Skirt Full of Fire | Tucson-based Tribal Fusion Belly Dance Instruction & Performance

1) Women as Violent Characters in Movies
Interesting read as we delve into what it means to make a series about women who make their money off of violent acts. I am not passive in nature, but I’m anti-violence, so making Hitwomen was definitely an interesting leap for me. Further complications included not wanting to alienate any fans, but also not wanting to directly cater to the desires of “chicks with guns” fetishists. While it’s niave to believe that action heroes (or anti-heroes, as you might call our characters in “Hitwomen”) shouldn’t have an element of sex appeal (helloooo Bruce Willis in “Die Hard”), it’s definitely off-putting to think that women in action are selling it not with how bad-ass they are, but with the mere fact that they happen to have a pair of breasts. Even more disheartening, the idea of a “father figure” still calling the shots for these more than competent women in action.

2) The Effects of Repeated Idea Elaboration on Unconscious Plagiarism
This is a really interesting read if you are involved in the arts.  It discusses the way we receive information and unconsciously recall that information when we are trying to come up with ideas.  It also lightly touches on how to avoid unconsciously plagiarizing another’s work through strict scrutiny of your creative output.

3) In Rediscovered Letter from 1865, Former Slave Tells Old Master to Shove It
I absolutely love this.  It’s everything you could possibly imagine and more.  The experience of wanting to tell off the fucker who straight ruined your day (in this case, made your life and the lives of your family members hell for a pretty chunk of time) is pretty universal, but how often have any of us had the opportunity to do so on such a grandiose level?  The answer is rarely.  Reading this is like a hug from baby Jeebs (that’s Jesus, for you philistines out there).  I can’t overstate the brilliance in this, so just read it.  Also, an invaluable glimpse into the tragic history of that time from one who lived it.

4) Luxury Comedy by Noel Fielding (of The Mighty Boosh fame)

Surrealist comedy complete with animation and songs.  Far too brilliant for his own good, that Noel Fielding.  Watch and you’ll want to light your eyeballs on fire afterward…in the good way…I think.

5) High Resolution scans of Ernst Haeckel’s “Kunstformen der Natur”

Just too pretty for words.  Look through them.  If you aren’t familiar with Ernst Haeckel, he is a German biologist who described and named thousands of new species.  He was an absolutely brilliant artist, and it’s worth it just to look through the high-resolution images even if you don’t care much about biology.  All the pretties.

The most challenging aspect of being a dancer is finding music that moves you, past that it’s figuring out what to do with it.  Structuring choreography or improv for a song can be an arduous task, but I have a little trick I use to speed up the process.  I call it “The Magic Arc” (catchy, huh?).  It’s not necessarily a new concept, writers use something very similar called a “story arc”.  Essentially, as dancers, we are using our bodies to tell a story, so it makes sense that we might want to use a technique reserved for writers.

On the image above, you’ll see that I have numbers and dots marking certain points in the arc.  These are the markings I use to determine what I’m going to do during the music.  The numbers represent certain movements I’d like to incorporate and the dots represent changes in the focus, whether it’s musical focus (say, I want to work with the beat more than the melody), character focus (going from one emotion to another), or anything else, really.  The great thing about interpreting music is that the sky is the limit.  My suggestion for interpreting music with lyrics is to take the lyrics into consideration but not to go for the most literal translation of those lyrics in your movement.  For example, if I hear lyrics about drinking wine, I’m probably not going to mime drinking wine.  Obviously, there are exceptions to every rule, so take my suggestions with a grain of salt.

The main point of the arc is to keep you from using your whole bag of tricks within the first minute of your music.  Generally speaking, if you tend to get nervous when you dance in front of other people,  you might be tempted to bust out all your intricate and dramatic material right off the bat and then you have three minutes of a song to fill with nothing else to give.  When you already feel anxious about performing, it may sometimes feel as though the music has slowed down by fifty percent and you’ve been onstage forever and oh my god what if the audience hates this.  This tends to create frenetic movement and a lack of focus during your performance.  If you’ve mapped out your music ahead of time, really taken the time to prepare yourself for performance, and thought about the type of emotion you’d like to tap into, you are less likely to become flustered.

It’s important to have a build up and release to your movement.  I’ll even take it to a different level by giving a little, taking it away, giving more, taking away, giving most dramatic movement I have, then releasing completely.  It’s almost like teasing the audience.  You never want to leave them feeling completely satisfied, they should always want to see more. You can place the climax of the arc pretty much where ever you want on or past the middle of the music.  I let the music and my own interpretation of it guide me.

I’d love to hear your techniques for music mapping, too!

We all (hopefully) learned to give constructive criticism in high-school, it’s actually one of the more useful things you learn as a teenager.  Compassionately aiding someone in their personal or professional development is a task that is often required of adults.  It’s easy to give this kind of critique to others, but, so often, we as dancers either ignore completely flaws in our behavior or we so harshly criticize ourselves that it becomes impossibly overwhelming to attempt to improve ourselves.

“Artists who seek perfection in everything are those who cannot attain it in anything.” – Gustave Flaubert

Truth time, I am my own worst enemy.  Small missteps in performances, problems with makeup, stupid off-the-cuff comments I’ve made…they have a tendency to stew in my brain until I’m waist-deep in self-hatred and can’t even think clearly.  I have learned this about myself, and, although I find it to be a pretty big personality flaw, I’ve learned to work with it, control it, and cut it off at the pass when I see that I’m about to go down a really negative road.  I am on one end of the spectrum of the typical artist’s personality.  On the opposite end, I know a good amount of artists that think everything they do is the end all be all of pure art.  They can do no wrong.  Every piece is a journey and every journey is perfect in and of itself.  While I appreciate this mode of thinking, it often leads to stagnant and repetitive art that never grows and never changes the perception of the artist.  There’s got to be a middle-ground, right?

 “Be kind whenever possible. It is always possible.”  - Dalai Lama

I find it mildly embarrassing to watch videos of myself dancing, but it’s one of the best motivators to improve yourself as a dancer.  This is where the “honest self-appraisal” bit comes into play…you have to be able to look at yourself, through the smoke and mirrors, and see what is actually happening with your body.  How is your posture?  How are your arms  in their framing positions?  How muscular and clean are your movements?  Are you working primarily with your dominant side, or are you switching it up?  Are you actually feeling the music or dancing in spite of it?  The best dancers working today consistently receive this feedback either from instructors, coaches, or simply from studying their own videos.  If you don’t have access to gigs that tape performances, I suggest you tape yourself with a point and shoot camera and study that.

When critiquing your own performances, remember the “compliment sandwich” – something positive about your performance, something that needs work, and, again, something positive.  Sometimes the compliment sandwich feels like a reach, where you just hate (or, alternately, love) everything about your performance, but you have to realize that this is not honest appraisal.  If you are truly honest with yourself, you can find something positive about your performance, and you can find something that needs polishing.

As a belly dance instructor, I’m pretty emphatic with my students about taking other dance forms.  Cross-training is your best bet to becoming a well-rounded dancer and also to having more movement to pull from when you are choreographing or improvising.  An added bonus to cross-training in other dance forms is that it’ll knock you down a peg if you are getting a little too full of yourself.  You will not be a professional at every dance form you do, and it’s great to develop some humility and to have to start at square one.  I do this myself on a weekly basis.  The great thing about taking other dance classes is getting an honest outside eye on your quality of movement.  A contemporary jazz instructor has no reason to fluff your feathers, whereas other belly dancers in your community might feel awkward about giving you the critique you really need to be a better dancer.  From my experience, everyone asks how they did after a performance, but what they really want to hear is “YOU WERE AWESOME OMG I’M GOING TO NAME MY NEXT CHILD AFTER YOU!”  It’s challenging to get a straight answer out of other dancers, so don’t put them in the position to potentially hurt your feelings.  Study with other dance instructors and let that be your critique.

“As one gets older one sees many more paths that could be taken. Artists sense within their own work that kind of swelling of possibilities, which may seem a freedom or a confusion.”  - Jasper Johns

This process of self-appraisal can be overwhelming in one breath and liberating in the next.  What I’ve said in every art form I’ve ever attempted is “once I’m the best and have nothing left to learn, I’ll stop completely.”  There’s beauty in this struggle, and to submit to it fully creates a vulnerability that some people simply cannot handle.  It is up to you to decide if you can treat yourself with compassion and kindness on this journey or if you are unprepared to commit fully to the learning process.  It’s heartbreaking and beautiful and can cut you down to size or make you feel like you hung the moon…and I wouldn’t have it any other way.