Fame or Famine

One of the people that Lady Cocoa mentioned to me when she was describing the belly dancing was Tarik Sultan. In the below clip, you see some of the great control, but what I find amusing is the section around 3/4 of the way through, when the music changes and he does some hip isolations. He uses his hands and face to direct the attention of the audience – and then suddenly, while his hips are still moving, his face pops up and he gives this big surprised grin, as if to say “Wow…check that out! Cool!”
More on Tarik can …read more

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This weekend I was lucky enough to attend two Middle Eastern Dance workshops as a student at a camping event. The first class was taught by Phedre of Madison, WI, and the second by Lady Cocoa from Chicago.
In the first, we learned basics of posture, foot position, and then the standards of hip circles, figure 8’s (flat), walking, and hip shimmies. One of the things that she mentioned towards the end, though, caught my ear: the Three Rules of Middle Eastern Dance, as taught by her teacher, Mona N’wal

If you can walk, you can dance – it’s just shifting your …read more

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“I knew, in choosing Pablo Veron as principal dancer and co-choreographer, that the secret architecture of the tango would be central to the movement vocabulary of my production. Not the sleazy over-dramatised tango of so many shows (the tango that the Argentineans themselves call ‘tango for export’), but the underlying forms of the dance for two that tango at its best embodies so powerfully….The other major movement vocabulary that I have instinctively gravitated towards is hip hop, or street dance… (like the blues) is a vital expression of those outside the system finding and creating joy and power out of …read more

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My degree is in Dance. Specifically, I was in the Interarts Technology Program at the University of WI- Madison, and studied with people such as Li Chiao-Ping, Jin-Wen Yu, Peggy Choy, Phil Zarrilli, and my primary mentor, Douglas Rosenberg. This was in the heady Dot-Com Boom, and I was loving my work integrating dance and technology, not the least because there were so many opportunities to bend the medium of the nascent web and digital video to traditional forms such as dance.
So I was excited when my browser opened up to an article by Nathaniel Stern on “Implicit Art” …read more

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I’m going to my 20 year H.S. reunion in a month, and it amuses me that under “hobbies” I get to put “Burlesque Performer.” It’s very true; I spent the latter half of travel on thursday night choreographing a new number for the Peach Pies, where I get to sing “All I Care About” from Chicago. And it’s a great, great feeling to be back in that frame of mind, scribbling stick figures and arrows and lyrics.
But of course it caught my eye when reading the ROOT magazine feed that in San Francisco, they’ve started a Boylesque.
“SF Boylesque seeks to …read more

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