Day 3, 4 & 5: International Bellydance Conference of Canada, 2010

Day 3: Friday, April 23, 2010
Friday at the 2010 International Bellydance Conference started strong with a Sabaya final rehearsal and then Pop-n-Lock Artistry workshop with Sera Solstice. I enjoyed the visual effects of her combinations and would gladly study with her again. Another differentiator with Sera is her focus on meditation and energy visualization during the warm up. I took her East Coast Tribal Fusion drum workshop on Sunday afternoon (Day 5) but I hadn't eaten a proper lunch or breakfast so my body wasn't responding to the choreography. So frustrating. Also, the level was challenging enough that we didn't get through the choreography. Can't wait to get my hands on her new drum choreography DVD and work it out.

Here is Sera at Tribal Fest 2009. Look how she commits every bit of her body to every movement in every moment. Incredible. Powerful.



Body Image in Bellydance Discussion Panel
After Sera's Pop-n-Lock Artistry workshop, I headed upstairs to listen to the Body Image in Bellydance discussion panel with Delilah, Mayada, Jaene Castrillon, Andrea Deagon, Galiah and Candace Bordelon. Panelists were a good mix of very experienced dancers, an abuse survivor, fitness competitor, academics, younger and older dancers, and dancers of all shapes. Biographies available on the IBCC featured speakers page. Here is a short summary of the major themes.

Connecting to the Core
Beginning students don't always initially understand the concept of dancing from within their core or their physicality. Teaching dance classes in front of mirrors encourages students to look at themselves as they learn how to feel. This can defy the intention of deep connection with music, the body and emotion through movement. Disconnecting the self from one's image may help students feel emotion in the body. One exercise is to turn the lights low or encourage students to close their eyes to reconnect with their self.

Transformations
Transformations occur both internally and externally. Delilah advises her students to start a journal to note their personal growth through bellydance. As dancers start having physical power and control over their bodies through dance, they gain greater confidence and soon have more power and control over their entire lives. As a catalyst, bellydance can rejuvenate or even break up relationships due to sudden personal growth and awareness.

The Bellydance Image
It's a constant struggle between social perception, perception of ourselves, and the projection on us. Mayada made a great point about the mass media pressures to be thin and yet in the bellydance form there is a stereotype where one can't be a real bellydancer unless you have something to jiggle. In her classes, thin dancers often feel insecure and ask "am i doing this correctly?"

Candace sees the tribal dancers take much more ownership in their image and feminine power than oriental dancers. Mayada pointed out that Rachel Brice and her bellyrolls brought the 6 pack onto the scene but before that (especially in performance venues) there was a certain body type that was accepted: curvy, not too fat and not too skinny. As soon as Mayada lost weight and became more muscular, people asked her why she looked sick. Delilah said that in the Seattle area, being too skinny isn't a common issue but being too heavy may still be an issue.

Health vs Weight
Lots of discussion around the importance of focusing on health and not weight. For example, both skinny and heavy people can be unhealthy and you just can't tell from their weight.

Aging
Delilah made a very honest observation about aging. During her 35 years of dance, she said, there's a sadness in watching the body change and letting go of movements that she once could do and can't do anymore. She is learning a lot through this frustrating process of acceptance but for her the idea of retiring seems impossible. She says she will be dancing even with an aluminum walker. Her point was that although there are things one gives up as the body ages, there are other richer things that come in that an 18 year old won't have experienced. And there is power in acceptance.

Andrea Deagon, who started dancing at around 16 years old, made a touching statement about how one can give so much to the dance community through teaching and performing and yet at a certain time in one's dance career, people stop coming to watch. "The journey from youth to age and from thinness to weight is not at all pleasant," Andrea says. "For me, to have gone from being a thin dancer to one who is no longer thin and from a young dancer to one who is no longer young, I have seen people who would have formally embraced me and wanted to see my art, turn away from me and be uninterested in seeing my art. Am I a better dancer now? I can't do Turkish Drops anymore but yes, I AM a better dancer now. But there is not the same desire to see me, even within our bellydance community. So that's the flip side of the beauty and sharing and delight in our bodies that we create in our classrooms for the beginners among us."

After this panel, I went back to the hotel for dinner at Fresh and to get ready for our Sabaya show. It was nerve wracking, this performance. We were honored to close the first act. Whether it was due to nerves or peaking in rehearsal that morning, Sabaya didn't give the performance we had hoped to share. The next day, we did receive very positive feedback about our showcase and even an "it was perfect!" from Yasmina Ramzy, so perhaps it went better than we thought.

Day 4: Saturday, April 24, 2010
Jillina picked our spirits up with a fantastic Fellahi (farmer's dance) on Saturday morning. In this choreography, our character was a young peasant girl with a jug of water, flirting shyly and looking for a husband. On Day 5, Jillina taught a great Raks Sharki piece. Let me say that Jillina has fine tuned the art of teaching at large scale workshops. She is able to teach and complete a choreography in the allotted time with a strong dose of humor and enough repetition to "get it." As a testimony to her skill, most participants are still up and dancing by the end of the workshop. Don't always see that in either small or large workshops.

Here is Mahmoud Reda, the featured 2010 IBCC instructor who was unable to make it to Canada because of the volcanic ash cloud grounding air travel over Europe, dancing a Fellahi with Farida Fahmy and the Reda Troupe in the film Mid Year Vacation. I was unable to find the year this was filmed.


For more photos and reviews of Day 3,4 & 5, visit my blog Conversations on Dance.

Enjoy, Yasmin

Day 2: International Bellydance Conference of Canada, 2010

Day 2 of the 2010 International Bellydance Conference of Canada started out at 9am with Anatomy of Bellydance by Dr. Aurora Ongaro, professional chiropractor as well as Artistic Director of edVenture Arts Academy in Edmonton, Canada. Her presentation focused primarily on explaining the interaction of muscle groupings around the shoulder, back, abdominals and feet. For each area, she explained common problem areas encountered by new students and discussed methods of safe execution or training. For example, instead of crunches for improving belly rolls, she recommends core strengthening exercises that involve an unstable surface. Or for students complaining that backbends pinch, remind them to stabilize the back muscles by engaging front abs. To free up more muscles in the abdominal and back muscles, she recommends using hamstrings instead of lower abs to tuck the pelvis. As long as the student doesn't lock their knees or squeeze their glutes while engaging the hamstrings, they will safely be able to tuck their pelvis. She encourages students to cultivate body awareness by having them poke and prod their muscles to determine when muscles are properly engaged. Strong dancers must have solid body awareness and some of this responsibility includes understanding how muscles work together.

Anatomy of Bellydance lecture was followed by Rhythmic Notation for Bellydancers by Dr. George Sawa. This musician is a master. He began the lecture by covering the history of notation over the centuries starting with the system of Ishaq al-Mawsili (died in 850) to the Prosodic System of Al-Kindi (died 870) to the Precise System of al-Farabi (d. 950) to the Pre-Modern Arabic Era to the system of Safiyy al-Din (d. 1924). After the historical significance of each system, Dr. Sawa described the system he developed that notates each drum pattern by a visual circle that moves through each dumm, takk and rest in a continuous circle.



He played examples of several rhythmic patterns from his CD's Egyptian Music Appreciation and Practice for Bellydancers. The 2 CD set released two weeks ago includes an extensive booklet explaining all 21 rhythms used in Egyptian music (rather than the subset included in most rhythm CDs for dancers), Melodic Modes, Musical Forms and full color photos of 35 instruments. Side note: The tambourine percussionist creating embellishments over the drum rhythm in the CDs is in his 80s and has performed with Samia Gamal, Taheyya Carioca, Mohammad Abdel-Wahab, Farid el-Atrash and toured worldwide with Feyrouz. That's reason enough to get this learning tool.

For more photos and reviews of Day 2, visit my blog Conversations on Dance.
Enjoy,
Yasmin

Day 1: International Bellydance Conference of Canada, 2010

Long travel day today. Up at 4:30am, at the Austin airport by 5:30 and then off to Toronto. Lily and I were travel buddies and we made it to our hotel at 4pm that afternoon. Stacey and Rania took later flights and will be arriving close to midnight. By 8am tomorrow, we'll be out the door to a full day of lectures, workshops and performances at the 2010 International Bellydance Conference of Canada.

At tonight's opening gala performance, Yasmina Ramzy of Arabesque Dance Academy and host of the International Bellydance Conference announced that Mahmoud Reda and Khairiyya Mazin,the featured Egyptian instructors, were unable to make it to the conference because of the volcanic ash grounding airtravel over Europe. Here are short bio write ups taken from the IBCC website.

Mahmoud Reda is the pioneer of theatre dance in Egypt. In 1959 he founded the world renowned Reda Troupe. By the mid 60s the troupe had over 150 members including, dancers and musicians. As soloist, choreographer, and artistic director, he was instrumental in creating a legitimate theatrical dance genre that embraced many styles. He has choreographed more than 300 dances including for many Egyptian feature films, and has starred in three musicals directed by his late brother Ali Reda, two of which are major productions and are regarded as mile stones in the history of Egyptian cinema. With the troupe he has performed in prestigious theatres in more than 60 countries such as the Royal Albert Hall in London, The Olympia in Paris, Carnegie Hall in New York and Stanislavski in Moscow.

Khairiyya Yusuf Mazin is the youngest of the famous Banat Mazin, one of the last exponents of Ghawazi dance, which is perhaps the primary origin of Egyptian "belly dance." She is the sole remaining practitioner of the authentic dances of the Nawari Ghawazi of Upper Egypt. When Khairiyya Mazin retires, one of the most distinctive traditions of Ghawazi dance may come to an end. The Ghawazi are the famed female dancers described so often in Western travelers' accounts since the 18th century, and probably the major wellspring of Egyptian danse orientale.

What a true disappointment not to have the opportunity to learn from these legends. I had been truly looking forward to studying with the now 80 year old dance legend and choreographer Mahmoud Reda. But the show must go on and there will be plenty of amazing experiences ahead in the next few days of dance.

Photos and more reviews from the conference posted on my blog, Conversations on Dance. Enjoy!

Yasmin