Dancy thinky
Dec. 27th, 2005 02:54 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bethlakshmiYep, I'm skipping a relation of Xmassy goodness. There were good points (like my new fruit hat) and not-fun points (like getting a migraine), but going through all of it, and analyzing it would only make the good points seem trivial and the bad points seem worse, and I'd surely leave something out. So, I shall selfishly keep these memories locked away in my brain. Nyah.
Instead, I shall talk about dancy goodness, which (as we all know) I can expound upon at great length.
Friday dance class
Aparna's back - week 2 - I believe I may have "leveled". As in, if this was a video game, a little fairy would come out of nowhere and dance around me while playing a happy little noise and emitting lots of little red hearts, recharging and enlarging my health and stamina. Yes, I'm a big geek.
Why do I think that? Well... we've moved into a new level of adavu working-ness. I still believe that there may be Undiscovered Adavus, but I do not believe I need to lock my teacher in a room until she teaches me these unfound tidbits of knowledge. At present we are re-examining existing adavus. Now we are working on "motivation". That sounds like we should be wearing black turtlenecks and black berets, drinking awfully bitter coffee and speaking in snooty accents. Such is not actually the case. In this case, it is not anything like "my deep and bitter anguish at the state of the universe makes me stomp thusly" - it is the idea that some part of the movement "motivates" the entire set of movements in a given moment. Picture your body as a Rube Goldberg device - and in some way moving hands, or feet, or head or eyes is what triggers the rest of the whole complicated mechanism. This is really hard to write about... and only minutely easier to speak about... and of course, I'm still wrapping my grey matter around it... so that doesn't help either, but here's an example:
We are doing Nattu Adavu #3 (ironically, Padme and I just finished #2... wouldn't it have been convenient if she had picked #1 or #2... but no... I don't have this kind of luck). Adavu #3, Part 1 goes like this:
- start in aramundi (the knees bent, out to sides position), hands kataka at chest, each hand is the max spread from thumb to pinkie away from chest, wrists are more or less directly in front of nipples.
- 1 - stick out R foot, resting on heel, straight out in front of you, hands go out, to either side of foot, in alaputma, bending from the waist
- 2 - stamp with L foot - this is rather like a hop, given that most of the weight is on it.
- 3 - stamp with R foot, returning to upright state, hands kartaka
- 4 - stamp with L foot
Now... when learning it, that's really quite enough for one day. Getting the heel and the hopping and the stamping happening, along with the bending at the waist and returning to a nice clean position, and then the hands doing their thing, all of it happening more less in a relaxed non-panic sort of way is Quite Enough Thank You for learning this thing.
But I learned this 3 or 4 years ago, so presumably I've got it down. I do, this is not even close to the hard stuff. So... the next question is - what part of the body drives the movement? Aparna's pick - the hands - the act of throwing the hands right around the foot and then pulling them back is the active agent. And they go out in a throwing way, not an arc, a straight out vector towards the feet. Everything else is about following the hands - the eyes, the bend at the waist, the foot.
She tells me this is not the *only* way - it could be the foot that directs the movement, or the head or the bending at the waist - but today, we pick the hands. She pointed out that you could the same movement several times in a dance piece, picking different focuses, and it would add a variation to the peice that is a level on top of just doing the peice well...
This is an easy example. We did three adavu series, and the third one is a lot more complicated than this.
We moved on to Revenge of Alairippu - the peice I taught this summer. I think teaching my lovely lotus buds has helped me quite a bit - she complimented me on it, along with the criticism. I could feel the on-ness of the 1st 1/2 or so, as though I didn't need to think about what came next, or if I could do it, but could just ease into it, and pull the best out of it. I did mess some stuff up:
- I'm cutting the head/eye move of the mutaiya short - I need to fully lock in on the hand as it goes out to the side
- I'm taking the easy path, when I should take the hard path on the arms of a certain movement transition (puk-adavu to mettu adavu, for my own reference)
- I fucked the puramundi leaps up royally - I got stiff, and scared, and I'm out of practice. Bleck.
And we did some more Javali - verse #2 is halfway through. There's a great *look* in. It's "your look captured my heart" and it sure is a heart-capturing look. Or it is when Aparna does it. I believe right now on me, it's a heart-capturing look that is corrupted by shuffling into place and looking vaguely uncertain so that it is more like "if I tie my shoe laces will I capture your heart?" But I will work on more capturing certainty.
Neena & Veena
Attempting to compensate for the vast amounts of food I have been consuming, I began Monday with Indie Hop with Neena and Veena the famous Belly Twins (www.bellytwins.com). It's a mix of bhangra, hip hop and perkiness. It does exactly what a work out video should do - it exhausted me by about 2/3 in, and I struggled to finish up, but managed to hang in there and do the cool down. The cool down and warm up are OK, although their advertised yoga moves were not quite enough yoganess for my taste... but they were identifiable to me as yoga - which is good.
On the two absolutely perky and adorable Belly Twins, the moves look freaking adorable. On the buff guys in their workout gang, the moves are pretty darn hunky. Bhangra is originally a men's thing, and hip hop can be pretty guy friendly. On me... well, it's something to work for. There's a lot of hopping and shrugging which I believe must be done with absolute certainty that while you are doing something dorky, you are still quite definitely the Coolest Thing on the Planet. This is hard to do while the hopping and jumping is causing bobbling and wobbling on bits of the anatomy that one might prefer not bobble or wobble so. But, perhaps if I eat more salads, less 7 course dinners, and do more Neena and Veena, the bobbling quotient will reduce. :)
All in all, if you are looking for something fun - this is a good pick. This is not belly dance, this is not anything like the excruciatingly complex classical Indian dance. This is good clean fun that doesn't demand really precise moves, it just needs attitude.
Baby Dolls Choreography
Finished Monday night with Baby Dolls choreography time. Refreshed myself on the choreography, which had gotten a little rusty, and started in on the next bits. I now have up to 2:55 (mm:ss) figured out, and the trailing 20 seconds of close are done. That is plenty to work on this week with my fellow dancers. I'm tickled. We're working on the 80 Drums Around the World version of Istanbul from Ultra Lounge 3. Or...at least I hope that's the one - I can't preview streaming media at work. I love this peice of music. At first I was not too thrilled at the idea of another Istanbul choreography, as I loved both the Dancing Lady comic rendition to They Might Be Giants and my own 7 Veils version. I figured you couldn't get away with using the same melody three times for 3 great numbers - you were bound to strike out and get stale. But the 80 Drums version is not at all like any other version. It's got big band going on, and then some wierd drum stuff, and then a little Nutcrackeresque stuff... it's wild.
Better yet, it's the kind of music that makes me want to dance. And the kind of music that suggests very specific dance moves, if I care to take the time and listen. I love those sorts of choreographies that are so well-linked to the music that it feels like the music is actually making the dance happen. There's dance that goes with music, which is nice and can be striking and beautiful. But I mean the kind of dance that it feels as though the dance moves were created by the making of the music. Some of it is the skills of the dancer, but I think alot of it is a good repore between choreographer and music selection - or... at least I hope so, since I am but one of the dancers, and I don't (yet) control the universe. :)
Sometimes you get lucky and you get that right peice of music. It talks to you and tells you what it wants done. Sometimes you just do the best you can. I'm hoping this peice will be the former. I think it will be, and that's pretty neat.
I took the liberty of choreographing solos. Sadly, this peice does NOT allow for even solo disbursement. I'm betting that my dancers (who are probably not as neurotic as myself) are not gonna count the beats and freak out about the uneven disbursement. But it warms the cockles of my camp counselor heart when I can divide up music in even beat sets. But, instead, we have space for 3 highlights, where the music for each highlight is wildly different. So no dancer will suffer by comparison, for comparison will be impossible. Nor will boredom be possible, because if you didn't like solo #1, #2, or #3 - wait for 16-32 beats and you'll get Something Completely Different. Whee!
I'm a little nervous about choreographing solos - frequently the solo is left to the dancer to figure out, but I'm getting a pretty clear vision on what I'd like cause this music is so damn cool. And I have a dancer who is brand new to Middle Eastern dance, and so saying "go, create! be free!" is not necessarily a kindness.
I'm reminded that I have left out a little bit of shtick that I should remember to go back and re-evaluate - the shtick is a paddle turn done in only skirts (no harem pants), so that centrifical force provides a little flash. But if we remove skirts before doing the paddle turn... then, Houston, we have a problem. I wonder if there's another place skirts can come off... hmm...
Instead, I shall talk about dancy goodness, which (as we all know) I can expound upon at great length.
Friday dance class
Aparna's back - week 2 - I believe I may have "leveled". As in, if this was a video game, a little fairy would come out of nowhere and dance around me while playing a happy little noise and emitting lots of little red hearts, recharging and enlarging my health and stamina. Yes, I'm a big geek.
Why do I think that? Well... we've moved into a new level of adavu working-ness. I still believe that there may be Undiscovered Adavus, but I do not believe I need to lock my teacher in a room until she teaches me these unfound tidbits of knowledge. At present we are re-examining existing adavus. Now we are working on "motivation". That sounds like we should be wearing black turtlenecks and black berets, drinking awfully bitter coffee and speaking in snooty accents. Such is not actually the case. In this case, it is not anything like "my deep and bitter anguish at the state of the universe makes me stomp thusly" - it is the idea that some part of the movement "motivates" the entire set of movements in a given moment. Picture your body as a Rube Goldberg device - and in some way moving hands, or feet, or head or eyes is what triggers the rest of the whole complicated mechanism. This is really hard to write about... and only minutely easier to speak about... and of course, I'm still wrapping my grey matter around it... so that doesn't help either, but here's an example:
We are doing Nattu Adavu #3 (ironically, Padme and I just finished #2... wouldn't it have been convenient if she had picked #1 or #2... but no... I don't have this kind of luck). Adavu #3, Part 1 goes like this:
- start in aramundi (the knees bent, out to sides position), hands kataka at chest, each hand is the max spread from thumb to pinkie away from chest, wrists are more or less directly in front of nipples.
- 1 - stick out R foot, resting on heel, straight out in front of you, hands go out, to either side of foot, in alaputma, bending from the waist
- 2 - stamp with L foot - this is rather like a hop, given that most of the weight is on it.
- 3 - stamp with R foot, returning to upright state, hands kartaka
- 4 - stamp with L foot
Now... when learning it, that's really quite enough for one day. Getting the heel and the hopping and the stamping happening, along with the bending at the waist and returning to a nice clean position, and then the hands doing their thing, all of it happening more less in a relaxed non-panic sort of way is Quite Enough Thank You for learning this thing.
But I learned this 3 or 4 years ago, so presumably I've got it down. I do, this is not even close to the hard stuff. So... the next question is - what part of the body drives the movement? Aparna's pick - the hands - the act of throwing the hands right around the foot and then pulling them back is the active agent. And they go out in a throwing way, not an arc, a straight out vector towards the feet. Everything else is about following the hands - the eyes, the bend at the waist, the foot.
She tells me this is not the *only* way - it could be the foot that directs the movement, or the head or the bending at the waist - but today, we pick the hands. She pointed out that you could the same movement several times in a dance piece, picking different focuses, and it would add a variation to the peice that is a level on top of just doing the peice well...
This is an easy example. We did three adavu series, and the third one is a lot more complicated than this.
We moved on to Revenge of Alairippu - the peice I taught this summer. I think teaching my lovely lotus buds has helped me quite a bit - she complimented me on it, along with the criticism. I could feel the on-ness of the 1st 1/2 or so, as though I didn't need to think about what came next, or if I could do it, but could just ease into it, and pull the best out of it. I did mess some stuff up:
- I'm cutting the head/eye move of the mutaiya short - I need to fully lock in on the hand as it goes out to the side
- I'm taking the easy path, when I should take the hard path on the arms of a certain movement transition (puk-adavu to mettu adavu, for my own reference)
- I fucked the puramundi leaps up royally - I got stiff, and scared, and I'm out of practice. Bleck.
And we did some more Javali - verse #2 is halfway through. There's a great *look* in. It's "your look captured my heart" and it sure is a heart-capturing look. Or it is when Aparna does it. I believe right now on me, it's a heart-capturing look that is corrupted by shuffling into place and looking vaguely uncertain so that it is more like "if I tie my shoe laces will I capture your heart?" But I will work on more capturing certainty.
Neena & Veena
Attempting to compensate for the vast amounts of food I have been consuming, I began Monday with Indie Hop with Neena and Veena the famous Belly Twins (www.bellytwins.com). It's a mix of bhangra, hip hop and perkiness. It does exactly what a work out video should do - it exhausted me by about 2/3 in, and I struggled to finish up, but managed to hang in there and do the cool down. The cool down and warm up are OK, although their advertised yoga moves were not quite enough yoganess for my taste... but they were identifiable to me as yoga - which is good.
On the two absolutely perky and adorable Belly Twins, the moves look freaking adorable. On the buff guys in their workout gang, the moves are pretty darn hunky. Bhangra is originally a men's thing, and hip hop can be pretty guy friendly. On me... well, it's something to work for. There's a lot of hopping and shrugging which I believe must be done with absolute certainty that while you are doing something dorky, you are still quite definitely the Coolest Thing on the Planet. This is hard to do while the hopping and jumping is causing bobbling and wobbling on bits of the anatomy that one might prefer not bobble or wobble so. But, perhaps if I eat more salads, less 7 course dinners, and do more Neena and Veena, the bobbling quotient will reduce. :)
All in all, if you are looking for something fun - this is a good pick. This is not belly dance, this is not anything like the excruciatingly complex classical Indian dance. This is good clean fun that doesn't demand really precise moves, it just needs attitude.
Baby Dolls Choreography
Finished Monday night with Baby Dolls choreography time. Refreshed myself on the choreography, which had gotten a little rusty, and started in on the next bits. I now have up to 2:55 (mm:ss) figured out, and the trailing 20 seconds of close are done. That is plenty to work on this week with my fellow dancers. I'm tickled. We're working on the 80 Drums Around the World version of Istanbul from Ultra Lounge 3. Or...at least I hope that's the one - I can't preview streaming media at work. I love this peice of music. At first I was not too thrilled at the idea of another Istanbul choreography, as I loved both the Dancing Lady comic rendition to They Might Be Giants and my own 7 Veils version. I figured you couldn't get away with using the same melody three times for 3 great numbers - you were bound to strike out and get stale. But the 80 Drums version is not at all like any other version. It's got big band going on, and then some wierd drum stuff, and then a little Nutcrackeresque stuff... it's wild.
Better yet, it's the kind of music that makes me want to dance. And the kind of music that suggests very specific dance moves, if I care to take the time and listen. I love those sorts of choreographies that are so well-linked to the music that it feels like the music is actually making the dance happen. There's dance that goes with music, which is nice and can be striking and beautiful. But I mean the kind of dance that it feels as though the dance moves were created by the making of the music. Some of it is the skills of the dancer, but I think alot of it is a good repore between choreographer and music selection - or... at least I hope so, since I am but one of the dancers, and I don't (yet) control the universe. :)
Sometimes you get lucky and you get that right peice of music. It talks to you and tells you what it wants done. Sometimes you just do the best you can. I'm hoping this peice will be the former. I think it will be, and that's pretty neat.
I took the liberty of choreographing solos. Sadly, this peice does NOT allow for even solo disbursement. I'm betting that my dancers (who are probably not as neurotic as myself) are not gonna count the beats and freak out about the uneven disbursement. But it warms the cockles of my camp counselor heart when I can divide up music in even beat sets. But, instead, we have space for 3 highlights, where the music for each highlight is wildly different. So no dancer will suffer by comparison, for comparison will be impossible. Nor will boredom be possible, because if you didn't like solo #1, #2, or #3 - wait for 16-32 beats and you'll get Something Completely Different. Whee!
I'm a little nervous about choreographing solos - frequently the solo is left to the dancer to figure out, but I'm getting a pretty clear vision on what I'd like cause this music is so damn cool. And I have a dancer who is brand new to Middle Eastern dance, and so saying "go, create! be free!" is not necessarily a kindness.
I'm reminded that I have left out a little bit of shtick that I should remember to go back and re-evaluate - the shtick is a paddle turn done in only skirts (no harem pants), so that centrifical force provides a little flash. But if we remove skirts before doing the paddle turn... then, Houston, we have a problem. I wonder if there's another place skirts can come off... hmm...
