The Pandemic, Bellydance in time of Quarantine

2016 Was my Last Post. No one Saw what was Coming Next. Geez, an entire lifetime happened since my last post. From 2016 on, I was going along merrily teaching at DanceGardenLA, with a lot of students & a lot of performances. DanceGardenLA was THE place for Belly dance classes. Several regular teachers, workshops, recitals, It was a kind and warm community like no other. Plus I was teaching at various other locations, and classes were hopping. I was enjoying a particularly creative time in my career, choreographing for troupes of students and professional troupes. There was a yearly event called "LA Legends of Bellydance" which I gratefully was included as a teacher. Students would come from around the world to study with various teachers for a week. 

 I was producing yearly the the big Gala for "Cairo ShimmyQuake", LA's largest Belly dance festival. It was an extension of several Theater Productions I coordinated "A Choreographers' Collective" and "A Choreographers' Eclectic". Audiences really packed the theaters back then. From the "Flowers of the Desert" performances to my personal producer endeavors, There were lots of butts in seats. I mention this because live Belly dance shows are dead in LA as I write in 2023. Dance is dead here. Classes are dead here. I'll go into that in detail in a future blog post. 

I was doing more out of town teaching, which was something I wanted to pursue more of. In 2019 the world seemed wide open.

  DanceGardenLA changed owners in early 2020, but we seamlessly rolled right back into our usual full class schedules. A student of mine from Wuhan started mentioning that her family and friends back home were sick and dying. She said there's something so bad out there that no one is talking about. This shook me up, as I prayed this new plague would subside and stay within small parameters. We all know what happened in March 2020. It was the last I would see of most of my students who vanished from the bellydance world, or at least from my classes. 

  But the new owners of DanceGarden were smart as whips & were able to not miss a week, as classes went online. I'd show up in the studio in mask & stay far from owner Lauren, also masked and manning the Zoom link. It was a rocky and weird start to the new reality, one we thought would be over soon. Students from around the world were showing up in the little Zoom tiles, and that really opened my classes to new audience. A new creative way to express ourselves became one of my favorite parts of my dance career. Making dance videos staring myself & my students. I think this was me in my most sincere authentic form. Little did we know this would be the method of performing for several years. It seems like a lifetime. 

                                                Keep creating through the hard & lonely times

Seeing the clever videos in the worldwide online shows, I got a lightbulb in my head that we should honor the best of them in some way. I thought of a kind of Academy Award of Bellydance show. Lauren, the co-owner of DanceGardenLA brainstormed the idea of a film festival to go with it, so a new showcase was born The "Raqs Film Festival" and "Raqsi Awards" show. We had videos submitted from every corner of the globe. With the angst of pandemic, the videos produced were heart-wrenching & entertaining, reflecting the times of loneliness we were all facing. 

In 2023 I was assisting in the 3rd International Raqs Film Fest. Though many dancers had moved away from filmmaking and back to live stages, the collective experience we went through created a new space for dancers to be creative. I hope dancers continue to explore film as a medium.

A wish I could say the pandemic subsided and in-studio classes filled up again, but this hasn't been the case. For me at least. I continued holding a few online only classes, and my regular studio classes aways have Zoom students tuning in.

I reread my blog to see if any other times in dance were as bleak as 2023, but for me, this is the worst. I finally am seeing the end of my time of relevance in the dance world, unless some crazy stroke of fate strikes new lightening bolts of energy into my dance career. Here in LA, dance is so dead, and there are so many teachers and producers just beating that dead horse. It's tragic to see the shows with only a handful in the audience.

So my final post coming soon will be a rant about how Belly dance got to this place, where making a living wage is no long possible, except for a few young beauties dancing the club and wedding scene. And what will that rant include? The insidious, insipid, vapid (redundant right?) world of Social Media.