Dance Yourself Happy!

Ahlan Wa Sahlan Pt 4 - The Power of Randa, Sufi Spinning and the Closing Gala

At the beginning of the week, we registered and booked the workshops we wanted to do.  It's fortunate that the dollar is so weak against the pound because it certainly didn't come cheap!   Three-hour 'Super master classes' with the likes of Randa, Dina and Soraya were $80, three-hour master classes were $60, and two-hour classes were $40.  Add in the cost of the opening and closing galas and registration, and it's one expensive holiday.

Now that more and more Egyptian teachers are coming to the UK, and there are tailor-made tours such as those organised by Farida Dance, it seems sensible to choose master classes or two-hour classes with the non-Egyptian teachers.  Firstly, there were fewer people so you actually got to learn something, and secondly, the subject matter was often more interesting. 

For example, I really loved the Tanoura workshop I took with Madrid-based teacher, Mohamed El Sayed. He seemed a gentle, joyful kind of person and it was wonderful to work with live music too; he brought along a singer, req, nay and darbuka players.  Mohamed obviously has a big following in Spain and South America as the majority of people in the class were Spanish speakers.  This was a big advantage as he didn't speak any English, and I found his translator's English  far less comprehensible than Mohamed's Spanish, which fortunately I more or less managed to follow.

After getting used to turning by changing direction and varying arm positions, we all got to spin as a group.  Sufis spin only to the left, and this takes some getting used to. Every few minutes there was a dull 'thud' as another person keeled over. 

After the break we got to spin in the big Tanoura and Sufi skirts. They really are magnificent. The Tanoura ones are made for performance, much more colourful and weighted with a thick band of rubber, while the Sufi ones are hemmed with very thick rope. Apparently there is only one person in Egypt who makes them. (I was momentarily tempted to buy one for some home spinning but then remembered the excess bagage we'd already accumulated over the previous few days and thought better of it!)

The music has a haunting, meditative quality with an insistent rhythm that builds up in speed. It's a very special feeling having that weight to ground you when you feel that otherwise you are spinning so fast that you might take off.  I find sitting still to meditate extremely difficult, but spinning is a great way of clearing the mind.

Maja, a Russian-born dancer based in Miami, gave another interesting class in Gypsy Tribal Fusion. I loved the combination of Arabic, Flamenco and Romany Gypsy movements.  At one point she taught us how to use silk fans.  We had to make do with plastic plates, which made me smile until Jo pointed out that it was no more ridiculous than making people put a shoe on their head as a candelabrum substitute (which, yes, I have been known to do).

Having said that I felt I learned more from the non-Egyptian teachers, I really enjoyed the piece of choreography we learned at Randa's masterclass. 

The Ahlan Wa Sahlan Festival Pt 3 - The Magnificence of Mona and Catching up with Keti Sharif

It's curious being here with a VIP.  As organiser of the Bellydance Congress, Jo is very much in demand. Other international teachers, who previously didn't show much interest in the UK scene, are falling over themselves to say 'hello'.  As Jo admits, it makes her life much easier.

I'm enjoying meeting new people - and bumping into dancers I have met at other workshops, such as Bernard from Paris and Raja, from Lille - a truly wonderful dancer, full of passion and flair, who I first met at a Horatio and Beata Intensive and then performed with in a show in Biarritz when a Parisian dancer fell ill.  (My abiding memory is of her stunning finale - and of getting locked out of the theatre with my friend Yvonne during rehearsals and having to scale a wall to get in, only to find that there was no time for me to practise with the orchestra, or even mark through what I was going to do to somebody else's music in front of an audience of 500 people.)

That ranks as one of my scariest experiences, but the masterclass with Mona el Said wasn't far behind. My God, she's the ultimate maa’lima (boss woman). She gave short shrift to anyone wishing to sit down, telling them that they should go back to their room if they were tired, and told the people on the door to shut it in no uncertain terms.

But she danced with such passion that she made me cry.  She doesn’t teach as such, you just follow her dancing to a piece of music, which keeps you on your toes as the choreography changes each time she dances.  She used all the signature moves I have seen in videos of her over the years.  I’m not sure how the younger dancers felt about her, some looked rather bemused. I was interested to see that there were (only!) about 80 students in the workshop, compared with 150 for Soraya and nearly 200 for Randa. But Jo and I agreed that she’s a legend and has to be respected as such.  It was dancers like her and Fifi Abdou that made me fall in love with this dance.

Ahlan Wa Sahlan Pt 2 - From Brazilian shimmies to the Nubian Village

Sunday 29th June

We learned some of Soraya’s techniques at a three-hour master class today.  She had a male translator with her who was almost as tiny as she was (especially as she taught without the mega heels she wore to perform) and focused on a variety of different shimmies, from Egyptian to Vibration and also the ‘Knife’ shimmy, where you imagine you have your knees tied together, your back against the wall and are pinned to it by a knife in the middle of your forehead, just under the belly button and between the knees.  You move your knees backwards and forwards rubbing them together.  I’m not really sure what the purpose of the analogy was – but apparently that was how she was taught the move. 

Soraya did her best to manage such a vast group of women, sometimes leaping off stage and hurtling around the room to demonstrate a movement, but it was still a challenge to see her – not least because some women were hell-bent on standing so close to the stage that they formed an inpenetrable wall.  Soraya’s class was fun though, and she did use some interesting imagery, which sometimes her translator was reluctant to translate.  They seemed to involve buttocks and pencils.

It was a novel experience being in a room of about 150 women, many of whom would have killed their granny (if not their entire family) to get a place at the front, refused to move when the lines were rotated – and crowded round Soraya in a scrum to get a picture with her at the end of the workshop.   I really don’t understand this desire to get your picture taken with the ‘star’, but I appear to be in a minority.

It was then off to the disco, for a Bollywood workshop...

The Ahlan Wa Sahlan Festival - Our Arrival and the Opening Gala

Friday 27th June

And so to Cairo for the Ahlan Wa Sahlan Festival, organised by Raqia Hassan.  I’m here with Josephine Wise, who’s teaching at the festival, and we’re lucky enough to have a room at the Mena House Hotel where the activities are all taking place – and a view of the Pyramids.   Every so often as I write this I look up, and there they are, in all their glory.  It’s heaven.

I came to the very first festival, which was held in Sharm El Sheik, but haven’t been back since.  It’s certainly grown in size in the intervening years.  There are a number of big names from Cairo teaching, including Dina, Randa, Soraya and Mona El Said. And the British, Europeans and North Americans are definitely outnumbered by the Japanese, Chinese, Taiwanese, Koreans, Brazilians and Venezualans.

The first person we saw when we arrived at the Mena House was Zaza Hassan, who’s now something of a mega star, being a judge on the Lebanese Star Academy (for dancers). 

In the course of the next few hours, at the opening gala,  we bumped into Leila Haddad, Jillina (Belly Dance Superstars), Nabila (from Berlin), Yasmina, Morocco and, of course, Raqia herself (pictured here with Jo.  I realised just how long I had been doing this dance, thinking back of the number of workshops I had taken with them, many of which I had helped organise, either independently or for MADN.   I suddenly felt very old.  At the time there was no Ahlan Wa Sahlan, nor many other international festivals.  It seems like a lifetime ago now.

Glut power, the Suhaila Salimpour way

I have just returned from Exeter, where I took a truly inspirational three-day intensive in the Suhaila Salimpour format of Arabic Dance, with Sabriye, and organised by Tatanya. 

I went with little prior knowledge, only Raphaelle's enthusiastic endorsement of the technique  - and the caveat that I'd feel like a total beginner again.  How true.  It was certainly challenging; by the end of the three days I thought my brain would explode with so many demands made on it.  And my gluts haven't been the same since!

But it was really worth it. As I've said before, when you've been dancing for some time, it's easy to get stale and lack inspiration. There are always new things to learn, but it's a question of finding the ones that speak to you.  This course definitely did.

Sabriye is one of Suhaila's senior teachers.  Based in Dubai, she is a lovely, elegant performer and a fun and down-to-earth teacher.  I enjoyed every minute of her teaching, even though my body often refused to do what was expected of it!

Glut squeezing is a key aspect of Suhaila's technique - and one that I have yet to master with any great success.  When Sabriye did a side-to-side using just her gluts, her hips moved with real force.  My effort was more like a twitch.  I've definitely got my work cut out.

By all accounts, all this glut activity can become something of an obsession. As part of the warm-up you spend some time practising your squeezes - both cheeks, right only, left only and both - at various speeds. By the end of three days you find yourself squeezing at every available opportunity.  This can go undetected when you're a novice, but with practice the movements get much bigger, and so harder to conceal - even under a big coat.  You have been warned! 

There is a serious side to all this buttock work.  Using the gluts helps protect the knees and also frees you up to build up layers of movement.

The course was actually a five-day one but I arrived on the Saturday night in time for the hafla, and stayed for the following three days. The numbers were very low, for several reasons, I feel. 

Britain's Got Talent - A Thumbs-up for Dance in the UK

This year's Britain's Got Talent was very inspiring, and it was fabulous to see dance fare so well in the competing rounds and, of course, in the final itself.

The fact that the final was watched by a staggering 13 million people, and included song, dance - and a dancing dog! - shows that the great British public still has an appetite for those kind of variety acts that used to be the mainstay of Saturday night entertainment.

George Sampson was a very worthwhile winner, with his fantastic, modern take of Gene Kelly's Singing in the Rain.  His surprise and delight at winning brought a tear to the eye - followed by yet more when he said he was going to use his £100k winnings to pay off his mother's mortgage.

But I loved Signature, with their innovative and energetic blend of Michael Jackson and bhangra. Suleman Mirza, a trainee lawyer, and Madhu Singh, a sales assistant, were just magic. And audiences were captivated by the performance of Muslim Suleman, who performs a Michael Jackson tribute act, and Sikh Madhu, who entered carrying a broom, and then let rip with some banghra. On a single day their BGT audition rerun on YouTube exceeded five million viewers. 

And their story was inspiring too; as Suleman Mirza said in an interview in the Daily Telegraph, "Our routine is about togetherness and overcoming conflict. I start the act with a Western dance, and then Madhu comes on stage. I look down on him because I don't understand his culture. But he surprises me, and he works really hard, symbolising immigration, and then we work together, and show that everyone can get on."

Swindon Shimmies to the Tabla Beat

I had a great time belly dancing in Swindon on Saturday evening - and yes, you did read that correctly. 

I know that people generally view Swindon as being on a par with Slough, which, let's face it doesn't get the greatest press, or maybe that's just my perception because I always get lost when I go there.  (In fact I remember once embarking on a frantic search round Slough for the WHSmith HQ, only to discover that it was in fact in Swindon. Hardly ideal when I was going there to present my company's range of road atlases!) 

But I digress.  There is, in fact, a thriving dance scene in the area, so I was delighted to asked to be guest dancer at the first hafla organised by local dancer and teacher Heather Rose, aka Shirin.

It was a thoroughly enjoyable evening. A number of the people there were new to Middle Eastern Dance but they seemed to have a good time.  The ladies in the photo were sitting along one wall behind a long table and looked rather like the Strictly Come Dancing judging panel, which was somewhat disconcerting.  I told them afterwards that I was half expecting them to hold up score cards after each performance - so they duly obliged!

In Chippenham, Diamonds Are A Girl's Best Friend

This week I taught a burlesque workshop for the Sahara Sisters in Chippenham. They are a lovely group of women and threw themselves into the workshop with their customary gusto!  Once everyone had got dressed up in feather boas, gloves, high heels, wigs and plenty of bling, we ran through our showgirl walks and seductive glove removal and worked on a choreography to that Marilyn Monroe classic, Diamonds are a Girl's Best Friend.  I hope they enjoyed it as much as I did.  Unfortunately, I do have a tendency to discard my gloves rather too enthusiastically, flinging them with such vigour that I generally can't find them afterwards.  This time I surpassed myself, lobbing my glove overhead and finding it had actually stuck to the wall!  Most curious...

The Case for Burlesque

Now I realise that Burlesque is an emotive word as far as some belly dancers are concerned.  (But then again, 'belly dance' also makes some dancers' hackles rise...)  I can see their point; those of us who have been dancing for a while have fought so hard to improve the reputation of this dance and see it recognised as a valid dance form like flamenco, jazz or salsa, that we don't want to jeopardise the progress that has been made.

And it hasn't been easy. I still shudder at the memory of a gig I once did in a restaurant in Reading.  I was there with a couple of friends and we just wanted to get some experience of dancing in public. I should have known it would be a disaster when I first clapped eyes on the restaurant  - a  dingy, delapidated building that backed on to a graveyard.

Unbeknownst to my fellow dancers and myself, the place had been booked out by a group of bikers.  Apart from the fact that by the time we arrived the women were already throwing up in the loos and were extremely aggressive towards us in the mistaken belief that we were there to get off with their men (now, that really is deluded), those men's comments nearly put me off dancing for life.

'Ee, you're better than strippers!' and 'If we paid you more, would you take your top off?' were among the tamer remarks.

As a feminist and someone who held a responsible publishing job at the time and was used to being taken seriously at work, I was mortified to be treated like a piece of meat.  True, once we got talking to the bikers they were perfectly OK, but it really put me off cabaret for a long, long  time.

And that's just one story. I have heard so many dancers relay similar experiences, often far worse.  So why am I now so staunchly pro-Burlesque, which in many people's eyes is just glorified stripping?

A Burlesque Fest at Madame Jojo's

On Sunday I intended to go to the MADN AGM (Mosaic Arabic Dance Network) and workshops with Horatio and Beata.  I had booked my tickets and planned my route to Spalding, (relatively) undaunted by the five-hour round trip.  However, on Sunday morning it didn't seem such a good idea after all.  Having spent a good four hours in the car on the Saturday, I just couldn't face another stint - especially on such a gloriously sunny day.  After all, who knows when the sun might come out again?

A sensible person would have pottered around the garden, soaking up the sun and taking life easy.  Sadly, I have never had much sense and I have yet to master the art of doing nothing.  My mind believes that a day exists to be filled, however much my body begs to be given a break.  So it was inevitable that I should trawl on the internet for things to do.

And when I stumbled upon the ShimmyShake website promoting 'London's Belly Dance and Burlesque Show' - check it out for yourself at www.shimmyshakeshow.com - I took it as a divine sign that I had found the perfect way for me to spend my Sunday...

Review to follow shortly!

Bollywood In The Forest

Last Saturday saw me trekking over to Ruardean Woodside in the Forest of Dean for a Bollywood workshop I was teaching for Kim Danby and her students.  It's always a joy to teach there as they are all so enthusiastic and eager to learn new things.  Inevitably they remember my choreography better than I do - but that's just something I've learned to live with!

Does Size Matter?

Last night was spent watching thirteen twenty-stone Russian ballerinas flinging themselves across the stage in a lively parody of Swan Lake. The company of XXL dancers, called The Big Ballet, then treated us to dances with a more contemporary theme; everything from 'Go West' by the Pet Shop Boys to Tom Jones' 'Sex Bomb', with a rather Boney M meets Eurovision final number entitled 'Moscow'. (When I tell you that the meaningful lyrics went along the lines of 'It's a place of mystery, it's so full of history', you get the picture.)

The company was created fourteen years ago by the Russian choreographer, Panfilov, with the aim of showing that 'people of larger build are able to move with similar grace, dignity and flair as traditional dancers' and also to prove that he could create a professional ballet troupe out of dancers with no previous experience. The company hails from Perm, a beautiful city with two million inhabitants in Russia's Ural Mountains which was also the home of Tchaikovsky and Diaghlev.