News and Thoughts
December 2016
HAPPY HOLIDAYS! Whatever your celebration, may you have a joyous season and may the new year bring joy, adventures and serenity…
And remember: If you haven’t had an opportunity to join the forum, please do! It’s free, all you have to do is register, and then clink on the link sent to your email and then join the discussions. You can ask questions, make comments, and share ideas…
DECEMBER: Excited to be getting the new forum up and welcoming our panel of experts. So far, we have Lee Ali and Ashiya Ali who will be available to answer questions about AmCab, A’isha Azar who will handle raks sharqi questions; I am waiting to hear from a few other experienced, highly qualified instructors/dancers whom I have invited to be on our forum panel. Soon, we’ll be posting bios of our experts, too!
If you haven’t had an opportunity to join the forum, please do! It’s free, all you have to do is register, and then clink on the link sent to your email and then join the discussions. You can ask questions, make comments, and share ideas…
OCTOBER: Happy Halloween!
The past couple weeks have been a bit hectic so things moved more slowly than I planned, but in the coming week you can expect to see the zil pages up and some more movement pages.
We’ve been looking through the videos and are finding some good examples of floorwork, veil, some good examples of choreography to share and more, so once we get them noted, we can begin editing clips and posting.
In the meantime, if members have any questions or suggestions for articles, or would like any topic covered, be sure to write!
September 2016:
It’s September and I hope members are enjoying going through the site and learning new things or reminding themselves of ways to enhance their dancing or teaching!
Adding material is a slow process because I have to make sure it is relevant to fusion, synthesized dance and dance theatre while touching on stage craft, too.
We’re up to Intermediate 2 levels in the dance handbook, and today I’ll be adding info on zils.
Over the next few weeks, look for articles on warm-ups and stretches, more zils, 9/8 movements and zils, and we’ll be starting some workshop ideas for you.
Oh- and floorwork- yes, we’ll be starting on floorwork.
July 4, 2016
Here it is, 2016. I became involved in theater and dance in 1970 and never looked back. In 1975, I discovered American danse orientale. A few years later, I discovered its parent dance form, raks sharqi. From then on, I went on to become fully obsessed with understanding not just dance and human movement, but how these came together to create theatrical entertainment and dance theatre. I began teaching in 1976, and realized there was too little information on how to teach, why to teach and what to teach. I danced with incredible performers and kept learning. I met wonderful dancers, teachers and stage performers and kept learning. Along with others, we developed and began to define and refine fusion dance. I moved into dance theatre and alternative dance while keeping my dance roots in bellydance and folkdance. I have now reached a point where, after decades of dancing, teaching and producing events focused around bellydance/alternative dance, I finally felt I had something solid to offer serious students and teachers of dance. The result is this site. I hope you enjoy it. Please contact me if you have questions or suggestions… I’ll do my best to respond quickly.
