One Hour with Suhaila

I’m still mentally and emotionally processing one of the most memorable events of my dance training life: my first private lesson with Suhaila to work on my personal choreography for the Advanced Performer Recital in December. Before the hour arrived, I was nervous. However, my goal was to remain open and receptive during the lesson; to do what Suhaila asked of me to the best of my ability without holding back one ounce of effort. My choreography, I knew, was not even close to brilliant, although I had put many hours of work into visualization, emotional perspective, isolation choices, foot work and stage patterns. It came as no surprise that Suhaila was able to look at what I had done and quickly inject a new level of life and power into my piece. I’m still sore several days later from the amount of energy and movement I tried to create in response to her suggestions!

This hour reinforced yet again why I have dedicated the past eight years to studying Suhaila’s format: there is always more. More depth, more range, more options, more freedom, more expression… What was also particularly exciting was the fact that this was my choreography (with my emotional perspective and interpretation), and Suhaila was helping me with adjustments to help ensure that the audience could feel what it is I’d like to express. In my opinion, I am a lucky dancer indeed to have had this kind of feedback. Watching video of myself and trying to make adjustments on my own would never have gotten me as far as we did in just one hour. I thought I was breathing... but I need to breathe deeper. I thought my movement had come from an emotional perspective and interpretation of the music… but I have to go even further and understand “the why” of every single moment / movement. There were a lot of other improvements as well in the areas of body positioning, technique, movement initiation, dynamics and sentiment.

What Suhaila really changed in that hour was not just my choreography, but my perspective, yet again, on me/dance/bellydance. For years, I have chased the intangible "how" to take a performance from OK to good; or from good to great. There is still a lot of work ahead of me to incorporate my newfound, yet heightened awareness of the principles Suhaila asked me to apply to my choreography. Not only am I more excited about this particular piece, but look forward to applying (or attempting to apply) these same concepts to future projects (including improvisation). Maybe one day I'll be able to live up to my own, new, higher expectations of myself. One thing is for sure - I'm going to keep trying.

--Stacey

Suhaila's blog about the L4 show: http://www.suhailainternational.com/blog/?p=408