S & F Series--When One Door Closes

Happy April! Tomorrow, April 2, is the anniversary of something that continues to affect my life today. I call it The Day of the Knee. In 2002, only a month and a half after I was married, I was in a serious car accident. I had gone home for a long lunch break from work, excited to have some time to play around in my new house. On my return to work, as I entered an intersection, the traffic light turned yellow. A driver coming from the opposite direction did not yield the right of way and made a left hand turn. We collided. My truck was totaled, and my right knee cap was broken. I might have had time to stop instead of proceeding on the yellow, but I'll never know. I was worried about being late. The other driver was cited for the accident; I had done nothing wrong. I could have chosen differently, but there is no retrieving the past. We can "what if" ourselves to death, and it changes nothing. The consequences remain.

Just the day before, 13 years ago, I took my first belly dance lesson. It was with the sister of the best man at our wedding, Deniz in Dayton. I lived in Columbus at the time. In June I went on my crutches to the Arts Festival downtown and watched a performance of the Habeeba's Dance of the Arts troupe. I took one of their fliers home and registered for classes beginning July 22. Belly dance was a big part of my recovery from the accident. I got strong again. Eventually I danced with the Habeeba's troupe. When I moved to northwest Ohio, I became a belly dance instructor.

Unbeknownst to me, a result of the knee injury was that my right leg is shorter than my left. Evidently the pressure put on the L5 area of my lower back due to the imbalance caused disc damage. One day in February two years ago, while dusting my coffee table, I was suddenly experiencing searing pain. I couldn't even sit up straight. I've had difficulties ever since.

If I didn't have the posterior annular tearing of the L5/S1 disc, my chiropractor said he would encourage me to keep dancing. But as it is...game over.

Loss. A loss of the joy of dancing, the exercise it provides, the opportunities to teach and to perform, the loss of a community. Of course, the dancer friends I have made will still be friends. Many of them I saw only once a year, at the Island of Isis Dance Retreat held every May in Loveland, OH at the amazing Grailville center. Wholesome food, idyllic country surroundings, always a phenomenal teacher, and the camaraderie of women sharing a common passion. Belly dance is a cultural experience unlike any other; you might even say it's a way of life.

The lower back injury can certainly be improved. There could even be a reversal and complete healing, but the chances of that are not very high. Still, there is hope. I was afraid to have the MRI, because I'm claustrophobic. I prayed a Rosary in my mind and on my fingers and survived the experience. I faced a fear, and that is BIG. And now I know what I am dealing with and therefore can move forward. Ironically, the directors of Island of Isis decided to retire the retreat after 20 years. Last year was the grand finale. I am witnessing the end of an era.

My grandmother gave me wise advice. She told me to give myself time to get used to not belly dancing anymore. She said not to put pressure on myself to figure out what I'm going to do next right away. This is pure genius. Because that's exactly what I was doing--rushing the process. I wanted to figure out, in a couple of days, what I was going to do next. I was panicking, because I am an artist, a creative soul, and I might die if I don't have a passionate artistic expression to pursue.

The thing is, I always had a plan. When I knew it was time to move on from a job, for example, before I left I devised a scheme for escape. My dad told me never to quit one job before I had another lined up, so I always had a grand idea and took the necessary steps to make it happen. Yet occasionally, I got unexpectedly fired. One time when this happened, I came home to find my Mary Kay starter kit waiting on my doorstep. Being a Mary Kay Beauty Consultant was my Big Dream at the time, and I was filled with hope. When one door closes, so the saying goes, another one opens.

I suspected that dancing was aggravating my back condition, and I felt that God was preparing me for something else that he was calling me to do. I was willing to accept this if it turned out that I had to give up belling dancing. When I look back on it, I am so grateful. What an exhilarating ride! What stupendous people I have met, what challenges I have risen to, what extraordinarily talented teachers I've had the pleasure to learn from, and what an enormous privilege to be able to serve God with the gifts he has given me. I even made some money for my family along the way.

Knowing that it was all probably going to come to an end doesn't make it any less devastating. My husband has also been experiencing the closing of one door after another. There must be something dazzling beyond our dreams just around the bend!

Please pray for my healing and for my family. I may not know what my next big thing will be, but I do have my tidying up project to keep me busy, thanks to Marie Kondo, who may very well turn out to be a lifesaver. In The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, as I wrote about yesterday, she says that this process of discarding and reorganizing one's home will set you on the course toward what you were genuinely created to do.

I'm not going to lie to you. This process is painful. Letting go of our possessions is hard, even when we know that we must set free those things that don't spark joy. Our fear of letting go, Marie said, comes down to either anxiety about the past or anxiety about the future. We accumulate more and more possessions to remedy these fears. As we all know deep down, the next purchase is only a quick, very temporary fix. The restlessness always returns. Marie Kondo's method is the equivalent of ripping the bandaid off very hairy skin. You just gotta squeeze your eyes shut, take a deep breath, and pull it quick.

Facing your stuff, once and for all, is liberating. Making these decisions of what to keep and what to let go brings with it a growing confidence. When you practice deciding what you really love and what you don't, you get to know yourself better. You learn to know your own mind and heart. You build trust in yourself, because ultimately, you are putting yourself more completely in the hands of God.

Will you die if you don't tidy your home? Is it absolutely necessary? The answer is No. You can choose to keep on picking away at your stuff, a little at a time, and never get anywhere. Or you can keep shoving your stuff into closets, basements, and attics. But out of sight does not equal out of mind. In fact, slowly but surely we go out of our minds, because all of our stuff is wrapped up in the very corners of our being, making us sick. There is no separation of mind, body, and spirit. The clutter is there because something is wrong. Too much has been swept under the carpet, and we're afraid to look.

But you know what? Today I'm going to celebrate my 13th anniversary as a belly dancer! And we will pray for one another. We will begin with our own things, and specifically with our clothing. When that is done, we move onto our books. Category after category, one item at a time, we will sweep through our homes like domestic genies and make all of our own wishes come true.

Belly Dance--What Can I Say, I'm Old School!

I am excited to be teaching belly dance classes again, and to discover that it seems to be helping with my lower back issues. I decided to return to Tribal basics, which is what I began with when I taught my first class back in 2008. I had learned Tribal belly dance in Columbus after becoming interested in seeing it performed a few times, most notably by Angie Never's troupe, Sacred Shimmy. When I found out that Angie was going to teach Tribal through my teacher Laylia's studio, I was so excited!  I had taken classes for some time at Habeeba's Dance of the Arts and had learned what was termed Egyptian Cabaret, but which I later came to determine was actually American Vintage Oriental. At my first Island of Isis belly dance retreat in 2003, I had experienced Dalia Carella's Dunyavi Gypsy fusion style and had fallen in love with it. I thoroughly enjoyed watching Laylia perform at the Ohio Renaissance Festival and sought her out for a series of both private lessons and group classes. Each experience offered something unique.

The Tribal format I learned was primarily that of Gypsy Caravan, which Angie had learned directly from the troupe's director, Paulette Rees-Denis. Of the belly dance styles I had experienced thus far, Tribal seemed the most natural to my body, and it filled in gaps in my previous training. Perhaps most importantly, it got me dancing from both sides of my body, whereas Habeeba's technique heavily favored the left side. When I moved to my current location, Tribal was the style I taught first. Eventually I created choreographies that might be called "Tribaret", a combination of the Tribal and American Cabaret movement vocabularies and stylization. I also incorporated some Gypsy elements in both choreography and my solo technique.

I was giving private lessons to a friend last year, and after spending some time working on classic steps, my intuition told me to try teaching her the Tribal style I had learned from Angie. This seemed to click for my student, and she progressed more quickly and easily. I currently have four returning dancers and three new students in my Tribal basics class. The new ladies are picking the movements up very well, and the returning students are happy to be back in the Tribal saddle.

After much instruction in the Tribal style, I had taught my troupe dancers classical Egyptian belly dance, including the Baladi Taksim, Golden Era style, and drum solo technique, inspired especially by Island of Isis instructors Bahaia, Hadia, and Ranya Renee. The focus on Egyptian dance was more challenging and demanded individual response to the music and creative self-expression. It required reaching into one's artistic soul, simultaneously having control of one's movements while improvising in the moment, without anyone else to follow and with no standardized format in place. Traditional Middle Eastern music is also more complex, with the variations in rhythm, tempo, and emotion all in one song.

As an instructor, it was really difficult to take the Tribal out of my dancers and lead them in developing themselves as soloists. No doubt it was frustrating for them as well! But I knew that in good conscience I had to expose them to authentic Egyptian belly dance, in which over the years I had received such amazing training from the teachers at the annual Island of Isis retreat in Loveland, Ohio. I had also taken weekly lessons from Aegela in Toledo. My heart and soul were immersed in the full orchestral compositions of the Golden Era, and I had to be true to where I found myself as an artist. It was imperative to share my newly found passion with my students, and we all needed to grow and break out of our comfort zone.

I am now questioning whether it is wise to attempt another foray into Tribal. I live in a low population, rural area, and it hasn't been possible to offer classes in multiple styles of belly dance, to allow students to choose their area of interest. It arguably takes a couple of years of dancing together as a Tribal troupe in order for each dancer to attain proficiency in both leading and following. There is the problem of inconsistent troupe membership, and in my experience, I only had one student who could effectively lead. I came to the conclusion that Tribal just wasn't working well for my class as a whole. We kept the chorus line idea for one of our numbers but otherwise left Tribal behind.

So yesterday I was searching youtube for inspiration, and the Tribal videos weren't resonating with me. I viewed one of my favorite Lady Morrighan videos (A Lady and her Belly) and noticed something interesting in the comments. She says that while her costume is Tribal, her movements are old school belly dance. I typed the key words "old school" into google and found a NYC dancer doing an American Vintage Oriental performance. That's more like it, I thought. At the end of the day, I found myself soaking in video after video of Soheir Zaki in the 1970s. I went to bed happy, satisfied at last. And in fact, I had also begun to look again at my Golden Era favorites in black and white...

 Soheir Zaki

Tribal belly dance, with its particular breaking down of movements and consistent musical rhythms, lends itself nicely to introducing beginners to belly dance. It works so well for drilling basic steps and combinations. But do I really want to invest the next two years in developing dancers to master this style, only to have students come and go, and potentially to end up finding once again that we never really arrived? To be honest, the overabundance of the buzzy mizmar and clanking of zills often used in Tribal group improvisation grates on my nerves, and the "sameness" of the dance is simply not currently providing me with the personal inspiration I crave. I appreciate its simple beauty and the difficulty of creating dance as a group, in the moment. I love the sense of community that Tribal belly dance fosters.

But then I watch Soheir, Fifi, Naemet, Naima, Samia, and the other Golden girls, and I am spellbound, transported, and filled with joy. The question, I suppose, comes down to whether I can take my dancers with a base in Tribal and segue somehow to classical Oriental dance with a minimum of pain and confusion. It seems possible. After all, there are various elements of Tribal belly dance that are obviously inspired by the Golden Era. For example, consider that a chorus line of dancers backing up the soloist goes back to at least the 1940s. Unlike with Tribal chorus lines, however, the Golden Era variety was choreographed, and the dancers each maintained their individuality. Could something like this be done while allowing every dancer to have a brief turn in the spotlight, therefore bringing together the best of both worlds? Also, if I use Tribal only for the purposes of teaching basics and drilling sessions, could we not spend the bulk of time developing solo skills?

Well, it all remains to be seen, and hopefully I will retain enough students this time around to find out! For now, it's a tentative plan, and we'll get where we are going one step at a time.