So, I'm sitting here, in my little crappy hotel room in Kupang, NTT, feeling a small bout of insomnia coming on. I decide that NOW is the time to give a teensy update of my 2 month absence:).
First of all, Bellydance Jakarta was invited back again for the second year in a row to be part of the prestigious Jakarta Anniversary Festival. Which was fabulous. Except for the part where we only had 2 months to put it together. Yikes. Since none of us are full-time dancers, we juggle bellydance with our work/family and other commitments. Plus several of our troupe members already informed Christine, our artistic director/founder of BDJ that due to hectic work schedules, they would be out of town a lot, and unable to commit to upcoming performances for a few months. Double Yikes. Eeeek!
In the end, it worked out fine. We decided this year to indulge ourselves in using love as our theme. Good ole' lurveeee. It gave us a chance to use classic love songs such as Enta Omri, Bitwannes Beek and more modern stuff by Fadl Shaker. We also took on the challenge of working with a live-band. For those of you who are lucky enough to always get the opportunity to work with one- I am envious! I loved working with a band! They give me that little extra bit of oomph and energy- it was such a fantastic experience. In Indonesia, there's not that many bellydancers who work with bands. At least not in a complementary fashion, anyways. They're just both doing their own thing, they just happen to be sharing a performance space. Well, as far as I can see. The bands here obviously don't gear their musical arrangement to suit a dancer, because they've never had to. We worked with a really talented group of musicians, El-Wahda and put in a lot of rehearsal hours to get the arrangement to a stage where it would really showcase their skills and complement our dancing at the same time. Not everyone got to perform with the band as we only had a few short months to prepare. Christine did all her solos except one with the band. I did my solo with them. My intermediate class also did, the four of us danced to Zay El Hawa and I danced with a male singer named Bobby Baraja to Ya Ghayeb (originally by Fadl Shaker). This was really ironic in a sense- the song means "Absent One", and Bobby was unable to have a rehearsal with me until the day of the day of the performance. He was pretty busy, so he was in fact, Ya Ghayeb the whole way through until D-Day:). Despite my obvious stress over that, it worked out fine. We hit if off and had great chemistry on stage. There were many women who were envious over the fact that I danced with a rather good-looking, talented male singer:).
The band came up with the most amazing arrangement-slow with lots of heavy percussion, just the way I love:). Here's a photo from that performance :
This photo is courtesy of Widiyanto Saleh.
In short, it was a fantastic experience for me as a student, to be able to dance and rehearse with the band. My performance was completely improvised-all though I wouldn't really call it dancing, more like some hipdrops, some shimmies and some chasses interspersed with some clapping and general merriment up on stage:). Oh well, I hope I will be better next time:).
I've realized that I am now in my fourth (more eeks and yikes!) year of bellydancing, and I have been thinking- Where the f**k does time go?
Instead of lamenting over my slow progress, I would rather have a giggle over a giant metal chicken. If you think this could potentially be something that might cause you some mirth, have a look below:
I feel a rant coming soon, so stay tuned!
0 comments:
Post a Comment