A Productive Weekend

I had a really busy, productive weekend and I am feeling pretty pleased with myself and ready to tackle this week.

On Saturday, I was up in Phoenix for the bellydance swap meet. My friend Jen and I had both decided it was time to clean out our dance closets, so we shared a booth. We had just enough stuff to full up our rack and a couple of tables, and we got to spend the day hanging out (and taking turns going out to shop and socialize). I was worried that I wouldn't sell much, but I think I managed to move about half of what I brought with me, including two of the most expensive items in my booth. And I only bought two (matching) costume pieces and a piece of normal clothes, so in the end I was very successful. Plus I got to see a lot of dance friends that I hadn't seen for a while, yay!

Sunday is usually my day off, but this weekend I made an exception to study with Amanda Rose! I took her Dynamics Toolbox workshop, which is great for making you really think about how you can modify moves to make your performances more, well, dynamic. I was already aware of most of the concepts she spoke of, but had never really taken the time to think of the different ways they could be applied and combined to moves. The great thing was that while Amanda Rose does Egyptian-style bellydance, the workshop is really applicable to all styles of bellydance and only required knowledge of the same basic moves that are used in all styles. I definitely recommend it for the intermediate-level dancer who is looking for ways to really bring more dimensions to your work, especially if you're feeling stuck in a rut. Everything that she discussed was equally applicable to building choreographies or dancing improv, and the concepts could really be useful for making your at-home practices more challenging by adding different elements to your drills. I'm excited to start applying what I learned to my practice and seeing how it comes out in my performances.

Over all I am really happy with what I accomplished over the weekend!

What a weekend!

 You might imagine that on weekends when I'm not performing or at a workshop, I lounge around my house, snuggling with the corgis and maybe catching up on some reading. But nope, even when I'm not in the public eye, there's usually something that I'm up to. This weekend was no exception, and in fact, it was pretty fun and exciting!

On Saturday I went over to Bellydance Tucson to film my first-ever audition video. Wow, was that nerve-wracking! You never realize how many tiny little things go wrong when you're dancing until you're trying to get a "perfect" take! But it was a fun learning experience and I finally got to wear this Anaya Tribal costume that I bought back in Autumn, and I did some new things with my makeup.

Speaking of makeup, after class on Sunday I popped over to Liora K's studio so we could collaborate on this week's Beauty Blogging for Belly Dancers column. I am SO excited! Not only did Liora do some fun things to my face (as you can see), but she took lots of pictures, which you know are going to be 5000x better than what I've been taking with my iPhone in my bathroom.

It's always fun to get together with someone else to do makeup anyway, because they see the things in my train case differently than I do. I pretty much have specific items that I use for specific things, and then everything else is something I saw on sale at Ulta, used once, and then set aside. Between my private lesson with Jolie and yesterday's session with Liora, I definitely feel like I need to be more open-minded and experimental with my collection and see what sort of fun new things I can do.

Be sure to come back on Friday to see more pictures, product reviews, and a nearly step-by-step breakdown of what Liora did with my eyes.

What I did today

This morning was the photo shoot for Skirt Full of Fire and Fire & Gold Bellydance! There are not many things that will get me out of bed at 7am on a Saturday, but this was one of them! I had to be fully made-up, coiffed, dressed and over to the venue by 9am. Luckily I live 5 minutes from downtown.

There's a lot more photos coming but Liora K is a super busy lady, so she just posted one as a preview for us... the whole group snuggled up on some couches. Super cute! The whole shoot was this fun. Liora's great to work with, and of course I love all my troupemates and "big sisters" so it made for a good time. And while it was rough getting up and ready so early, it was nice to be done early, too. This was the first time I've had my Saturday afternoon and evening free in a long time.

Keep your eye out for more pictures soon!

The weekend is too short

How is it already 11:30 on Sunday night? This weekend flew by.

I didn't end up performing at the Circus Farm fundraiser after all. The weather was far too icky to drive all the way up to Mesa and dance outdoors at night. Instead I ended up going to a holiday party, which was nice. Sometimes I get so wrapped up in dance (and this time of year, my jewelry business) and I just don't make enough time to socialize with my friends.

Today I went to dance class in the too-cold studio. Two more nights of cold classes and then I am FREE! The studio is closing for 2 weeks starting on the 21st and moving to an exciting new venue with more room and best of all, HEAT! Oh, I can't wait to no longer shiver my way through dance classes. I hope that the nicer, bigger studio also results in more new faces in class, and maybe in the troupe, too.

Then I went jogging, and it was also too cold, but you do what you gotta do. I did pretty well, until we stopped jogging and suddenly my calves decided to entirely cramp up. But that's sadly pretty normal. Maybe if I didn't subsist off of tea all winter long I would be less prone to calf cramps, but water is cold and tea is not. I guess I could drink plain hot water but that would be awful.

Big Dancing Weekend!

My goodness did I dance a lot this weekend! Hours and hours of dance, in fact!

Last night was a big birthday bash for Kimberly, owner of Plaza de Anaya and all around awesome lady. Not only was there live drumming to dance to, but Spiritchaser (the Dead Can Dance tribute band) played a live set, too! That was SO much fun to dance to. I enjoyed getting my Anaya on with Tiffany and No-El to beautiful live music.

Today I had not one but two troupe practices, each two hours long. First, my last troupe practice with Anaya Tribe, where we did our usual general practice and crazy layering warm-up, and then we worked on our piece for the Unmata show next weekend. Second I came back to Tucson for the Collective's practice, in which we talked about what we were going to do, practiced a bunch of dancing and made a lot of noise with zills.

Now I am ready to relax for a bit before I have to tackle another class-filled week!

Epic weekend!

Days 351 and 352 of practice.

Spent the past two days in a flurry of getting ready for performances, performing, and watching my fellow performers. It was amazing! I am exhausted! Pics and video to come, I hope!

Coughing my brains out

Days 307-310 of practice, sorta.

Well, my year of dance kind of fell apart with this sickness. I flat out did not practice on Thursday and Friday. I was so sick, and in such a bad mood from being sick, that it just didn't happen. But you know what, I'm okay with that. I've been doing this for over 300 days and I only missed one before, also when I was sick. So I think I've proven that I can practice every day. I'm going to continue onward, having acknowledged the fact that sometimes I am physically and/or mentally incapable of doing anything that truly resembles dancing. From now on, sick days will be for non-physical dance journey enrichment -- maybe I'll spend the day watching videos on YouTube, or sorting through new music, or reading a belly dance magazine or on-line articles.

Anyway, the weekend was full of dance. I went to the Plaza de Anaya Intensive, featuring Elizabeth Strong and Silvia Salamanca. I couldn't fully participate, due to low energy and coughing fits, but even sitting on the sidelines and taking notes when I got too tired was fun and inspiring. Plus the show pretty much knocked my socks off! Other fun parts of the weekend were carpooling with Jolie and getting to know her better, spending the weekend with my great friend Jen, and being paired up with awesome fellow Tucsonan Gina and my beading belly dance friend SaraBeth for an exercise in upper Egyptian group dancing :) All that and I got a badass femme fatale hairclip from local vendor extraordinaire Kyla, as well as DVDs from both instructors so I can pick up more of their style when my health improves.

Now I'm left with a horrendous cough but a strong desire to dance (especially since my husband found more awesome music tonight), so I'm facing a week of going to my dance classes but dancing at partial capacity -- Jolie has already given me permission to skip the torturous crunches, push-ups and hip bridges during her warm-ups, probably because she's had to listen to me cough all weekend :)

Two days in one post

Days 132 and 133 of practice.

As you may or may not be aware, Blogger was down for 20.5 hours yesterday, a span of time that included my late-night attempt to update this blog after class. So while I did in fact practice yesterday, with my customary 3 hours of classes, I was not able to blog about it.

Here's a brief run-down of yesterday: I had a nice drive with Dawn, and classes were pretty good but I was feeling really tired and not really on top of my game. Skirt class was especially challenging, because after two hours of classes already, I was really beat! Then I got almost home, after dropping Dawn off, and got stuck behind a stupid train. After waiting 8 minutes, I took advantage of an opening and made an illegal mid-interesction U-turn to get out of there. It took me 6 minutes to detour around the train tracks, and guess what? The train was still there! So I'm glad I didn't wait. Who knows how long I would have been stuck there.

Today I had some nice afternoon practice at home. I tried to do some belly flutters and failed. I expect many more days of failure before I have success. Then I put on some music and practiced this-and-that. I found that I still very much like dancing to "Convivio" so I think I will perform to it the next time there's a hafla. I did some Anaya Tribal fast and slow, then spent an entire song walking back and forth across my living room with various traveling shimmies, including glute shimmies which is pretty awesome because until the Mira Betz workshop, I thought I couldn't even do glute shimmies. Then I decided to dance to one random song, and once again the ol' iPod stuck me with something slow and hard to work with -- "The Witch" by Danny Elfman. The man's a great composer, but as it turns out, movie soundtracks are not ideal to dance to. Oh well. It was fun for practice.

This weekend will be jam-packed with dance! Deb Rubin workshops, a group dinner with Deb Rubin, a joint birthday party for two dance friends, more workshops, a MECDA meeting, and then watching Anaya Tribal, Qadesh and Divine Chaos perform before I head home to collapse into a heap of exhaustion.