late-weekend review
I had, seriously, the strangest dream(s) yesterday (or, more accurately, this morning). I’ll have to blame it on dinner (the same reason I’m using to explain my oversleeping this morning, and my current state of fatigue). Mom invited dad and I over, and then stuffed us with beans and rice, mushrooms and cabbage, and stew.
The dream was all vignettes. One scene, I was sort of making out with a fellow in a kitchen, but then we went into the garage and thought better of it. Another scene that kind of ties together, during which my mom was mentioning that she’d had to send me away because she had trouble keeping her hands off me. As if she and the guy had switched brains and that was the explanation for why, when we’d entered the garage, he sat me down on one couch and then sat himself on another.
Then there was some action in a hotel. This probably came from watching the tail end of “The Amazing Race” during which the competitors raced around the Monte Carlo and some other Vegas fancy-spots. Details on this section are fuzzy, but I think it involved Avril Lavigne (or someone like her), a foreign diplomat, and an assassination attempt. I was with Avril’s entourage and spent a good part of the time worrying either that we were in the wrong suite, or that the assassins would for some other reason mistake us for the diplomats and burst in guns ablaze. I didn’t mention this concern, and it didn’t happen. But now I recall that there were some schoolchildren around and they were evacuated. And I remember walking along with them and hoping we’d all be safe during the walk from the insecure building to the secure one. Hm… and there may have been an airplane. So maybe we were walking from the hotel to the airport?
And then there was another scene that took place outside a café, which was somehow in or near the backyard of the house with the garage and the kitchen. So actually, this scene probably took place before the hotel scene (gotta be efficient with our use of sets, after all). I was doing surveillance work. Avril (or someone like her) had a meeting inside the café. A briefcase exchange was involved. It was dark out, so I (and my partner) were able to skulk outside the building without being noticed. And maybe that’s why I was paranoid about an assassination attempt, if she actually was involved in some shady business. I would think that maybe I was doing some security work for her, except for the fact that I actually was spying on her; she didn’t know that I knew about whatever it was she was up to.
In other news of the weekend…
Last dance performance of the year was on Sunday. It was just three of us (Jen, Saida, and me) and we had about 15 minutes to fill, so I ended up with a solo (“Inta Omri”). I didn’t spend near as much time practicing it as I should have, but I changed some things, and actually remembered almost all of the choreography. So it went relatively well. The biggest problem was that I suddenly got very shy and kept looking at the ground (and definitely didn’t smile enough).
There was a whole lot of shimmying going on. Even without my glasses, and without looking much at the audience, I noticed a guy in the front row who seemed quite… riveted. And then later a woman (whose name I can never remember, but who was talking to winterredwood) commented that I’d had the sexiest dance. “Great,” I replied. “So I’m all set to do bachelor parties now.”
Of course, she said that during intermission. There was more show to go. The next segment involved some kids doing bhangra, and then teens and adults performed a couple of other Indian dances. These involved joyful, hip hop-lite choreography and relatively chaste clothing. And then we got back to the bellydancing. I remarked to Queen B that this progression was kind of like returning to childhood and then being yanked into puberty. By which I mean, ‘hot dancers are hot.’ And, of course, talented. But it was such a contrast: the Indian dancers wore loose clothing from head to toe; the bellydancers had exposed midsections and quite a lot of cleavage going on. (Yeah, we were all covered from the waist down, but when that coverage consisted of skin-tight pants, well, that did seem to defeat the purpose a bit.) I began to feel a unclean.
I should probably mention that the first bellydance troupe out of the gate, post-intermission, was pure Egyptian and thus pretty wholesome. Some of them wore beledi dresses, other wore bra tops with beaded fringe that still mostly covered their bellies; and the choreography was bouncy and joyful. The ladies in the beledi dresses did a fun/scary cane dance that made me happy that I wasn’t sitting in the front row. (If those had been swords, things could have gotten very messy. Not that they dropped the canes or anything, but they were spinning so fast that a simple slip could have been more than a minor mishap.) The ladies in the beaded bras and skirts did a dance that involved a lot of spinning. And they did have some snaky movements, but they didn’t “muscle them” the way that tribal dancers tend to do. So things didn’t get skankified until the tribal dancers took the stage, with all their snaky muscularity.
I found something to aspire to in both styles. Whenever I see Egyptian dancers, I wonder why I don’t incorporate more spins into my dances. And whenever I see tribal-fusion dancers I wonder how to achieve such controlled movement. Anywho.
So when it comes my turn to teach the class some choreography, it’ll probably be “Inta Omri.” Jen really likes the backbend. (One side effect of the nervous energy I build up during a performance is that I always end up going further into backbend than I think I can. One of these days, I’ll probably hit the ground and have no way of getting back up.*) But she doesn’t think she has a lot of back flexibility. So one of my tasks will be to come up with some exercises to help with that.
~~~~
* = This reminds me to mention the “open dance” segment of the event. Most successful open dance I’ve seen; people actually danced and for a good long while. Even the non-dancers danced. (There’s something charming-and, yes, funny-about seeing middle-aged white guys shake a leg, especially when the beat they’re following is nowhere near the neighborhood of the song they’re listening to. And there was one fellow (Middle Eastern? Mediterranean?), who took center stage and did a step in-step-back, drop down-hop up sort of dance. He grabbed someone’s hand, she grabbed someone else’s, and eventually there were a line of people doing this same dance.
But what I really wanted to mention was the last dance I saw. The music came on and one of the studio owners caught the holy spirit or something. She was just on it. Hair-tossing, hip-shaking… at one point she bent down and slapped the ground. She ended by leaning back and then dropping onto the ground, knees splayed like in hero pose (virasana). And then I had to leave, because I knew that nothing else I might see would top that.
The dream was all vignettes. One scene, I was sort of making out with a fellow in a kitchen, but then we went into the garage and thought better of it. Another scene that kind of ties together, during which my mom was mentioning that she’d had to send me away because she had trouble keeping her hands off me. As if she and the guy had switched brains and that was the explanation for why, when we’d entered the garage, he sat me down on one couch and then sat himself on another.
Then there was some action in a hotel. This probably came from watching the tail end of “The Amazing Race” during which the competitors raced around the Monte Carlo and some other Vegas fancy-spots. Details on this section are fuzzy, but I think it involved Avril Lavigne (or someone like her), a foreign diplomat, and an assassination attempt. I was with Avril’s entourage and spent a good part of the time worrying either that we were in the wrong suite, or that the assassins would for some other reason mistake us for the diplomats and burst in guns ablaze. I didn’t mention this concern, and it didn’t happen. But now I recall that there were some schoolchildren around and they were evacuated. And I remember walking along with them and hoping we’d all be safe during the walk from the insecure building to the secure one. Hm… and there may have been an airplane. So maybe we were walking from the hotel to the airport?
And then there was another scene that took place outside a café, which was somehow in or near the backyard of the house with the garage and the kitchen. So actually, this scene probably took place before the hotel scene (gotta be efficient with our use of sets, after all). I was doing surveillance work. Avril (or someone like her) had a meeting inside the café. A briefcase exchange was involved. It was dark out, so I (and my partner) were able to skulk outside the building without being noticed. And maybe that’s why I was paranoid about an assassination attempt, if she actually was involved in some shady business. I would think that maybe I was doing some security work for her, except for the fact that I actually was spying on her; she didn’t know that I knew about whatever it was she was up to.
In other news of the weekend…
Last dance performance of the year was on Sunday. It was just three of us (Jen, Saida, and me) and we had about 15 minutes to fill, so I ended up with a solo (“Inta Omri”). I didn’t spend near as much time practicing it as I should have, but I changed some things, and actually remembered almost all of the choreography. So it went relatively well. The biggest problem was that I suddenly got very shy and kept looking at the ground (and definitely didn’t smile enough).
There was a whole lot of shimmying going on. Even without my glasses, and without looking much at the audience, I noticed a guy in the front row who seemed quite… riveted. And then later a woman (whose name I can never remember, but who was talking to winterredwood) commented that I’d had the sexiest dance. “Great,” I replied. “So I’m all set to do bachelor parties now.”
Of course, she said that during intermission. There was more show to go. The next segment involved some kids doing bhangra, and then teens and adults performed a couple of other Indian dances. These involved joyful, hip hop-lite choreography and relatively chaste clothing. And then we got back to the bellydancing. I remarked to Queen B that this progression was kind of like returning to childhood and then being yanked into puberty. By which I mean, ‘hot dancers are hot.’ And, of course, talented. But it was such a contrast: the Indian dancers wore loose clothing from head to toe; the bellydancers had exposed midsections and quite a lot of cleavage going on. (Yeah, we were all covered from the waist down, but when that coverage consisted of skin-tight pants, well, that did seem to defeat the purpose a bit.) I began to feel a unclean.
I should probably mention that the first bellydance troupe out of the gate, post-intermission, was pure Egyptian and thus pretty wholesome. Some of them wore beledi dresses, other wore bra tops with beaded fringe that still mostly covered their bellies; and the choreography was bouncy and joyful. The ladies in the beledi dresses did a fun/scary cane dance that made me happy that I wasn’t sitting in the front row. (If those had been swords, things could have gotten very messy. Not that they dropped the canes or anything, but they were spinning so fast that a simple slip could have been more than a minor mishap.) The ladies in the beaded bras and skirts did a dance that involved a lot of spinning. And they did have some snaky movements, but they didn’t “muscle them” the way that tribal dancers tend to do. So things didn’t get skankified until the tribal dancers took the stage, with all their snaky muscularity.
I found something to aspire to in both styles. Whenever I see Egyptian dancers, I wonder why I don’t incorporate more spins into my dances. And whenever I see tribal-fusion dancers I wonder how to achieve such controlled movement. Anywho.
So when it comes my turn to teach the class some choreography, it’ll probably be “Inta Omri.” Jen really likes the backbend. (One side effect of the nervous energy I build up during a performance is that I always end up going further into backbend than I think I can. One of these days, I’ll probably hit the ground and have no way of getting back up.*) But she doesn’t think she has a lot of back flexibility. So one of my tasks will be to come up with some exercises to help with that.
~~~~
* = This reminds me to mention the “open dance” segment of the event. Most successful open dance I’ve seen; people actually danced and for a good long while. Even the non-dancers danced. (There’s something charming-and, yes, funny-about seeing middle-aged white guys shake a leg, especially when the beat they’re following is nowhere near the neighborhood of the song they’re listening to. And there was one fellow (Middle Eastern? Mediterranean?), who took center stage and did a step in-step-back, drop down-hop up sort of dance. He grabbed someone’s hand, she grabbed someone else’s, and eventually there were a line of people doing this same dance.
But what I really wanted to mention was the last dance I saw. The music came on and one of the studio owners caught the holy spirit or something. She was just on it. Hair-tossing, hip-shaking… at one point she bent down and slapped the ground. She ended by leaning back and then dropping onto the ground, knees splayed like in hero pose (virasana). And then I had to leave, because I knew that nothing else I might see would top that.