November started with a lovely event at which I danced with my troupe in Lichfield. It was one of those lovely old-fashioned haflas full of joyful women and I spent a very pleasant evening with friends. The following weekend Shikidim were booked to dance at a wedding which is always nice, it was a pleasure to dance for Helen and her new husband and nice that it was in the village - a home fixture. The weekend after that we danced at the Bamba charity hafla in Birmingham, we had a lovely evening, there were some greats acts performing.
That brings me up to 24th November - the day of my Raqs Wombourne2 show. I have to say the lead up to the show grew more and more stressful. I like to plan things like this very carefully and was feeling very pleased with myself that we had got the programmes and music sorted so early. The week before the show I was sent messages from 6 performers to say they were unable to dance - fortunately I had been inundated with requests for performance slots and had crammed too many into the show so it gave a little leeway with the timings but it meant the programmes were wrong and the music had to be re-done - Rob was re-doing the music an hour before the show. The day of the show was pretty manic, we had Bex do a brilliant fun workshop - spooky, vampy and gothic and then Ozgen arrived and we did another fabulous workshop - Turkish Romany style, followed by a drumming workshop with the wonderful John Sleiman which sadly I had to miss as I had to get my hair done and get to the Civic Centre to set everything up. The show was brilliant even if I do say so myself. I think having been to many belly dance shows I am still capable of being critical/objective however I can honestly say that every performance was wonderful. We had up and coming talent such as Hannah who was a very pleasant surprise for everyone, we had Rachelle (recent Miss Belly Dance Ireland winner) perform and wow everyone, we had big names such as Bex and Ozgen who always deliver a stunning performances and we had fabulous troupes displaying Saiidi, ATS, Bollywood, Circus, Thai fingers. If I were to mention everyone personally here it would be a very long blog but I would like to say a huge thank you to each and every performer/troupe it really was a splendid showcase of the diversity of Belly Dance. I do have to say a special thank you to my students who performed a Latin fusion dance - all my nagging and drilling paid off and they did me proud as did my troupe Shikidim who performed my new dark caberet dance and my tango fusion dance.
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| My fabulous students |
The following day we had more workshops with Ozgen, Turkish caberet being the first and it was just fabulous fun, lots of skirt swishing and attitude and then we had a drum solo workshop - I was feeling slightly brain dead by this time but nevertheless the workshop was excellent - very clever choreography.
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| Ozgen performing Turkish Romany style |
Plans are already underway for RaqsW 3. I now have Christmas to celebrate so I shall cut this blog short. Merry Christmas everyone.
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