Posted by Shelley Ashfield (Om Helena) on 3/3/2004, 12:46 pm, in reply to "I've been out of dance for awhile looking for friends to update ideas..."
130.76.96.19
Hi Kayla,
This is where the web will be really helpful!
Best place to start surfing is www.shira.net for reviews of music and videos, and her essays on music/lyrics. Do your share of "window shopping" on the net to see how you can order music, videos, costumes, books, even dance retreats(!) through Amazon.com, or dancers of note like Delilah (Visionary Dance Productions) or Suzannah Del Vecchio. There are a good many song translation sites out there now, but even better, Aswan Dancers have phonetic translations as well. For costuming, the Costume Goddess is a great help, as well as Dawn "Davina" Brown. Davina has a website with lots of great articles including yes, a costume update!
It must be tough to dance in such an isolated area, but there's also a lot of opportunity if you're the only show in town! Use your contacts to the utmost: network with school teachers to find gigs on "International Culture Week" celebrations and the like; go to your local senior citizen center and make a proposal to teach a bellydance class or two, designed for that age group; showcase your students at a hafla; form a dance club at a local college. I've done all sorts of gigs, including a good number of Toastmaster speeches that have incorporated bellydance from "The Physics of Sword Balancing" to solving back/posture problems with bellydance to revealing how costumes are constructed. One of my speeches made it to Area Contest level, giving me yet another audience.
P.S. I know the mom stuff well - as you can see, my stage name is Om Helena, mother of Helen, who at ten is also dancing, balancing a sword on her head, and practicing her zils to Hossam Ramzy's drumming.
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