiful and unusual, but it was too expensive to just buy on a whim, since I already have two 25 yard skirts, a 10 yard skirt, and a 9 yard skirt (plus 25 yard pants). I was saving it for a special occasion, and 100 days of practice felt pretty special!

Yaaaaaaawn

Day 27 of practice.

Forgive me if this post is a bit short. I got up earlier than usual so we could take my brother-in-law up to Tempe for the day. We had a good time hanging out in the Phoenix area, but I'm quite tired after a very long day.

Our day of course culminated in my usual two hours of Anaya Tribal classes. In Fun-Duh-Mentals, the newbies were finally introduced to zills, with predictably noisy results. I'm glad that we'll be zilling in that class, because I need all the practice I can get. Advanced/Performance Prep involved trying different transitions between formations, which resulted in me picking the entirely wrong move to use in a diagonal formation. Good thing it was just practice!

Also, I got a new green skirt. Squeee! Perhaps this blog should actually be called Confessions of a green skirt addict.