Theatrical Bellydance Conference | New York City

Our 2010 Instructors

WORKSHOPS

Here is our line up of workshops. You will be receiving a complete 4-course program each day, tailored by the teaching team, who are working together to provide material that adds up to, in the words of one of last year’s workshop attendees, “more than just the sum of its parts.”

Class sizes will be small, about 20-25 people per class, with the same group of participants together for 4 workshops per day, taught by a team of rotating teachers, dedicated to creating an environment where you can really get to know your fellow dancers.

We aim to provide a safe space for workshop participants to learn and explore different theatrical approaches – working from the inside-out and from the outside-in—that can bring greater emotional depth to your work and greater comfort onstage

You are welcome to choose your room each day. However we highly recommend you stay in the same room over the three days to get the maximum variety of teachers and topics. Some topics are repeated over the weekend.

Download Full Conference Schedule

Free panel discussions on Friday, Saturday and Sunday from 1:30pm to 2:15pm.
Open to the public. More info…

• ↓Jeniviva

  Silent Film Starlet

  How to Give Great Face While Bellydancing

  In this workshop you will learn how to use facial gestures to enhance your dance-storytelling and how to deepen your connection with performance music (and/or song lyrics). We’ll use female archetypes like the “femme fatale” and other characters that can be expressed on the stage. Taking a look at some of the great silent film actresses, we will also touch on the importance of stage makeup and using the light to emphasize your message. We’ll work with dance combinations that help express the character work we are doing, and discuss how this work can be applied to various genres of bellydance.

• ↑↓Hanan

  Empowered Bellydance + Intercultural Performance

  Uncovering the source of personal power, signature voice and expression through an array of grounded beledi vocabulary and technique which can be applied to all dance styles across genre and culture”. This workshop will incorporate creative unblocking processes and theatrical techniques to bring participants closer to their individual voice, higher and grounded self, offer new vocabulary and tools for more empowered and stylized performance.

  The Art of Exchange

  A workshop which examines the power and processes of interior and exterior spaces in dance and performance. This workshop will offer techniques and experiences geared at bringing dancers to a more holistic approach to performance; looking at the mechanism of “give and take”, “call and response” and grounded, nurtured and empowered communication with self and audience. Exercises and techniques will be explored to get participants beyond ego and create from a multitude of frequencies and spaces shaped to incite the highest level of response and engagement.

• ↑↓Kaeshi

  Body Love

  Learn to love your body and make friends with your reflection in the mirror. Through this workshop, you will arm yourself with tools to expand your concept of beauty beyond the narrow definitions created by the media. Work with other dancers in a supportive group setting to explore how you see yourself and to open yourself up for transformation. Initiate a friendly conversation with your own inner demons and learn how to harness their power, through physicalization exercises (such as working with shifting weight, muscle contractions and releases, and facial expressions) to create a more dynamic performance on stage.

• ↑↓Anasma

  Gestural Movement and Storytelling

  This class allows dancers of all levels and movers of any background to share any message beyond strict dance vocabulary and to have fun! While using their current dance technique, dancers will be invited to reflect upon the meaning of their dance and the choice and symbolism of their movement. Dancers will learn miming techniques, how to transform everyday life gestures into dance movements, develop specific characters and tell stories through their face and body, as a soloist and as a group.

  Presence, Intention and Emotions From Inside Out

  By accessing the self and the power of now, performers can truly touch their audience. The purpose of this class is for Anasma to share tools to grow as a striking performer, from inside out. Dancers will be invited to reflect upon the intention of their dance. Starting from meditative work and internal movements, dancers will learn how to connect their inner world to the outer world by working with strong visualizations, connecting to their emotions, clarifying intentions, playing with the gaze and facial expression, creating awareness of the breath, exploring the paradigm of giving and taking.

  Character embodiment and Character Development

  Who are you when you perform? Are you staying yourself or are you a totally different person?

  Experiment with creating connections or gaps between you and the character. On one hand, use your emotions and personal experiences to feed the character’s emotional arcs and shifts. On the other hand, use the character embodiment as a catharsis : discover emotions and experience situations that you would have not experienced otherwise. We will work with neutral masks.

• ↑↓Sarah Locke

  Embodied Dance

  Anatomy for Dancers

  Learn how to dance with more strength, flexibility, isolation, and integration. Develop a fuller and stronger presence on stage. Discover new ideas for moves and combinations by using the form and function of the body itself as inspiration. Knowledge of anatomy can give you access to better technique, as well as the freedom to explore new movement vocabularies with ease. Whether you’re a student, a teacher, or both – it can help you to dance more fully and expressively, and also with more awareness of how to balance strength and flexibility, alignment and flow.

  In this workshop we’ll study aspects of the muscular-skeletal system that are key for bellydancers, as well as other body systems (breathing, organs, fluids) that support core integration and deepen full body awareness. Using exercises that incorporate principles from yoga, Body-Mind Centering, and the Alexander Technique, we’ll explore the form and function of the body through movement. A combination of clear and precise information (diagrams and notes) with somatic exercises (feeling the body through movement) will give you a great range of tools to be a better student, teacher, and performer.

  Moving from Center

  Developing Presence and Body Awareness

  For dancers interested in exploring movement from the inside out, as a way to fully inhabit and enjoy your dance. Combining Sarah’s experience in bellydance, yoga, Body-Mind Centering, and physical theater, this workshop focuses on developing presence, body awareness, emotional expression, and other elements of deep listening. We’ll explore movement exercises that will cultivate a greater range of choices in your dance — in terms of both expression and technique, both intention and action. This new awareness will empower you to access your fullest dance: a true expression from the inside out.

• ↑↓Ranya Renée

  Embrace your Mistakes!

  Your performance can be compelling even when it isn’t “perfect”….and finding ways of accepting yourself while transforming your mistakes into opportunities can create an even more interesting and personal performance. Ranya will lead participants in exercises from her signature “Breathwork for Performance” method, including focused breathing techniques to shape the energy of the dance and of the performance space, relax yourself onstage, and build a rapport with the audience and with fellow dancers. Then we’ll apply the particular challenge of keeping the breathwork going even through difficult moments, like tripping on a pile of dollar bills in a nightclub or forgetting your choreography in a group show. You’ll come away with more tips and tricks on how to use breathing as a powerful tool for communication and connection, have more fun when dancing, and develop self-confidence and a sense of personal strength when you are doing your thing out there, even in the tough times.

  Character in Performance

  Acting for Dancers

  Explore the different moods and emotional colors that bring interest and fun to the bellydance show. This work allows dancers to bring out different aspects of their personality in practice and in performance–even parts of your character you might not consider fit for the stage!!–and opens up a deliciously liberating vehicle for personal expression, as well as enhancing the audience’s interest in watching you perform. We’ll employ different kinds of physicality, such as receptiveness or resistance in the body, and passive vs. active approaches to stage presence and movement, and how those can help focus our intentions. Ranya’s “Breathwork for Performance” techniques will be applied in solo, partner and group work to bring your character inspirations to life.

  Introduction to Breathwork for Performance

  Ranya will take participants through a movement “breathwork series” progression and fundamental exploration in her signature performance technique method, which she began developing in 1996. Breathwork for Performance is designed to help artists bridge the perceived gap between themselves and their audiences. It encompasses solo, duo and group work to better connect to oneself as a dancer, to the music, and to an audience, through attention to the breath and the focused use of one’s breathing. The breath is used as a tool for “painting” the performance space with vibrant energy and gaining comfort with eye contact and visual focus. This technique allows dancers to work from a place of possibility, creativity and generosity, while building self-confidence and concentration as a performer.

• ↑↓Lotus Niraja

  Bellydancer’s Body and Style

  Lotus Niraja has designed a training class that addresses the physical component of creating a memorable impression on stage. Technique work to help you to smooth and refine your dance, with emphasis on: differences between the effect of muscular movements vs. skeletal dance moves, how they are perceived by an audience; deconstructing movements and their mechanics, building core strength, stamina, and improved posture. Class curriculum includes patterns, directional changes, weight balance and level changes. Take basic, isolations and movements and learn to turn up the volume and intensity for sharp, high power dancing or to turn it down for slow, ooey-gooey movement. The class will work on technical precision, deconstructed movement phrases, creative movement, and layering technique. Bonus: Explore gestures, drama, contrast, and musicality.

  Own the Stage

  The Power of Gestures to Capture Your Audience

  The stage is your playground and your domain! Once you enter the stage, you connect with your audience. It is up to you to keep their interest. Setting the theme and tone for the audience is a great way to capture their attention, and working with the power of gestures and natural human expression is an effective way to connect and interact with them. Let your personality and technique speak for you through practical technique and analyzing the aesthetics of bellydance movements. We’ll work with isolations, gestures, comedy, communication, and ‘percussive expressions’ to explore ways to capture and keep your audience’s attention. Create the WOW factor through exercises in framing, accents, creative movement, and building energy.

• ↑↓Samara

  Theatrical Energy Through Space Design, Focus and Projection

  Performing on the big stage can be an overwhelming experience without the knowledge and tools needed to present a theatrical experience to your audience. The theater performer faces greater intensity of lights, a larger space, and an audience who is much more demanding than the one found in the more casual venues. A dancer can get lost on the stage if he or she does not know how to fill the theater with the energy and focus demanded by this type of venue. In this workshop Samara will work on specific techniques with workshop participants that will further their understanding and knowledge about how to execute movement, emotions and ideas on the big stage. Some of the work Samara will cover in this workshop: Combinations which includes different spatial patterns working from the center of the stage. Utilizing the stage with focus and directional changes. Angles, circular patterns. downstage, upstage, right and left stage will be explored. Working on energy through body lines and upper body projection. Using these combinations in partner work across the expanse of the stage to enhance focus and spatial awareness.

• ↑↓Aszmara

  Emotion in Motion

  Connecting your Emotion to the Music and the Audience

  To really dance well, one has to fully understand, intellectually or intuitively, the rhythms of our chosen genre. The soul then takes these in, blends them with its own voices and impulses, to let the movement out in a way that makes it our own, as we become an instrument in the “event”. In this workshop, we will improve our listening skills, play with different ways to interpret the rhythms in our bodies, and let the music move us. In finding the passion, we must first find our inspirations, what we want to express, and then how best to express our soul, through our stance, our movements, our face. In this segment we will look at choreographic patterns, the power of music along with acting and character stances, holding on and letting go.

  Dynamic Staging to Enhance Stage Presence

  Expanding Your Range of Expression with Dynamic Staging

  Whether in a nightclub or on a raised stage, quite often in performance the tendency is to use the same space as we are used to in rehearsing. Through Dynamic Staging you can expand your use of space to make your shows more compelling, whatever the venue. With knowledge of stage positioning, level changes, and character stances, we fill the stage with our presence. In finding the passion and letting go, you can feel the music as it happens, not just the choreography in your head! Aszmara will help guide you in her practices to bring out this expressive passion and thereby build greater confidence in your dance.

• ↑↓Fathiem (Sunday)

  Using Imagery in the Dance

  “You can’t do an empty move. In order for it to be full, you have to fill it with a conscious intention.” Fahtiem will cover many aspects on how to use imagery in the dance: both in rehearsal and in performance, to adjust your speed of presentation, to change your personal vibration in order to relax more onstage, to go beyond the technical execution of the dance moves. We’ll address the concept of imagery in preparation for performance and during performance–how to use imagery so that you’ll stay focused on stage and be able to tell your story, to have a performance that is satisfying to you as a performer, and also satisfying to an audience who is coming to be entertained or moved. Through use of these techniques, it will no longer be unpredictable whether you have a good show or not—you can develop consistency in your artistry to get your desired result every time you perform. As part of the workshop, we’ll apply tools to evaluate where you are in this moment in your dance career, and create a chart to help track your progress, to see if you are applying what you’ve learned, as time goes on. Learn to apply imagery in non-performance areas as well: in goal-setting, psychological goals, longer-term career objectives. Fahtiem applies some of her life-coaching experience to this work.

• ↑↓Angelika Nemeth (Sunday)

  The Dynamics of Directing and Staging Group Choreography

  Guidelines will be given on how to direct as well as how to take direction in staging a group dance. A short combination will be presented. Participants will be split into groups to develop an effective stage presentation based on the combination. Guided by an assigned group director, each group will expand the basic combination into the space, paying attention to entrances and exits, patterns on stage, directional changes, musical interpretation, expressiveness, group interaction and entertainment value. Participants will receive guidance on intra-group communication, to better handle the negotiation process involved when artists create work together. Toward the end of the class the groups will have an opportunity to perform their work and receive feedback from the instructor as well as each other.

• ↑↓Roula Said

  Going to the Well

  Seeking the Source of Inspiration from Within

  Working with dreams, creative writing techniques and guided meditations to generate stories, motifs and choreographic materials that are ripe for the picking. Participants will be asked to bring in a dream or personal vision that inspires them to want to create a piece. We will work with various physical techniques such as Sufi Whirling and Roula’s Seven Waves Movement System to bring our bodies, minds and spirits into a state of communion. Through sensory heightening exercises, dancers will be guided to find any combination of gestures, themes, dialogue, emotional truths, rhythms, melodies, sounds, colours, tastes and scents that connect them to the dream and serve as materials with which to build a choreography with deep resonance.

  Hot and Heavy Humor

  Bellydancer Meets Shamanic Clown

  Starting from a platform of deep cultural respect and technical grounding in bellydance, then drawing from the teachings of legendary Canadian clowning master, Richard Pachenko to explore the profoundly funny side of bellydance. We will dive into states of “innocence and experience” and push our emotional palettes to electrifying (and likely hilarious) extremes… release our voices, our imaginations and our bodies to explore some very rich, dark and fertile territory. Time permitting, we will co-create a foolish and kick-ass choreography (or segment thereof) based on a structure that Roula will present. We will fire our therapists!

• ↑↓Blanca

  The Sensual Bellydancer

  Sensuality has always been one of the most highly prized qualities in bellydance. But it’s not a special talent or skill—it is actually present in all of us. In this workshop you will learn how to tap into the sensuality inside of you and translate it from an internal state into an expressive, easy-to-understand language of dance movement. Come learn the moves and methods that have helped women around the world shine sensually both onstage and in everyday life.

  This workshop will begin with a group discussion on sensuality and the differences between sensuality, sexuality and sexiness. Next, learn ways to connect with your own authentic sensuality, as well as tips and techniques to make your dance more connected and expressive. Use body language to express sensuality and make any bellydance step more sensual. You will also learn a series of poses and gestures that express the femininity of bellydance. Blanca will give guidance on what to practice on your own, to be as sensual outside as you already are inside, both in performance and in life.

• ↑↓Aepril Schaile

  Embodying Mythical Archetypes

  A Ritual-Theatre Approach to Bellydance

  To the ancients, dance, ritual and theatre were one. Stories were cyclically and seasonally told and retold for the community, and those who performed the stories were said to embody the spirit of the gods, elements, and ancestors. Returning to the magical roots of theatre, we will work with story, inspiration and movement to bring archetypal forces to life through bellydance.

  The Energy Body in Dramatic Motion

  A Metaphysical Approach to Theatricality in Bellydance

  We will expand our execution of dance performance well beyond the limits of physical movements, props and costuming, creating an energetic connection to an audience. We’ll work with “dual attention”: simultaneous inner focus and outer energy direction. Learn how to infuse technical skill with conscious energetic and emotional content, to “animate” physical gesture with soul and meaning; to develop awareness and utilization of the etheric double, or energy body, in performance.

• ↑Elisheva

  Choreography Tool Box

  Want to take your Choreography to the next level? There are tools to help you! This workshop is geared towards any and every style of dance to help you create dynamic, varied and original choreographies. The course will cover composition techniques including “Theme and Variation” as well as “Time studies” to help kick start ideas for movement and to help explore parts of your dance expression not yet found. Please bring a notepad and pen.

  Structured Improvisation

  
  Improvisation is a wonderful way of expressing yourself in the moment. Many dancers use this mode of performing when on stage, but aren’t always able to focus on using all of their stage and performance abilities. This workshop covers the basics of improvisation techniques for any style of dance. Focus includes storyline, shape, and quidelines to increase your improvisation dance vocabulary. Never again will you feel like your improv performances are just repetitive moves!

Monday Workshops