Taking it easy

Day 66 of practice.

I'm still sore, tired and dehydrated from my weekend at Wild Wild West Con, so today's practice was broken up into manageable chunks. Breakfast shimmies, chair dancing to various music, and then just now a shimmy warm-up and some veil performance practice. I'm feeling pretty good about my veil piece! Now to figure out a costume already.

The above picture was taken at WWWC. The fun thing about having a convention at Old Tucson Studios (a former movie set where many westerns were filmed, before most of it burnt down in the '90s and was rebuilt and turned into more of a theme park), is that costume photos have fun, authentically old-timey backgrounds. Here, Miss Sophia Freelove Greene seems to be saying "Really, you expect me to ride in this?" It's easy to get spoiled by airship travel! This costume was inspired by Victorian-era Orientalist paintings, but of course I gave it a steampunk twist.

Wild Wild West Workshop

Today I got some real, quality practice. While at Wild Wild West Con, I was able to take a workshop from Lori, aided by her fellow Lykiska dancers. There were three combos, including a special Clock Combo that they developed especially for the convention. It was my first time learning from Lori and I really enjoyed it!

The only strange part is that the workshop was held in front of one of the performance stages, which meant we had a lot of random people just sitting there watching us! Luckily most of them left, but it was still really weird to have an "audience" while learning. And just like last night's concert it was a concrete floor, which was less than ideal. I saved my feet by hopping onto the stage itself (wood!), which had the bonus of allowing me to see over the other students' heads.

Over all, WWWC was a fun event, and I may still head over to the hotel for tonight's after party.

Weeee!

Ta da! A pic of me, in steampunk finery! I'm quite pleased with how I look, especially since I pulled it together out of separates from my costume closet.

Today's practice consisted of breakfast shimmies and dancing to The Mission Creeps at Wild Wild West Con. I also danced a tiny bit to The Strand, and I danced to Voltaire, but the floor was so crowded for his show that it barely counted as dancing.

So... tired...

Dance, dance, dance, then party, party, party!

Day 62 of practice.

No Plaza de Anaya for me tonight, instead I am off to the VIP Dinner and Concert for Wild Wild West Con! My inner steampunk (her name is Miss Sophia Freelove Greene) is going to come out and play.

But before I get all gussied up (oh yes, there will be gussying!), I had to get some dance practice. First, shimmy drills with Rachel Brice. I was feeling a little wussy today, and pressed for time, so I stopped when she got to 3/4 shimmies. I am so bad at 3/4 shimmies, sometimes I feel like they're going to take away my belly dancing license. Since the shimmies warmed me up nicely, I jumped into veil practice. I even did some simple floorwork, although I don't know if that will make it into my performance or not. Then I did some Anaya Tribal fast moves, to the song "Turbo Tabla 4" which I know really well because we dance to a remix of it at Anaya Tribal class fairly regularly. Being more familiar with it allows me to have a lot of fun matching up specific moves with different parts of the music and makes me feel like maybe I can go ahead and keep my belly dancing license. But then I decided to practice my zills along with some basic tribal moves, and I began to once again fear the belly dance police. My zills sounded awful! Even so, I got bored of doing the same three moves over and over again, so I decided to do some of them leading with my left foot instead of my right, which didn't make me sound any worse and was good practice and left me feeling more balanced.

Now -- the gussying!