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

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.

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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!

I am not the type of teacher that wants to clip the wings of my students, as I’ve been lucky enough to have supportive and wonderful teachers that saw in me a potential and strong desire to move forward and they nurtured that fully. I want to be the person that says “if you have a specific vision and a clear way of reaching that vision, you should!” I want to be the type of mentor that does not fear the rise of a student with potential, but fosters, protects, and gives that student a clearer idea of the path ahead. I don’t believe in the “there ain’t enough town for the both of us” mentality at all. If we all support and create a beautiful community of dancers, there is enough business for everyone. Passion and devotion to your craft creates passion and devotion in the public. To a large degree, it’s just a matter of getting the community together to agree to very simple terms so that we are all treated fairly by our client base. All that being said, not every student is ready to go pro. Furthermore, not every pro should be a teacher.

When to go pro:

When you’ve been dancing for a while (meaning at the very least a year if you’re a quick study or have had other dance experience), you might feel that you are ready to take on a solo gig or two. I usually fully support this with students if the gig is a small performance in a variety show, benefit, or ensemble belly dance show. It is important to gauge whether or not you actually *like* performing by yourself for an audience in small doses before going pro. You need the experience, and these small gigs help you determine what works and what doesn’t and gives you very practical knowledge of how a show is put together. Any instructor in belly dance should provide you with opportunities to perform. I would also suggest using your first shows as incentive to develop and fully realize new material. If you have always wanted to learn sword, but never had an excuse to…now’s your chance! You should choose a teacher that you can respect as a mentor if it is your goal to perform. This person will give you critique, practical knowledge, and advice that will be invaluable to you as performance artist. This person is also responsible for letting you know if you are overreaching for your level of proficiency, so you need to be comfortable in your relationship with him or her.

Here’s the big thing, if a teacher tells you, with compassion and kindness, that you are not quite ready to dance alone, do not take it as the end-all-be-all. If it it said with love and your best interest in mind, it just means you have a more work to do. Also, every dancer has more work to do…take heart in that. You most likely will not be ready to go pro in the first year. Honestly, you will be lucky to go pro with three years of training. Think about it this way, a prima-ballerina studies from age two or three in most cases. There is a certain level of change in the human body that has to take place for a dancer to become proficient at any dance form. Muscles form in very particular ways, flexibility in certain areas of the body change, and, in some cases, even the bones will shift in order to accommodate certain movement. Pardon my language, but…this shit takes a hot minute. If you think you can be a professional ANYTHING in a year, you need to take a step back and really think about why you want to do it in the first place. Is it passion or self-actualization? The journey to be a great dancer, better than you were last year, should never end. There is no magic piece of paper that anyone can give you to tell you you’ve learned all you need to know. Dance is a language, and it’s ever changing and evolving. Take joy in it without looking for the end result and you might surpass your wildest ambitions for yourself.

I believe completely that your instructor should fully endorse your transition into professional-level dance. If you’ve done your homework as a student, you should have, by this point, found an instructor that you feel comfortable with and that you can trust to give you open and honest feedback. If he or she says you need a bit more work, you should absolutely respect that opinion and ask what you can do to improve yourself enough to receive their blessing to move into professional status. It doesn’t hurt to ask the questions, but keep an open mind and, remember, it’s not personal! Professional dancers receive harsh criticisms regularly, so this would be a great time for you to develop a thick skin and the ability to receive critique with an open mind and a willingness to change. Just as it takes a lot of years of professional development to move from mail-clerk to CEO, you must work your way up as a dancer. Again, it’s all part of the journey. If you are truly following your passion, the drive you have to do this every single day for the rest of your life should overshadow the momentary lapse in self-confidence you may experience when you receive your instructor’s honest critique of your level of proficiency.

Are you ready to teach?

My advice on taking the next step to teaching is simple. If you feel you have something to offer that is different than what you’ve been taught by your instructors, you should be supported in taking the step to teach on your own terms. That being said, I think it is common practice to begin teaching under the umbrella and watchful eye of your instructor’s company. The best step is teaching a beginning basics class at first to get a feel for giving corrections, moving and talking at the same time (yes, it is a skill), and pacing a class. Your instructor should attend class with you and help you correct as well as offer guidance after class in things you can improve, or different ways of phrasing things. You should continue teaching under your instructor until such time as you have something unique and completely you to offer a class. If all you have to teach is your teacher’s material, do not do them the disservice of branching out and potentially burning a bridge by taking some students with you. I’m aware that we are all, to a large degree, teaching another person’s material. It’s part of dance. No one is reinventing the taqsim. These common moves and techniques exist to create a framework for dance, but it’s what you do with the information you learn and how you put it together that makes it yours. Just remember, teaching doesn’t make you exempt from the need to take classes. Learning from other instructors will help you think about how you approach dance. While I don’t take belly dance classes, just the odd workshop, I consistently take other dance and movement classes. You cannot be expected to figure it all out by yourself, so don’t bother. Attend classes with an open mind and continue seeking out instructors that resonate with you.

You do not have to teach to be a professional dancer, and you shouldn’t feel as though those two are synonymous. Some people simply don’t have the passion or patience to help students learn, and that is fine. While teaching is good supplemental income, if you don’t have a deep love for it, you will lead your students astray with your lack of care. Leave that game to the people that love it, and keep dancing your heart out! Who knows, maybe some day you’ll change your mind!

I would love to hear your opinions on this article!

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.