Veil Dance at Walachin

This is the Veil Dance. The music is Desert Rose by Sting. Here we are from left to right: Deanna, Karla, Denise (me) and Lisa. We performed this at the Walachin Community Center for International Women's Day festival in March 2010. We had to get them to move the chairs to give us more space to toss our veils around. It requires lots of space!

show at the yurt

Here we are from right to left: Deanna, Lisa and me (Denise).

This was taken last year when we performed at the yurt in Saranagati for a women's weekend. It was nice to perform for a group of women. We didn't have any comments from men to deal with. The women there were very supportive. I led a group class for about 30 minutes and then we performed two dances- Ringa Ringa and a slow improvised dance with me leading. I chose a very long song to dance the slow dance to. 7 minutes, 31 seconds! It was very long to keep up the audience's attention and to try to make it interesting. I learned to chose my music carefully since then and I created a slow floorwork choreography called Hicaz that is only 4:06.

Much better. But we have not performed this dance in public yet.

Activities in 2011

Well it's been a year since my last post, but here we are again gearing up for our next performance. I went out of the country to visit my family living in Ecuador last summer, so Lisa, Deanna and I didn't practice all summer and then we started up again in the fall. I began teaching a beginners class and our steady new members include Chris, Lise, Jane and Jahnavi.

I choreographed three new dances, including one for the whole group called Maps. The lineup for our show will be Veil dance, Maps, a special performance by former student Karla dancing with Isis Wings, Dance of Mourning, Hicaz and finally Ringa Ringa. This will be the first time our new members have performed a dance in public, so we are excited about this show. We will decorate the hall with some draped saris and have snacks and coffee/juice. This show is for invited guests, friends and family, rather than an advertised public event. I thought that it might be too intimidating to do that for a first performance. In any case, we just want to show off what we've been working on to our friends and loved ones.

Pictures coming soon.

Performance at the Manor

Welcome to my new blog. We are a troupe made up of three bellydancers living in Ashcroft B.C. Canada.

We have been practicing since November and a couple of days ago we had our third performance at Thompson View Manor- a retirement home for seniors. They loved it and one resident remarked that he thought we had too many clothes on!

We performed an improvised ATS dance and a choreographed veil dance. We spent about an hour and a half getting dressed, putting on makeup and getting our turbans and jewelry on. Then we performed the dance for 5 minutes, hurriedly took off our turbans and jewelry and changed skirts, put on hip scarves and wrapped our silk veils around our bodies sari style. We danced our veil dance, which we are used to doing in a bigger space than what we had to perform it in. Very annoying to constrict the dance!