Rustling behind the veil
Friday: Post-work happy hour at Mardi Gras. Great bar for low-key or elderly boozers who don't care to mask their drinking with karaoke or the roar of televised sport. Strong drinks, good music. Later: met the Tantric Master's trainee femme fatale. I don't think she's brave enough to do any lasting harm, but she is toying with the TM and I find it painful to watch that shit. After the trainee's hasty exit, I could have saved Tantric Master a trip by giving Tonto a ride home. Not sure why I didn't. I wasn't thinking straight.
Saturday: We went to the Shimmy show at the Free Library in Carnegie -- a bellydance expo where we saw a resoundingly kickass performance in the style of Moulin Rouge. The dancers wore Victorian-slash-Wild-West costumes in mixed hues of red and black, complete with hats, corsets, and actual bustles (bustles! holy shit!). The choreography, to a song by Beirut, had dancers transitioning from Egyptian line-steps to Flamenco and back over to Arabic, Greek, Turkish, Indian, and a little dash of ballet. Stunning.
Bellydance is usually a pretty linear affair: dancers often take turns coming out front to solo while the others sort of bounce a hip or undulate in the background, like backup singers. In a linear choreography the audience will notice even the tiniest flaw in a solo performance, and compare each dancer against her (or his) peers. A professional who can drill a single hip movement for six hours a day is going to look great; someone who practices an hour a week has no choice but to look sloppy next to the pro. In a mixed group, the performance as a whole will suffer.
This expo featured mixed-level performers -- professional teachers dancing with their students. What I loved about the Moulin Rouge choreography was how cleverly it was structured to let everyone look awesome all the time. There were ten dancers layered in pairs in all four corners and the center of the stage; they were constantly moving and switching positions, so that no one was in the center for very long. There were no traditional solos, but because the dancers were paired and squared, five people were effectively soloing at any given time. The focal point for the audience was on the whole-group transition from one sequence to the next. The transitions looked simple enough that intermediate performers could do them effortlessly -- which is how a bellydancer wants her transitions to look. The professionals and ninja-serious amateurs were free to do fancier things (and they did), but the heat was never on any single performer. Sometimes with the linear-solo routine, the backup dancers who are doing one movement over and over and over can get to looking a little waxy and fixed, like the Robert Palmer dancers. Not so with this choreography. They looked like they were having a great time -- snappy, sharp and somehow also relaxed. It was awesome. I hope they take it on the road.
Saturday: We went to the Shimmy show at the Free Library in Carnegie -- a bellydance expo where we saw a resoundingly kickass performance in the style of Moulin Rouge. The dancers wore Victorian-slash-Wild-West costumes in mixed hues of red and black, complete with hats, corsets, and actual bustles (bustles! holy shit!). The choreography, to a song by Beirut, had dancers transitioning from Egyptian line-steps to Flamenco and back over to Arabic, Greek, Turkish, Indian, and a little dash of ballet. Stunning.
Bellydance is usually a pretty linear affair: dancers often take turns coming out front to solo while the others sort of bounce a hip or undulate in the background, like backup singers. In a linear choreography the audience will notice even the tiniest flaw in a solo performance, and compare each dancer against her (or his) peers. A professional who can drill a single hip movement for six hours a day is going to look great; someone who practices an hour a week has no choice but to look sloppy next to the pro. In a mixed group, the performance as a whole will suffer.
This expo featured mixed-level performers -- professional teachers dancing with their students. What I loved about the Moulin Rouge choreography was how cleverly it was structured to let everyone look awesome all the time. There were ten dancers layered in pairs in all four corners and the center of the stage; they were constantly moving and switching positions, so that no one was in the center for very long. There were no traditional solos, but because the dancers were paired and squared, five people were effectively soloing at any given time. The focal point for the audience was on the whole-group transition from one sequence to the next. The transitions looked simple enough that intermediate performers could do them effortlessly -- which is how a bellydancer wants her transitions to look. The professionals and ninja-serious amateurs were free to do fancier things (and they did), but the heat was never on any single performer. Sometimes with the linear-solo routine, the backup dancers who are doing one movement over and over and over can get to looking a little waxy and fixed, like the Robert Palmer dancers. Not so with this choreography. They looked like they were having a great time -- snappy, sharp and somehow also relaxed. It was awesome. I hope they take it on the road.