Arabic rhythms and the agony of choreography

Good evening one and all! I am feeling virtuous. My carpets are hoovered, washing is done and hanging up, dinner is cooked and eaten. Nothing left to do tonight except scratch and hum ‘A Wombling Merry Christmas’. How long has that been in my head now? Oh yeah, TWO WEEKS. Do you know what, I was going to link you to the video but I haven’t the heart. Don’t youtube it. Don’t.

GET OUT!

Ok, hands up who likes to choreograph? Well, I don’t. I am rubbish at it. Hopefully I’ll get better, but as it is I just don’t have the experience or confidence. I never had dance lessons as a child (except that one ballet lesson when I was seven where they angered me by saying I had to take the part of a cowboy) so dancing is new and frightening territory for me. It also sometimes still feels as if dancing is something waaaaaaaay out of my league – at school only the beautiful girls took dance classes, and as a teenager I looked like a chicken nugget, greasy and unappealing. If you had told me I would one day be dancing on stage in chiffon and sequins I would have howled with laughter, or (more likely) eyed you suspiciously and gone back to listening to Pantera. But! No matter! I am choreographing my first ever solo, and not doing too badly so far. The piece of music I have chosen is ‘Alf Leyla Wa Leyla’ by Oum Kalthoum, a very commonly used, but stunning piece of music. Its pretty old, and the original goes on for over forty minutes! Rest assured, I will not be dancing for that long. I have chosen a section of the music that is about two and half minutes in length. This part, in fact. Up until about 2:15.

Nice, right? And the full length version is even better.

It took me a while to get started on my solo because what I felt like doing, what the music was telling me to do, seemed too simplistic. I spent weeks just trying to think of what I could do with the strong ‘123’ beats at the beginning of the song that wasn’t just ‘right left right’ with the hips. After hours of trying complicated turns, chest isolations and drops I decided to go with my instinct. I hope it doesn’t turn out to be a bad decision, but I figured it was best to go with the music. Better to execute simple moves well and with feeling than to chuck in a load of complicated moves which I will probably get wrong and don’t speak to me in any way. So, thus far I have choreographed up to the part where the music slows. I’m not really sure what to do for this, something graceful and snakey with the arms, but I can’t think of anything interesting enough. I have the ending all planned out, gentle, flowing camels on the diagonal to the left and then to the right, ending in a beautiful pose. The beautiful pose I haven’t yet thought of, suggestions welcome.

I’ve started thinking of costuming for this piece already, and I want gold and earth tones. I’m thinking either gold and a dark red, or a deep green and copper. Really, I would like to wear my hair loose to add to the softness of the piece, but for that I need to grow some hair, or get some good extensions. Hmmm. We’ll see.

Hooray! Yesterday I had my first ever lesson on Arabic rhythms and how to dance to them! I’ve been excitedly waiting for this class ever since it was announced because I just didn’t feel like a proper dancer without at least a basic knowledge of this subject. I had done a bit of research on the interwebs, but just reading about music is a bit sterile. You need to be there! So, we all turned up with our drums, the quality of which varied wildly. Some people had proper tabla drums, others had bongos, one had a child’s brightly coloured plastic mini tambourine. It didn’t matter, it was just something to hit, but it amused me greatly. We learned about four commonly used Arabic rhythms (we only had an hour, so even four was pushing it a bit really), maqsoum, saiidi, malfuf and ayoub. Saiidi I already knew a little bit about, but the others had until this point been just a list of confusing words that only served to highlight my lack of knowledge. But not any more! So, a maqsoum is very similar rhythmically to a saiidi and a beledi, depending on where the ‘dum’ falls. The ‘dum’ is traditionally where your ‘down’ moves should fall – hip drops, any heavy, earthy steps. The ‘tec’ is a less pronounced beat and can be used for ligher, more decorative movements.

Its funny, the minute this workshop began I felt at home. Dancing is a completely new thing to me, but music? Music is an old friend. My background is all music, whether it be singing lessons, playing bass guitar, singing in a choir or studying music technology at uni. Music doesn’t intimidate me in the way that dancing sometimes does, probably because I have more confidence in my musical ability that I do in my dancing. So this workshop was great for me, and very exciting! The beautiful, unusual music was one of the things that first interested me in belly dance, and now I have a bit of knowledge I want more! I wonder if this could be one of my strengths? Musical interpretation? When I think back to work I’ve done in composing soundtrack for film, I never had any problems interpreting what I saw on the screen acoustically. The problem was always the technical side of things, how to produce what I was hearing in my head! Its the same with dancing, I’ll hear a piece of music and immediately visualise all of these beautiful movements that I have no idea how to execute. Hmmm. Is this a strength or a weakness? Maybe both.

Ooh, before I sign off, I was told by an Arabic speaking friend that malfuf means ‘cabbage’. Why are we dancing to a cabbage rhythm? Any answers?

Well, I shall leave you now with an example of a maqsoum. If you sit there chanting ‘dum tec tec dum tec’ along with the video, you’ll be doing what I’m doing. Bye for now!

Bits and Bobs and Bellymania

Evenin’ all. I’ve been on leave from work since Wednesday but now its Sunday night, which sadly means that my days of sitting on the sofa eating toast are over for another working week. But for now it is still the weekend, so I shall throw caution to the wind, put another piece of Hovis in the toaster and stay up for at least another half an hour. Don’t ask me why, I’m just crazy and out-there like that.

So, a couple of weeks ago I went along to Bellymania 2011, a local all-day event featuring workshops and a souk, then a performance in the evening. To be completely honest with you all I am not sure exactly how to review this one. There were some very good parts and some truly – hmmm, lets go for ‘interesting’ – parts. We arrived at about half one in the afternoon, which was a bit early, so we went looking for a newsagents, which took about half an hour as we were in the middle of a housing estate, in the country, in the middle of nowhere. The woman behind the counter served us with an amusing mixture of suspicion and confusion which left us a little bewildered.  Maybe buying a cornetto is an unusual occurrence in that neck of the woods? Who knows. But anyway, what am I talking about, you’re not interested in my cornetto, which was delicious by the way, strawberry flavoured, nice crunchy cone, weird bit of chocolate at the bottom, and I had some Refreshers too, and a Dime bar, which were also nice.

Wait, what? Dancing.

I took three workshops in total throughout the day, and whilst some were better than others I think I managed to learn something new from each one. The one that really stood out for me was a tsiftitelli workshop taken by a Greek dancer called Unaneyia. Here she is in action.

Isn’t she good? I thought so. Very natural, very expressive, plus she looks frighteningly like every woman in my family. I’m fairly sure I’ll look exactly like that in about ten years.

I’m going to admit here that I am still a little in the dark about what tsiftitelli actually is, but I gather that it depends on the style of music you dance too. This was, I believe, a Greek/Turkish tsiftitelli which we were told has its roots in the dances of the gypsies in Turkey. The workshop was largely improvised – Unaneyia demonstrated a few basic moves and then we all kind of danced around in a circle. I loved it. Certainly it felt like more of a folk dance, very joyful and brimming over with attitude, with far less finesse in the execution of movements than I am used to learning. There was a lot of dancing with the side of the skirt gathered in one hand and being swept from side to side as you travel, and the focus was on feeling and interpreting the music, not on isolation. In fact, as Unaneyia pointed out, if you shimmy the top and the bottom moves too – never mind! In her words “its all under the one skin”. Those words stuck with me – not that I am about to ignore isolations, that would be foolish. But maybe there are times when precision and accuracy are not the most important things in this form of dance.

I chickened out of taking a Tribal workshop. How silly is that? I was really interested as I have only studied Oriental style, but all the attendees looked so…tribal. I convinced myself that my inexperience would hold everyone else up and I would stick out like a big, glittery fairy. Silly me. Funny thing is, the tribal workshop was actually being taught by someone I have known on the internet for a good few years, before I even started dancing. Its a small world after all…

Want to see her in action? She’s really rather good.

All in all, a very nice day out. I especially liked the bit where we had a dominos pizza delivered to the car park. Very nice indeed.

I’m supposed to be talking about other bits and bobs, right? Ummm…Scheherazade is one hold at the moment because we don’t seem to have any dancers. It’ll still happen, just maybe later than we had originally planned. We have done a few community events over the past few weeks, all outdoors, all freezing. I managed to get stuck in my devil-possessed veil whilst dancing in a wine bar and consequently did an impromptu piece of avant-garde performance art until I could recover. I don’t think anyone noticed.

Right, bed beckons. Work in t’mornin. Nighty night!