Summer 2024 Belly Dance Wrap Up, Part One

It’s been an exciting summer of belly dance with classes and performances. In the next few posts I’ll share some of what we’ve been up to!

First off, a small group of my students from Better Together Dance Theatre and I performed at Carnival of Stars 2024! It was our first performance together as Troupe Alisa and their first time performing at a belly dance festival. We had great time preparing for and performing in this show. I’m so proud of their hard work. We put our entire set together with very little time and they did a stellar job!

Alisa and students performing at Carnival of Stars Belly Dance Festival 2024

The following day I had the honor of performing the in Carnival of Stars Gala Showcase to live music with Pangia.

Alisa performs with Pangia at the Carnival of Stars 2024 Gala Showcase.

I’ll share video from these shows and more of our summer adventures in the coming weeks.

Tonight is our last night of summer classes at Better Together Dance Theatre. Then we take a two week break and come back refreshed for our Fall season. My fall teaching schedule is available on my Classes page - come dance with us!

Dance With Me Practice Video

Sorry I’m a day late, but I’ve got a new practice video for you!

Today’s focus is traveling movements with hip accents. The video starts with a slow, in-place section where we practice our figure 8s, undulations and hip circles.

As always, this video is an improvisation so it also gives you a feeling for responding naturally to the music.

Email readers can view the video here.

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Performance Video - SirensFest

Last week in virtual belly dance class we danced to the song Zay el Assal (زي العسل). It is one of my favorites and coincidentally I was cleaning out a cupboard over the weekend and found a DVD recording of a performance I did using this song in 2016 at the North Bay Belly Dance Bazaar! I thought I would share it here:

I am slowly adding more performance footage to my YouTube channel, please subscribe if you you’d like to see more.

The North Bay Belly Dance Bazaar has been renamed and is now called SirensFest. It is a wonderful, positive event that truly celebrates bellydance! I had such a great time there. The festival is scheduled to go on this year, October 3 -4, 2020, and the organizer, TerriAnne Gutierrez, is planning to build a stage outside, so I feel very hopeful about this and I will keep everyone posted as I learn more.

The song Zay el Assal is one of my favorites. It was originally sung by the Lebanese singer and actress Sabah. She is considered one of the greats. Here is a clip of her singing it complied with some gorgeous photos of her throughout her lifetime. She was a glamorous figure until the end! There are many belly dance versions of this song today.

In other news, I am working on the schedule for my Virtual Summer Belly Dance Classes. Please sign up to be notified of these and future classes as soon as the information is available. Thanks so much for your support and happy dancing.