HURRAH. Life is pretty good, but somewhere in there I have to get, erm “beach-ready” and “mountain fit” for the Borneo bit (we’re attempting to climb Mt Kinabalu, which is no mean feat). So with a hectic work and travelling work schedule, I’ve been trying to fit in my fitness regime. The gym has gone out the window, and I hear there is a fitness centre at the NY hotel, but seriously, is that going to happen?!? So I’ve had another idea. I’m smuggling Jillina in my suitcase. I’m quite into her Hip out Shape Up DVD at the moment -the short 20 minute bursts of dance work outs just about suit my time poor life and attention span!

So she’s coming with me to the Big Apple, we’re going to dance together in the mornings.. or.. OK, maybe the evenings after work, or perhaps more likely when I return back from the pub after a beer. Ahem! Anyway, if I get sick of her I may also smuggle that bloke from the Zumba DVD as well, although I don’t want to freak out my hotel neighbours. We’ll see, at least if I can’t climb Kinabalu, I may be able to do a decent Saiidi hip drop at the top!

I’ve been looking forward to this class for AGES and Gwen, aka Minnie, did not disappoint. The sold out class assembled on Sunday and did a wonderful long warm up, reacquainting ourselves with our muscle groups, including some suspiciously aerobic reminiscent side leg raises, stomach crunches, and the hilarious, but difficult, buttock squeeze exercise. Yes, it was hard work, but as we were told – one difference between Advanced dancing and just having done it for ages, is the ability to add muscle quality movements into the dance – not just waggling your skeleton around (eee…).

Minnie was hilarious, helping us get to grips with concepts with numerous side splitting analogies, such as “through the serving hatch” and “stirring with the wooden spoon”… I leave the translation into moves to your imagination! Brilliant. Much laughing, face pulling, ab crunching, rib isolating and shoulder blade sinching later, we were all well-worked and smiling and hungry for more!
What a great couple of hours – spent in good company, all working on our wonky flexibility, wobbly balance on toes, and crazy claw hands when concentrating (or maybe that was just me). I really feel it’s precious to have the time to focus on the basic technique again, but really focusing on specifics- challenging, informative and fun (and plenty to work on ahead of next class, next month!)

Now we just need to persuade Minnie to make this a regular gig

We paraded as pirates, with our Pirates of the Caribbean entrance, followed by my pirate version of Spell on you – dancing around my skull stick (don’t ask), then a quick prowl around the site to locate some tasty festival food, and back for a change in the port-a-loos We made our sencond entrance shimmying as steam punk gypsies, and then for a final change to lord as leopards, with an adapted version of Ooo La La, in our new exciting leopard print outfits with our owl masks whooooo! It was brilliant – and the later it got, the more the crowd responded (hmmm), as we walked around the festival site in our outfits, we got loads of fab attention nice!

So, what else, I started a zills class in London with the wonderful Galit Mersand – someone who I have been desperate to have teach me for ages, and after two false starts (being in Slovenia and then avoiding London because of the riots…) I FINALLY got to class last week to bang those finger symbols together – it’s SO MUCH FUN. Although I’m pretty intimidated – despite dancing for over 12 years, I never really learnt how to use the zills – and you are supposed to learn from the start so it’s easy to dance and clang at the same time! Yikes… still, I’m getting there, and thanks to my zill-muffs, not driving the other half to complete distraction yet. Well, the zills are still on the table and not thrown out the window… yet!

So my final news is today’s exicting activity – hula hooping! I have been dying to get to a hooping class for the past 2 years – ever since my London lass Eva introduced me to the hoop at Secret Garden Party a few years back, but of course, nothing cool like that comes to Oxford (everywhere else, it seems), so I bit the bullet, found a wonderful teacher online (Emma Kerr of Hooping Mad) and invited her to Oxford YAY. We got good numbers and learnt some fab tricks and moves, spinning the hoops round our bodies, in all directions, jumping, flicking, rolling. Have a few minor bumps and bruises from all the over excited hoop throwing, but LOVED IT of course. So now… starting up a Oxford Hooping group – to all those lost souls who are hooping in their back gardens – come out and play!! Now, just gotta work out some kind of bellydancing, zill clanging, hula hooping fusion, and all in the leopard print outfits – PERFECT. Next stop, Goa.(please)…

I managed to spread the love around this year, taking two workshops with the wonderful Sabrina – first a fast and furious drum solo – she taught us 6 minutes worth of drum solo in 2 hours WOWOWOW that was crazy, but amazing. A little later we met again in her second workshop to pack a punch into our performance. Learnt tonnes about entrances with veils, walking with emotion giving good “performance face” and generally delving into what makes someone incredible as a performer – really insightful stuff – and she gave us our word – SHINE – to focus on in performance. She was amazing. I came away ladden with CDs
The Saturday night was a feast for the senses again as the Redeemer nightclub held the open-stage performances – I actually prefer these to the Friday night ones as the real pick and mix comes out here – my favourites were a some twirling scandanavian dancers who were completely spellbinding and a new group out of Manchester – Rockit! High energy bellydance aerobics to rock music! Awesome!

After a long day (and night) on Saturday, Sunday was supposed to be restful, I ducked into the first hour of the Morgana workshop, Morgana was teaching Matrix-esque pops, locks and kicks, but the energy was too much for me, I just wanted to chill, so I hung up my sequins a little early and let the hard core carry on!
Another fabulous weekend exploring some interesting takes on performance and bellydance styles, a great opportunity to check out new interpretations and see what dancers are doing with alternative music – and of course, a great time to meet with my angels from the darker side, Tamsin, Nadia and Nancy. Rock on gals, back again next year

It must be carnival time!

Getting ready for the procession - shimmy-me-timbers

Then, completely exhausted by the sheer numbers of shimmy per square park footage, we finally made it backstage for a quick collapse on the grass and glug of water, then BAM onto the huge main stage for our 1.5 knees up to the theme tune of The Pirates of the Caribbean. YeeeeeeOW! We were great! Well, I think so, and adrenalin was high after that fast and furious performance!

Fingers on fire - cooling down with fan veils

Back behind the van for a quick change back into the pirate get-up and I had to find the very elusive “community dance area” to meet the pirates again for our double run of the Roustabout and Skelebobs choreography – which was received well both times – with two crowds of happy campers (despite having a very quiet boombox tweeting out our music).

THEN, home to collapse, shower, rub my feet and watch the end of the Men’s final.
A great day all round

Our fan veil performance
Part of Roustabout performance

**Written in a hotel room, round the corner from the Empire State, during a strange, sleep-deprived but caught up in the romance of the City, Carrie-style fantasy**

So it only feels appropriate, since I’m in a hotel room, with my laptop perched precariously on my laptop, that I have some kind of dialogue with myself via that laptop. New York City is… captivating, it’s not so much the hustle and bustle that you hear about, since there seems to be enough room for everyone, it’s the colours, with the whizzing past of the bright yellow taxis, the smells, Nuts4Nuts carts on the corner with that burnt sugar waft, the sounds, as broad New York accents mingle with the rattle on the pavement from the far underground passing subway train.
I’m entranced, I love it, I constantly glance up at the towering skyscrapers and the bright blue sky overhead. Those towers block out the sun for most of my walk and then the sun breaks through an illuminates the sidewalk, blasting strong rays of light onto the back of my retina, temporarily blinding me to the path ahead.

Wandering through the financial district

Each block presents a feast to the eyes, as I pass delis with large multi-coloured cakes bursting at the seams, tacky NYC stores with every kind of New York trinket available to buy, coffee shops, gilded banks, neon Irish bars, all cheek to cheek with each other.
And yes, the smoking manhole covers. You hear about them, you see them, and yet you still want to take a photo of them.
There’s so much to do here that my feet are killing me. 10 hours of walking around yesterday simply wasn’t enough. I still need to get back out there. I have to go to one of the city’s best kept shopping secrets (I would say, but it’s a secret) tonight after work, but it’s OK, it’s open until at least 10…. I want to go to the top of the Empire State Building, but that’s OK, it’s open until 2am. I need to have dinner – I’ve been recommended an amazing place a few blocks away (the feet are mentally counting the steps), and I just need to walk around a bit more (feet scream noooo), take some more snaps on my Blackberry phone, say a few more hellos to random strangers. Breathe in more Nuts4nuts smoke and look up at the towering giants a few more times before bed.

The Boat and the Babe

It’s a place that I feel comfortable being alone. There were plans for Happy Hour drinks after work today that got cancelled this afternoon, but I’m happy to do my own thing instead. So many different people here, a lot of unidentifiable dialect and a Canon pointing upwards, it’s easy to feel like I’m one of the locals, and I like that.
The pace is fast, the energy is high when you’re talking to people, the taxis don’t wait for you, they just hurtle past at breakneck speed, but somehow it’s easy to go at your own pace along the streets, and spend that time observing life pass you by. It’s the spectacle that’s so intriguing and I don’t want to rush to get to my destination, when the destination is occurring all around me.

I just fell in love with a local..

Dogs. New Yorkers love their dogs. Perhaps that’s why I love it here. Yesterday on my stroll from mid-town to down-town I came across park after park. Mostly devoid of all greenery as Spring is yet to set in here. And nearly all parks without exception had a gated off play area. Normal for a park, yes, and the play areas were busy with people, sitting on benches and chatting with passersby as they watched their DOGS socialise, play, fight and chase each other. It was hilarious and I was captivated. It’s as if the city has decided that human children are not the way forward, it’s all about the furry, four-legged variety.

And these dogs come in all shapes and sizes – from giant, wooly, mountain sheep dogs, to tiny hairless rats of dogs, all with their own coats/jackets/doggy blazers, trotting alongside their owners, off to meet their friends in the park.
Bonkers but brilliant. I belong here.

p.s. There is a tenuous bellydance connection here – I met up with a very good friend who I used to dance with in Oxford – who is a New Yorker, still living it large in NYC – she took me to a delicious Middle Eastern restaurant and taught me how to tip on a credit card!!

So we were the opening guest act – performing straight after Hathor (always a challenge!) and I did my usual thing of being terrified, waiting in the wings, practising the moves in my head and throwing a sudden blank as we are introduced and skip out, in the darkness, into centre stage… BUT I am pleased to say that we pulled it off (Jilina, of Bellydance Superstars’ choreography to La Azon by Mohammed Fouad) without a hitch – I really enjoyed dancing this one, with all its spins and jumps and the wagging no no no no finger move YAY! Loved being back on stage as well – it feels like AGES (not performed since last Halloween). Then, all hot and breathless, I was able to scuttle back to my front row seat to admire the other performers from close up!

So needless to say, as ever at Hathor, there is a rainbow of performers, from solists, to groups, of all shapes, sizes and bellydance styles – from sultry veil numbers to full on carnivale affairs – and this year the thirds seemed pretty short and snappy – so the night motored through at quite a pace, with the wonderful MC/comedey from the compare, the wonderful drumming from John Sleiman in the breaks and shop shop shopping!

So my highlights were… from Part 1, it has to be Nikki Livermore with an impentrable drum solo which turned into a battle of the sexes – man versus woman, drum versus hips – and I think Nikki won! She can shimmy for Britain – infact the world (and I heard she recently got back from Brazil, which explains a few of those insane bottom shaking moves that had us all shouting for more at the end of a very exhausting set!

My Part 2 highlights were Ashnah (actually my favourite dance of the evening), doing a steampunk come can can performance, all killer boots, bustly skirts and attitude. LOVED it – and what great facial expressions MORE MORE MORE!
From a pure spectacular, choreographical marval and just “I can’t take enough photos but want to watch without my camera” front, hats off to Negoum El Leyl’s dance – a riot of colour with Isis wings, fluffy peacock fans, silk veils, fan veils, candles, all, somehow moving and spinning and whirling and twirling in UNISON. Wonderful, spectacular, and completely and utterly prop-tastic!

So with Part 3 comes my new bellydance crush – Sundara ATS – I LOVE these girls – doing American Tribal Style dancing with their fierce makeup and amazing hair and costumes, just a feast to look at and that’s before they start dancing. Their movements were sublime, they melted into the floor and moved with real style and grace, I was completed bewitched and just was thinking the whole way through “I want to dance like this, I need to dance like this”.. and so, I need to get some tribal in my life.. any suggestions gratefully received! (I quite fancy Tribal Fest in Cali..). Not only did they execute a hipnotising dance, they then rocked out to Personal Jesus, which nearly bought the house down (or the front row, at least!) Great stuff… And then, to close the show, Hathor pulled one of their usual crowd-pleasers out of the bag – putting more energy than I thought was possible into the Flo-Rida track Club Can’t Handle Me – the front row was literally jumping out of their seats with excitement!!

I’ve been going to Hathor now since 2004, and it’s amazing these days just how much variety and creativity the dancers put into their acts, which is something that seems to increase each year – back when Soleil d’Egypte started performing, there weren’t many times in a Hafla when dancers did something unexpected, but these days each time a group/dancer comes on stage, you don’t quite know what to expect and I think that the Hathor Hafla really embraces that, which I personally love and encourage. Another great vintage Hathor – lalalallalallalalallla! (my online version of the zaghareet).

I had to leave promptly, as I had a date with my mum, travelling all the way up from Essex, but what a way to start the day (only a further 4 punishing hours of walking round the shops to go!). I was sad to say adieu to the Bonanza, as my day was cut short, but I hear it continued through to be another great success- roll on next year!

Select your weapon of choice for the Bellydance Bonanza...

Oh, and you can read about the 2009 event here!

Unfortunately, just as I was enjoying being part of the audience (although I desperately wanted to get on stage myself), I had to do a Cinderella and dash off into the night for other appointments. It was tipping it down and I had to ride my bike all the way back to East Oxford leaving the lure of the jingle bells behind me in the O’Reilly Theatre. I only have a few photos – I’m waiting for Agata (the official photographer) to release her arty snaps – then I’ll put a few up here – AND I can’t wait to hear about the acts in the second half (if anyone wants to post about the second half – please let me know!!). But yet again, OMEDS did a fab job, gathering together some wonderful and beautiful talent from all over Oxfordshire and the surrounds – and it’s always lovely to spend the evening hanging out with our fellow sisters of sparkle… Roll on the winter hafla, I want to be ON the stage this time