It’s been a big summer for Sabaya Bellydance Collective. Our recent first place competition win was followed in quick succession by our 5 year anniversary at Sahara Nights and then the honor to have been asked (again) to dance at the Rachel Brice and Mardi Love workshop the last weekend of September in Austin, Texas.
Here is a clip of Sabaya’s performance as the opening act for The Indigo (the touring and teaching dance group of Rachel Brice, Mardi Love and Zoe Jakes) when they last came through Austin in 2007.
Sunday, August 29, 2010
Thursday, August 5, 2010
We are thrilled to announce that Sabaya won first place in the medium troupe category at the Choreography Project for Middle Eastern Dance 2010 hosted by Z-Helene and Rick Fink. All the late late nights in the dance studio paid off!
We performed three pieces for the choreography project competition. The first was a pop song called Abou Ali, then came a drum piece, and the finale was an energetic remix of Toba. We utilized the following three approaches to creating these choreographies.
1. For Abou Ali, we divided the song into distinct sections and assigned one section to one dancer. Each Sabaya dancer was responsible for creating the choreography for an assigned section on our own time. At rehearsal, we would present our choreographed sections and teach it to the other Sabaya dancers. This took just over a month. After we learned the various sections, we strung them back to back and performed the whole piece. As we glued it together, it was important to remain open and communicative about which parts really worked, were difficult, didn’t mesh or needed adapting. We needed to be particularly flexible when we began adding complex stage formations and transitions.
For me, the formations and transitions were the most fun. In my section, I knew that I wanted to have a Rockette line that moved 360 degrees while maintaining the straight line. It was playful, fun, and it worked. A definite crowd surprise.
I also wanted to see if I could have a long phrase that was all about creating figure 8 curves in a continuous line that traveled up and down the body and out different diagonals without stopping. Kind of like when liquid dancers dance with an invisible ball that “rolls” around their body. This was my attempt at the bellydance version.
What was revealing about this method of choreographing was that these natural movements for me were difficult for some of my fellow Sabaya dancers to integrate into their body. I experienced this in the reverse too. For example, some movements that Stacey presented in her choreographed section felt very awkward in my body. Her section included counter clockwise pelvic squares downbeat front with counter clockwise torso squares downbeat front (and down). I felt this one to look really clumsy on me, but in troupe dancing it doesn’t matter how a movement looks on one dancer. What matters most is how the same movement looks spread across the group of dancers. We strive to make it harmonious.
The full blog post describing the two remaining choreography techniques and more photos are available on Yasmin's blog: Conversations on Dance.
We performed three pieces for the choreography project competition. The first was a pop song called Abou Ali, then came a drum piece, and the finale was an energetic remix of Toba. We utilized the following three approaches to creating these choreographies.
1. For Abou Ali, we divided the song into distinct sections and assigned one section to one dancer. Each Sabaya dancer was responsible for creating the choreography for an assigned section on our own time. At rehearsal, we would present our choreographed sections and teach it to the other Sabaya dancers. This took just over a month. After we learned the various sections, we strung them back to back and performed the whole piece. As we glued it together, it was important to remain open and communicative about which parts really worked, were difficult, didn’t mesh or needed adapting. We needed to be particularly flexible when we began adding complex stage formations and transitions.
For me, the formations and transitions were the most fun. In my section, I knew that I wanted to have a Rockette line that moved 360 degrees while maintaining the straight line. It was playful, fun, and it worked. A definite crowd surprise.
I also wanted to see if I could have a long phrase that was all about creating figure 8 curves in a continuous line that traveled up and down the body and out different diagonals without stopping. Kind of like when liquid dancers dance with an invisible ball that “rolls” around their body. This was my attempt at the bellydance version.
What was revealing about this method of choreographing was that these natural movements for me were difficult for some of my fellow Sabaya dancers to integrate into their body. I experienced this in the reverse too. For example, some movements that Stacey presented in her choreographed section felt very awkward in my body. Her section included counter clockwise pelvic squares downbeat front with counter clockwise torso squares downbeat front (and down). I felt this one to look really clumsy on me, but in troupe dancing it doesn’t matter how a movement looks on one dancer. What matters most is how the same movement looks spread across the group of dancers. We strive to make it harmonious.
The full blog post describing the two remaining choreography techniques and more photos are available on Yasmin's blog: Conversations on Dance.
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