When I have the house to myself (as I do tonight), I think, “oh well I’lljust try to quickly…” and then I realize that hours have passed and I’m late, late, late in getting to bed.

It’s always something that’s such a little thing, but it becomes completely absorbing and time disappears. It’s a combination of love and challenge. These are tricky things or I wouldn’t be trying so hard to master them, and/or I love them (which is why I get lost trying to master them).

So I’m going to tell you my list of loves and challenges that keep me up at night. Then you can tell me your list. Hey, they’re obviously worth losing a little sleep over, so pass them along for the rest of us.

Here’s this week’s list:

Passionate Saidi Shoulders
Online costume browsing
Listening to Hisham Abbas
Learning to play Tabla
BackBends
Feeling the music
Watching classics on youtube
Sewing more cut glass beaded fringe on my costume

and yours?

“I know that I shimmied… a lot. For almost the whole 4 minutes, I think.”

Oh that sounds so familiar. That nervousness, the zoning out, the fall-back-moves taking over your dancing and the brain that can’t come up with the right mix or variety of moves.

We all know that you don’t need twenty spectacular moves to perform a spectacular dance. Three moves will do just fine if they’re done boldly. But what about those times where you spend an entire song fighting to get away from that one fall-back move, trying to remember anything else that you know how to do, and boldness is just a footnote waiting for there to be a move to attach it to.

Let’s look at how to bring more variety and creativity to your dancing. Creativity is rooted in the right hemisphere of your brain. During normal activity, your brain’s function is a kind of synchronized exchange between your right brain and your left brain.  Your right brain contributes those ideas that seem to strike like lightning, leaving you astonished at where it came from. Your left brain contributes the ideas that are a logical extension of what worked in the past, with thought processes such as, “shimmies will work well for this tight drum roll.” And, “Ah, I can always fit a nice egyptian hip drop to this baladi rhythm.”

But it’s a combination of these ideas that will give you a nicely balanced dance, showcasing moves that are a perfect, logical fit to the rhythms, with occasional moves that seem inspired by the music leading your body with no amount of logic required. So how do we open up the right brain so that its juices are flowing and it gives us those moments of inspiration more often? True improvisational dance is like brainstorming — you can’t force it, but you can give it an environment where ideas flourish and you can flex your brainstorming muscles more often so that, when they’re needed, they don’t cramp up and leave you in a perpetual shimmy.

You may remember that one of the most important tenets of brainstorming is to not censor ideas. When you’re brainstorming, accept all ideas as being good enough, because once you start editing, you inhibit the flow of new ideas — ideas which could be your best ones yet. In the same way, the key to doing good brainstorming dancing is to open yourself up, and let yourself be uninhibited about your dancing.

Here are four ideas for more brainstorming-oriented dance:

1. Dance at 200%. 

   This is a good trick for when you’re feeling self-conscious. If you’re dancing at 200%, you can’t ask yourself if a move is appropriate, because the answer is “of course it’s not. so what?” If you start asking this question, just turn up the intensity of the move — bigger movement, more enthusiasm, huge eyes, bigger smile. Keep turning it up until the question of “is this the right move?” disappears.
    

2. Dance for a child.

   Similar to dancing at 200%, only now, you have an audience. But the only judgment this audience is capable of making is, “am I having fun?” A child won’t care about your technique, doesn’t care how impressive your backbend is, they only care if you, and they, are getting lost in the moment. 
    

3. Do it without technique. 

   If you don’t already, make time to dance where you HAVE to just let go and enjoy it, throw out your technique, forget choreographies, stop asking if it’s good enough. Don’t even say “I am going to belly dance”, because that sets limits on how you will move. Just put on music and move. Don’t stop to think or to check a move. Don’t question if this is the right move; just turn off the mental chatter and go. Do this however often you need to, but no less than once a week. SRSLY.
    

4. Dance a story.

   This is a common suggestion for investing your dance with more emotion, but when you are really sunk into a story, you can be surprised where this takes you in your dance. If you have been particularly into a novel, historical figure or movie, try dancing the character that intrigues you the most. Let go of who you are. Stay away from mirrors so you don’t jar yourself back into remembering who you really are, or slip into critiquing what is happening. In fact, try turning off the lights. 

As you can see from the above list, the art of creativity seems to boil down to, “shut your inner critic up and enjoy yourself.” Some people find this a lot easier than others. So what do you do to get creative?

The lotus is an elegant, figure-eight motion done with the hands. Done correctly, it looks as if your hands are rotating unnaturally around each other, and adds a distinctive exotic flavour to your dance.

This week I’ve set out to learn to perform the lotus hand movement. It’s a pretty confusing move, and I’ve had to go through multiple resources before feeling like my brain had completely grasped what I was even trying to get my body to do. Actually performing it is another thing altogether. But now that I’ve got the concept, I feel like I’m more than halfway there.

So here are the best lotus hands references I was able to summon from the depths of the internet.

Start with a Lotus Hands Visual, so you can clearly visualize the effect you’re going to achieve.

If you’re a words person, Nika Feyrouz has a followup video where she explains a little bit of what she’s doing.

Or try Jasmin Jahal’s written instructions to what she calls the Thousand Petal Lotus.

And lastly, Mahsati Janan’s website has a powerpoint presentation which augments written explanation with some diagrams.

While I recommend starting with the video, so you can visualize where you’re going to end up, I found Mahsati’s  powerpoint presentation to be the best starting point for actual learning. Mahsati tells you to start by moving your hands as one. This is so important — while an expert lotus has hands chasing eachother in counterpoint, they’re performing the same motions together. It took me ages of watching Nika’s video before I even grasped that, “hey, the thumbs should follow eachother” and “where the right hand goes, the left hand follows”.

Ultimately though, you should give all of these resources a try. Whether you’re a visual, auditory or kinesthetic learner, the more learning techniques you can pull together, the better you will grasp the concept.

Lotus Photo © tanakawho. Used under a creative commons license.

I’ve spent my adult life writing technical, logical, persuasive documents. I’ve written cover letters, sales proposals, development plans, biographies, sales copy and training manuals. It’s been five years since I wrote my last poem.

I’m surprised to find myself here, frankly. I have always loved to write, and I loved it for the sake of playing. I remember I spent my teenage years rolling words around in my head, trying out their sound, pairing them, tossing phrases back and forth. I remember writing in a kind of free-form ecstasy where whatever word that came to me was accepted for being the perfect next word. I’ve dreamed of making a living at writing fiction, but lately it seems like all I can do with my writing is explain or argue.

What I really want to do is move. I want to move people and I want, for myself, to be moved.

I have the same predicament in dance. And I suspect that’s very common. What I want when I dance is to be transported out of myself. There is an ecstasy of having lost yourself in the moment that I want desperately. Having taken up Middle Eastern Dance only in my adulthood, I’m not sure I’ve ever quite had that moment. By the time I started dancing, I had already learned to overthink things.

But I’ve come close, when I’m dancing alone at home. And I crave it quite desperately. And then, beyond being transported, I want to have the power to transport others with my dance.

There now, that’s surely not asking too much is it? I want to write so I and my readers can be transported. I want to dance so I and my audience will lose ourselves.

In fact, while it is possible to craft your performance intellectually, I suspect that when it comes time to actually perform it, if you cannot lose yourself in it, neither will anyone else. If you are coldly assessing your technique, so will your audience be.

In ‘The Six Questions’, Daniel Nagrin wrote in depth about the high you can get from dance, the losing all sense of time. More to the point though, he wrote, ‘what we do onstage, we did as children: we “make believe” that what is not so is so. If this embarrasses, the performer is in deep trouble.’ I think this is critical information. In the making of ourselves as dancers, we put aside our self-absorption in order to see ourselves critically, from the outside, to correct and refine postures and techniques. But when it comes time to put it together and dance, you have to put aside the adult mind. Finding your voice as a dancer is the simple (though monumental) task of peeling away the critical exercises and returning to your child’s mind. It depends on your ability to make-believe unselfconsciously and with your whole self.

For myself, I have only just recently come back to writing with abandon and dancing with my whole self and the idea of approaching your raw art uncritically. I’m certainly not “there” yet, wherever there may be. But I feel like I’ve come home in both my writing and my dancing. For years now, I’ve kept myself away from the parts of these activities that drew me to them in the first place, thinking that once I reach some pinnacle of technique, then I will be good enough to stop being always critical and always logical. What a waste, right?

I think it would be better to keep the abandon and never develop the technique, than to develop the technique at the cost of your love for the art. Though coming back to the abandon is a process, and one I have really only just begun, I hope, over the next few weeks, to write some posts explaining the exercises I have been playing with that have allowed me to let go in my dancing.

The writing, I’m still working on. I have begun a novel which I have been logically planning for years, but have never considered myself ready to actually write. Now I’m writing it, and have thrown out most of my logical planning. I’m writing it, instead, on emotion and finding the writing much more compelling. We’ll see how that goes.

Have you ever had the experience of not knowing what to do or say to a friend who’s going through a bad time? You can’t think of anything helpful to say or do. Your mind is blank and your hands flutter by your side like birds in a net.

Do you remember the last time you saw someone care for a child who had hurt themselves? Or maybe remember back to when you were a child. What did the comforting person do? They said, “oh you poor thing,” and “Come sit by me and you can cuddle until you feel better” or “I’ll get a bandaid” or “how about I kiss it better.” Why is that so powerful? Do cuddles, or bandaids or kisses actually make the hurt go away? Well no. But something about the exchange provided comfort, and that was the attitude of mastery adopted by the adult. If they were to limit themselves to what was strictly true or what would actually fix things, they’d only be able to say things like, “crying doesn’t make it better” and “do you want some painkillers?”

Though bandaids and kisses are a kind of elaborate lie, a child given this care will feel better because the right attitude of sympathy, calm and mastery tells them that someone else is prepared to take responsibility for them and their wellbeing for a bit.

It’s what we do in dance. We take care of the dance experience for the audience. And it’s not what you do, or the truth or purpose of what you do. It’s how you do it; with calm and mastery. Every movement can be as much a fantasy as the idea that bandaids fix bruises, but if you deliver it with the calm and compassion of a parent comforting a child, it will be exactly right.

From Naima’s Bellydance Blog:

All Bellydancers should be aware of her “bellydance” body type. There are 3 things that you must address separately = bust, torso, and size (as in thin, average, full/goddess figure). You are doing yourself a disservice if you are buying/making costumes based solely on size (sm, med, lg, xl, xxl, etc.) The main thing we all want to do is have the illusion of a balanced hourglass figure regardless of our body type. However, don’t let yourself think that even though you may already have an hourglass shape or be lean and toned that you should wear any type of costume you want. read more…

This is wonderful. Detailed, logical and full of helpful diagrams. Can’t wait for Part II.

Dancing on your toes requires balance, ankle strength and core muscle strength. But if your balance is good when you’re flat-footed, and your ankles are strong, yet you’re still having trouble, check your posture.

1. Don’t straighten your feet 100%. If you’re up too high, then most of your weight is literally on your toes. Lower yourself a little bit so that the balls of your feet make better contact with the ground, maybe 70-80% straight. This also makes sure that in addition to using your ankles, you can use the muscles in your feet to correct your balance.
2. Tuck your pelvis under you. This will prevent you from locking your knees and hips and it will keep your center of gravity more over the balls of your feet.
3. Keep your ribcage forward (ie, centred over your hips) and your shoulders back.

Another advantage to making your neutral position only half-off the ground, is that it makes it easier to vary your height in order to add texture to a move.

When I recollect the best performances I’ve seen, and my favourite dancers, the critical element is never technique.

I love the dancers who are not only smiling, but their smiles are present, relaxed and engaging. A vacuous smile won’t do. Neither will smiling past the audience. My favourite dancers are focused on the here and now. They put everything they have into their moves, no matter how simple the move, and that degree of focus is an irresistible draw to the audience. That focus makes the dancer so present in the moment, their smiles are fluid and reflect an emotional give and take with the audience.

Here are some quick thoughts on how to cultivate that ‘focused and present’ mindset in order to be a more engaging performer.

Accept the Present Moment

Sometimes we tune out our surroundings because they’re making us nervous and we worry that we’ll perform poorly if we’re distracted by all that stimulus. I find the opposite is true. When we’re nervous and trying to tune out our surroundings, we spend more energy on denial and have less energy for our performance. In zen terms, acceptance is your best tool for mastery.

When your mind is nervous, it will practice a hyper-awareness. In nature, this helps tremendously in a fight-or-flight situation. The more details you have, the better able you are to use them in planning your attack or escape.

Surrendering to your mind’s inclination to take it all in will give you a better spacial awareness while dancing, and will serve to calm the nerves.

Accept Your Present Move

Another trap that will make your performance seem emotionally empty is allowing yourself to start judging the adequacy of or  over-thinking your dance. Losing yourself in the dance that you’re performing will endow your performance with energy and emotion. But worrying instead about your next moves and second-guessing your last moves will sap the energy from your current moves. If you can’t give your full attention to this hip-work or that flourish, why should the audience?

So, when you feel your attention wander, try narrowing your focus to the present moment, the present move, the present beat. If, like me, you tend to obsess and plan, remind yourself that the purpose of your dance is to be directed by the music. Not the other way around. Planning the next three moves is not truly interpreting the music. Let go and let the music determine your moves. And whatever comes to you, accept it as good enough and give everything to it.

Accept Your Emotions

Fighting with fear will sap your focus. Try acknowledging the fear, and then everything that comes with it.

If you’re feeling anxious, it’s because the stakes are high and you’re worrying about what could go wrong.

But if the stakes are high, doesn’t that also mean that rather than going wrong, this performance could go very, very right?

Don’t hold your excitement in check, thinking you need to pay homage to fear first. Fear and excitement are inseparable. Your performance is a big opportunity to show them what you can do. It should be exciting. So let yourself be excited (and a little bit scared).

As a Belly Dancer, and a Feminist, I frequently find myself in a situation where I want to speak my feminist mind on the topic of Middle Eastern Dance and our attitudes about it. And then I tend to second guess myself and keep quiet because they feel like two separate worlds. If I engage in Middle Eastern Dance, then I do so in part as a cultural homage, because I want to convey the history and the culture behind the dance. So then I feel that I have to be able to quantify the dance’s original purposes according to its history before I can offer any criticisms.

I suppose the issue is that as a westerner performing Middle Eastern Dance, I want to do so respectfully and I’m aware that my perspective is that of an outsider. For that reason I want to be true to its roots and not paint over or taint parts of it with my western perceptions. So I tend to talk myself out of questioning anything about the performers’ culture that has built itself around Middle Eastern Dance.

I think the time has come to stop doing that. We can be dancers as well as feminists. When we assert that Middle Eastern Dance is not about tease or titillation, we’re taking a feminist stand. But then someone winks and says, “but it IS sexy, right?” it feels confrontational to continue the argument. It’s also hard to argue with people who may be a part of your clientele. If an audience member jokingly inquires as to how many camels it would cost for him to take you home, it’s easier to smile and try to take it for a compliment than to tell him he’s being not only offensive in the context of the western culture, but offensive and inaccurate in the context of the near east cultures.

There is no denying that Belly Dance is a very positive thing for women in general. From its historical and contemporary benefits in childbirth, to its emphasis on accepting and dancing with the body you have. The problems come when we don’t actively deny the titillation attitudes and the mysogynist cultural jokes.

I don’t intend to ignore these issues anymore. The contention that women are human beings with the right to perform physical arts without being harassed or objectified is an argument that can and should be pursued in every venue, even one where you feel like a cultural observer. And it has to be possible to do so with an attitude of historical and cultural respect, because it is the parts of a culture that don’t oppress women that deserve our respect. And asserting one’s right to perform without being treated like an object for male titillation hardly smacks of cultural insensitivity. Rather, it’s the other way around.

If you suffer from stage fright, when there’s a performance looming, you probably find yourself questioning why you even dance. Let alone, why you’re considering performing.

When there isn’t a performance in the mix, and you’re feeling unconflicted, the answer is easy. You dance because you love it. And you love it, because it allows you to express something innately true to yourself.

Putting aside for the moment, any stage fright issues, the answer to why you perform logically follows. Creative expression is toothless without an audience. You can certainly spend your life dancing only for yourself, if that’s your wish. But if you are truly expressing something, at some point, you will want to quit shouting into the void, and turn your expression into a meaningful dialogue with the world. The problem, for those of us with social anxieties is that as soon as there is an audience present, we can become so acutely aware of the audience and our own anxieties, that our expression is stunted. That kernel of truth that the dance lets you tap into becomes cut off, and you are dancing from an exposed, frightened place that has little to do with truth or expression.

Your passion for creative expression will not only fail to insulate you against performance anxiety, it leaves you with a cruel dilemma; your spirit urges you to seek outlets for your passion, while those outlets ultimately leave you too anxious to do your best performance.

The problem with social anxieties, is that they build on themselves. Once you are nervous, you fear that people will see how nervous you are. You fear that your fear will ruin everything. Eventually, you are more scared of your scared reactions than of the actual situation. What you need is new thinking to break yourself out of that cycle. Let’s address this with some facts that you can remember when you’re caught in the anxiety feedback loop.

• The audience doesn’t expect perfection. What they expect is a good time. So you don’t need to obsess about the technical aspects of your dance, you can give the audience exactly what they want by letting go and having fun.
• You are the expert in this situation. If you’re still waiting for the magical moment that will tell you that you’ve arrived as an authority on belly dancing, stop. This is the moment. The audience is spending their time, and possibly money for the sake of seeing you perform this dance. You may still be waiting to feel like an authority because you know how much you don’t know. That can be daunting. But this isn’t between you and the entire world of belly dancing, this is between you and the audience. They don’t know how much you don’t know, they only know that you know something they don’t. You don’t have to convince them that you’re an expert, their willingness to invest in seeing you has already established it.
• Everyone in the audience wants to see you succeed. Your audience is not a faceless judging mass. They are a collection of individuals, who, having invested in your performance (with their time and money), are already predisposed to see the performance as a success. This is human nature. They’re invested in your success, because when they go away saying “what a great performance,” it will reflect well on them, their ability to choose a performance and how they spend their time and money. That it reflects well on you is a secondary consideration to them.
• This performance is part of a process. Take a long view of your growth as a dancer. Whether this is your first or your thousandth performance, this isn’t THE performance, it is the first or the thousandth in a series of performances that are making you the dancer you want to be. Regardless of how well or poorly it goes, there will be elements that can be improved and there will be elements of inspiration.

If none of the above items help, consider working with a therapist or anxiety coach. The worse your anxiety gets, the harder it can be to deal with next time and it can be very difficult to break that cycle on your own. Since a part of the fear is the feeling that you can’t let your fear show, you may also find that admitting to the anxiety and asking for help can reduce its hold on you.