There are a lot of ways to chart music. The most standard is proper written music with staff lines and notes. But most of us can’t sight-read music, and besides, as dancers, we don’t need to see the notes–we need the space to write what we’re going to do.
There are many methods of doing this, and like formal outlines, they don’t all appeal to everyone. So most folks make up their own methods. This is perfectly fine. Some people count, some draw diagrams of the music, some write descriptions. All are valid methods. What’s important is that it makes sense–to you. You can totally invent a method, as long as you know what it means. Once you start including others in your pieces, it also has to make sense to them.
Here’s a sample from Dawn Ventimiglia. The picture below is Dawn’s map to the first part of the ES Posthumus song, “Pompeii”: http://youtu.be/ GusLypfx7OQ Dawn said, “The double lines on the left are the section that repeats (though this shot is missing the extra tidbits later in the song). Also, off to the right (out of the shot), those horizontal lines continue, and I jot choreo notes next to each section.
“This is a HUGE newsprint pad – super cheap, and great for doing this stuff. I hate working small on this kind of thing – sort of inhibits my thinking, AND, this way, I can view it while working on the choreo.” Listen to the song and see if you can follow Dawn’s notation.
We do what works for us. I use a spreadsheet. I put columns for the time, the measures, the mood, instrumentation, and then a big long one for what I’m going to do. It keeps everything organized, and I can print it out and write on it by hand, then transcribe it later.
We are not the only people who write out music to suit ourselves. Here’s a lovely article about Caroline Shaw, 2013’s years Pulitzer Prizewinner for music. Though she wrote the musical score itself in standard form, she wrote all kinds of whimsical sound directions instead of the Italian classics–such as “mixy,” “floaty head voices,” and “plainchantish improv on these two pitches.”
Most teachers focus on spelling and grammar mistakes. Students get back papers full of red marks. It’s disheartening. Because of this legacy of shame, writing is difficult for many folks. Maybe for you, too?
Imagine the fun of writing what you want to say–without the misery!
But how?
Cutting-edge writing instruction focuses on content rather than form. That means we work with what you want to say, and saying it in a way your audience can best hear it. Most errors dissolve when people find their voice and speak from their hearts. Using simple tools and strategies, you can write articles that get your point across and engage your readers.
Interested?
Announcing
How to Write a Blog Post!
This 90-minute live Zoom class walks participants through the process of choosing a topic, sketching a plan, and developing that plan into a short (500+ words), well-organized article, suitable for a blog, newsletter, even a sales page–with ease.
Blog posts are a great way to give information in your area of expertise, as well as sell upcoming classes and events–even both at once!
Blog posts make great newsletter content, and can be reposted to social media accounts. Posting the blog article (rather than the emailed newsletter) drives traffic back to your own site.
This class will NOT make a you a great writer in 90 minutes.
This class WILL give you the tools you need to write short articles. And the more you do it, the better you will get.
We will
Use a simple system to create posts on any topic, any time
Explore topic generation and choosing suitable topics
Look at tools to use voice-to-text for those who prefer to speak
Consider the options of video and audio blogs
Learn strategies to resolve writing anxiety
Each participant will write their own unique article!
Live class, Saturday, October 16 from 2:00-3:30 pm edt. See this in your time zone (add to calendar button in link)
Can’t make it? All good. There will be a recording.
Bring a paper and pen or pencil that you like, as well as any refreshments you might want while writing. We will take a tiny break halfway through.
This will be a fun, productive class. Please do join us!
This presentation is designed for creativity coaches. It will be useful to anyone who wants to communicate well with their audience; especially so for folks in creative or coaching endeavors.
Alia Thabit has taught writing at the college level for over 25 years.
“We do well for you because you care about us.” “Even after I gave up going to all my other classes, I still came to this one.” “You are the only writing teacher who ever said anything nice about my writing.”
This pretty amazing offering is made up of more than 50 video lessons from creativity coaches worldwide.
Then I realized that my video was selected as one of the preview videos–so you can see the whole thing right at the link!
Creativity coaches work with creative and performing artists every day of the week. They provide guidance and support and help creatives set goals, stay organized, and stay motivated. They are “in it” with their creative clients.
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Now you can meet more than 40 creativity coaches from around the world and learn from them. See them, hear them, and get to know them. The Great Creativity Toolkit is a brand-new program that will really help you live your best creative life possible–plus get free and low-cost coaching!
I am so pleased to be part of the Toolkit. I’ve been meeting with Eric and these coaches for the last several months. I am very impressed with our group!
I’ve been collecting all this cool stuff to help folks feel more grounded, to regulate the nervous system (so we can recover from the constant HIGH ALERT or Freeze states so many of us have been pushed into over the last—year? Decade? Lifetime? Generations? I’ve been developing windows into creativity and lowering my own bar, recovering from lifelong perfectionism.
It makes me so happy that belly dance fits so well into this perspective. Belly dance is such a perfect venue for grounding and creative expression! Improvisation, curiosity, and playfulness are heart elements of the cultural dance. They are also heart elements of a happy, creative life. So it gives me great pleasure to be connecting all these dots in Spark*.
Spark* is NOT a class, though it’s full of useful practices. It is NOT about hard work, effort, goals, or accomplishments.
Spark* IS about coming into balance. It’s about feeling good. Relaxed. Alive. Real. Grounded. It’s about curiosity, playfulness, and improvisation ; ).
We’ll use exercises from Somatic Experiencing® to help bring the nervous system back into the here and now.
For example, let your fingers touch your hair. Very gently, slowly, notice the sensation of the hair on the fingers, the strands, the texture, the length.
Then gently move your attention to your hair, and how it feels the fingers touching it.
Maybe now touching the scalp, the feeling of the scalp, of the fingers on the scalp.
Maybe the face comes next, maybe the hair is enough.
You get to choose.
Take your time. Enjoy. This sensual enjoyment connects to the dance as we become curious about our sensations, as we slow down, as we enjoy the movement of the body to music.
We’ve been holding ourselves in for a long time. It’s scary to let go. But it’s time.
Spark* is a space to gently expand into wholeness. Take a breath. Come back into our bodies. Celebrate our bodies for connecting us to ourselves, our creativity, our self-expression, our joy.
Bees pollinate flowers, right? So so some moths, and a few other insects. The flowers get to reproduce, and the bees get food.
Symbiosis!
Symbiosis is a process in which all parties to the arrangement benefit. Unlike its opposite, parasitism, in which one party benefits at the expense of another, symbiosis is the original win-win.
Bees have it easy. They don’t wonder about the ethical ramifications of their floral relationships. They don’t agonize at night about whether it is fair to drink the flowers’ nectar, to fly off with there pollen. They don’t have existential doubts. They have a biological mandate.
We, on the other hand, have a bit more of a puzzle to solve.
Where is our Biological Mandate?
We wonder about a lot of things–we can’t sleep for the constant questions. Is it okay for me to do X fun thing? Do my words or actions detract from or harm others? Who am I to think my needs are so important? These are important questions. So…
All any soul-nurturing stuff, which, our culture tells us, is selfish frivolity, may demand some soul-searching. And sometimes our discoveries aren’t pretty. For example, when our interests collide with someone else’s.
One such conflict of interest is when we give priority to doing things for other people and don’t make any time for ourselves. I don’t know if you have noticed this, but I find that all I have to do is plan something for myself (or even have a deadline), and the phone starts ringing, or someone needs help.
Women tend to be socialized to help everyone else first.
But you know what they say on every airplane? Please secure your own oxygen mask before helping others. It’s great that we care about our friends and family, and it can be hard to carve out a little space for ourselves without feeling guilty. But the fact is, everyone else gets better service when our own creativity is fed and cared for.
Another conflict is when a loved one has issues with our dance interests. Some of us step back at that point, often for very good reasons. Some of us go forward, for equally good reasons. For myself, I went forward. Those issues were the last straw in a difficult relationship, and I had already compromised myself nearly out of existence. Another friend stepped back. She found other creative outlets that worked for her. Both of these responses were valid, and both took courage.
And sometimes the conflict of interests is with ourselves. Our own doubts and fears can keep us from nurturing ourselves and our creative side. We wonder so hard if we are doing the right thing that we can talk ourselves out of the self-care that dance gives us. We put so much pressure on ourselves. Who are we to dance? We’re not very good. We’re not even “doing anything” with our dance. Well, so what?
Just dancing for fun is plenty. Fun is important! Feeling good is important to our physical and emotional well-being. If we don’t fill our own well, no one else is going to come along and do it for us, nice as that would be.
It’s on us to gather our own nectar.
Yes, sometimes it’s very, very hard to give ourselves that love and care, to give ourselves time to rest, to enjoy things, to dance, whatever it is we need to thrive. Nature abhors a vacuum, they say, and our time tends to fill up fast.
Many of us have been subject to all three of the above scenarios—most of us probably have done at least two out of three. So what helps?
Put yourself first.
I have to learn this lesson over and over. Other things take a LOT more time than doing a little art. And they are never done. So finishing everything else first is a very bad idea. Take 20 minutes to do some fun art stuff first and you are set for the day—you get that little cookie of satisfaction that lasts all day long.
Accountability.
Put yourself fin a position where you have to do it. Courses and intentions are a good choice for that. Marking off the days you dance on a calendar helps to establish a streak. It’s fun to keep the streak going. Having a friend do it with you, so you can check in with each other. I created SPARK* mostly to help myself take care of myself.
Embrace your biological mandate.
Just say YES. Humans have made art since they figured out that charcoal makes marks on rocks. You have the right to make art. To do something enjoyable. Step forward with your unique vision. Give it the nurturing it needs to blossom and grow. No one else in all the world can do what you can. Trust yourself. Let it out. It’s time.
Love,
Alia
PS Want some help?
SPARK* is here for you.
For all of us feeling burned out, angry, anxious, alone, lost, sad, or searching, SPARK* can help rekindle our heart, our life, our joy.
I’m collecting alllll my skills and tools for this one. Oriental dance, Dancemeditation, Creativity, and Somatic Experiencing. I like things that are magic, and these are all magical in their practice and their effects. Soothing, enlivening, grounding, energizing! SPARK works on so many levels to bring us back into our bodies, to ourselves, to our balance and comfort in the world. Just tune in and enjoy. I’ll be your flower ; ) Symbiosis!
When is the last time we had actual fun? Enjoyment is a biological mandate, too. We are made for pleasure. Nectar!
SPARK* A 6-week soul vacation is a deeper immersion into soul healing, release, and joy. SPARK* runs Fridays, 5:30-6:30pm edt, August 13 through Friday, Sept 24 (no class Friday, August 27). YES, there is a recording!
Registration is now open. Seating is limited. There’s a special treat for early signups (but it’s a secret. Hint: It will come in the mail). https://aliathabit.com/shop/#trust
I’m struck by how many of us welcome the opportunity to step outside of our normal box. I hear from many dancers relishing new ways of being. Yet many of us also pine for our own style.
As dancers, this is our highest calling. We are not here to be anyone else. We are here to bring our own unique voice to the world. And that means doing things the way we feel them.
Sure we have to learn. We copy when we learn—everyone does. But then we put our own flavor, our own spin, our own feeling. That’s what art is. But we get so trussed up by rules and regulations and other people’s baggage it is hard to let our freak flag fly.
This is why we’re here. To let go of the inner tattletale who expects us to fail. Our failure reassures the vultures who fatten themselves at our expense. The internet trolls who make snide comments on our most tender videos. The “teachers” who disdain anything that doesn’t look just like them—and forbid you to study with others. The people who tell you that to develop your personal style you have to copy copy copy for years and years and learn everything and be perfect and THEN, MAYBE you will be ready for a personal style.
Nah.
Start NOW.
Take classes with lots of high-quality teachers. Watch and learn. Fill the well. Pour it in. But then let it go. Do it your body’s way. Dance what you feel.
Bobby Farrah told us every day to adapt the moves to suit ourselves, to make them our own. From Day 1. The beauty of micro movement is that no two moves need ever be exactly alike. There is no Platonic Ideal. There is the moment, and the music, and the body, and the feeling, and the breath. Their alignment is magical. And that is Art.
Our dance is different from most others. We have this movement vocabulary. It’s unique and remarkable. But people think that’s all it is—perfection of the form. There is so much more inside this dance. It is a magical, spiritual, healing pleasure.
Let it heal you.
It will.
Speaking of Healing…
I’ve gotten more deeply into visualizing the upcoming Solace experience, and realized that, while we need soothing, we also need enlivening. Relax AND Energize. So I’ve adapted the original plan to be a little more… uplifting. I even changed the picture. And the name ; )
SPARK!
Introducing
SPARK*
Kindle your heart
Energizing, Relaxing, Soothing, Enlivening.
Weekly Follow-me + free dance Zoom immersion.
Twice-weekly Spots of Sparkle
Grounding. Regulating. Nourishing.
Self-compassion. Rest. Breath. Awakening
Six weeks. For you.
Fill the well. Hold yourself close. Kindle your intuitive flow.
A while back I mentioned the complex Arabic orchestral music that used to really throw me for a loop. One of our more complex genres is our modern Entrance music. Back in the 5-part routine days, entrance music was fairly simple, upbeat, made to energize the guests and grab their attention. Any variation came from the multiple taqasim of the featured melody instruments. But with the incorporation of tarab music, and dancing on the complex orchestral overtures of famous songs, came a new kind of entrance music.
Mergensé, megence, majensee and various other spellings are apparently all derived from the French term Mise en Scène, which refers to the setting, props etc of a scene–ie, setting the scene–which is what entrance music does for a dance routine.
This modern entrance music is designed to show off the dancer’s skills, with fast-paced, radical shifts in rhythm, tempo, and affect. Like the classic songs, these shifts are often intentionally surprising. They can be a real challenge for dancers, so they are often choreographed quite tightly, per the recording, of course.
But what if you have a live band?
What if they play the song differently from the recording? (Oops…)
What if you don’t feel like tightly choreographing a song?
What if you could improvise even to complex music?
Well, you can.
I’ve certainly done it (as have many others of us). The first time I heard Alf Leila wa Leila, or Darit il Ayyam, for example, I was performing to them. Um. Yeah. Here is a clip from that Darit il Ayyam.
It went surprisingly well.
Why?
Musical structure.
As we become familiar with how music is put together, we begin to intuit when the changes are coming. We start to notice patterns, thematic repeats. We understand how to slow down when we feel changes, and to fully commit to our movement, so that even if we don’t match the music, we look like we meant to do that. And then we catch it the next time around.
Anyone can do this. It does take some practice.
(It doesn’t hurt to have excellent musicians, who watch the dancer and follow her moves, as in the above clip ; )
Here’s a fun entrance piece for you. Just dance it. https://youtu.be/lTvShF_lMWU Of course it won’t be perfect. Discovery is part of the thrill. Let yourself relax and enjoy the ride.
Fun, right?
If you’d like a better understanding of structure, and practice with a bunch of great entrance pieces, you might enjoy our next Fun Class Deep Dive.
Entrancing: How to improvise to entrance music for Oriental Dance.
Imagine you give a kid a cute little toy. It lights up, spins around, the whole deal. Then imagine you spend half an hour explaining to the poor kid how it works. You show them every single thing it does. Then you leave them to play. What happens? Nothing. That toy is dead.
All the magic can be explained out of things. When there is nothing to explore, things lose their shine. The allure fades. With a new concept, the fun is in exploring it—sometimes in bizarre ways. That bizarreness makes all the fun. Play, curiosity, and exploration are ways we learn and grow.
The Playful Wind
Contrast this with how dance is often taught. A concept or move is introduced. Then it is explained to death. Why? Because people are addicted to explanation. They want to know why and how before they do it.
Information feels safe. We want to do it right. We don’t like mistakes. This is exactly why so much dance is boring, since we learn through making mistakes—and then correcting them. When we are spoon-fed material, we might get to correct mistakes (a lot of them), but they are all related to someone else’s vision. We need to make our own, as we explore and discover for ourselves.
Consider Elena Lentini’s wind exercise. Dance as a leaf blown by the wind. The image is enough. The sound and feel and temperature of the wind engage multiple senses. We can relate to that. We can play with that. What is the wind? Gusty? Warm? Cold? Up to you. What kind of leaf? A red leaf? A huge leaf? A new spring leaf? Up to you.
The fewer specifics, the more the imagination fires up. Our mind and the quilted wonder of our memory supply details, skipping around, swapping them in and out. Try it if you haven’t yet. It’s fun. Of course, there is also purpose to the wind exercise. Several. It does a lot of things at once. I’ll explain, but for now, continue to play with that image (try adding a veil, too). And play.
Here’s some music for that.
Play is key. It opens creativity, happiness, and an inquisitive, open delight in the world. This dance is, at its heart, play. It is exploration, release, communication, shared love. We often lose sight of that while perfecting our hip drops. As teachers, we help our students connect by making time for experimentation, play, and fun.
Sufis say to have the experience first and get the explanation later. Modern learning science backs this up. Learning is more durable when we grapple with a concept or skill on our own before getting an explanation. We turn it upside down, bang it against the wall, poke and prod, and generally get our hands good and dirty. It may feel frustrating (especially if we are concerned about doing it “right”), but it’s far more nourishing.
There are spaces in the music for changes to happen. Theses spaces come between verses and choruses, between lines and phrases, and even the spaces between measures and notes. We’re going to experiment with measures and notes.
Most belly dance music has 4 beats to the measure, which is why we count 1, 2, 3, 4. This is known as 4/4 time.
Many popular dance rhythms are also 4/4. That means one iteration (repetition) of the rhythm (for example, dum dum tekkatek, dum tekkatek), takes one measure of music.
If you boil it down to four beats, you get DUM TEK DUM TEK. 1234.
There are spaces between those 4 beats. Much of the interesting stuff is in those spaces. The beats will be in capital letters and the extra in lower case. DUM dum, TEKkatek DUM tekkaTEK. 1 and 2 and 3 and 4. And 1 and 2 and 3 and 4 AND. I mean, you can break the notes down into ever faster/smaller bits, but we’re not going to go there. We’re just interested in the ANDs, especially 3 and 4, and 4 and 1.
These are useful places to prepare for, and make, changes.
When I improvise, I don’t plan. I pause. I slow down. I make space for the next thing. I prepare. On the AND.
I slow down around 3 and, change by 4 and, so I am there at the 1.
I invite you to experiment with this—finding spaces to change. Yours might be every 2 or 4 measures, or however many measures—it’s the transitions we want to explore. That moment of pause, of collection, as we create and opening to shift from one thing to the next.
With love,
Alia
For the exercise, you might like some straight up rhythmic music. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PBl9ax0pklk
This post is from 2015, when I accompanied Tamalyn Dallal on a road trip to gather material for a film.
Tamalyn Dallal’s project, “Pockets of Treasure,” was to be a film about traditional dances of the American deep south. Over the last 10 days, I’ve had the pleasure of accompanying her a recon trip, filming material for a trailer. Last week we were in New Orleans and rural Louisiana documenting Cajun and Creole mardi gras traditions. Two days later, here we are in Asheville, NC at the Bailey Mountain Cloggers (BMC) annual competition. In events ranging from Pee-wee Contemporary to Adult Traditional, we watched cloggers of all ages compete for a table full of prizes.
Clogging is an Appalachian country dance. It evolved from rural traditions of solo dance such as flat step, buck dance, hoedown, and rural tap dancing. Tamalyn introduced me to “Talking Feet,” a brilliant documentary of early styles, which you can view online (http://www.folkstreams.net/film,121).
Clogging couldn’t be further from belly dance.
Performed to bluegrass music, it is largely percussive footwork with no upper body movement. Here is some of what we saw and sought out on this leg of the trip.
Yet today we were in for a surprise.
Imagine an ocean of little girls in sparkly outfits, full make up, their hair sprayed, clogging to—hip hop? Yes. Hip hop. Clogging fused with contemporary dance. Chest bumps. Hip work. Arm circles. Happy little girls, grinding away in between the clogging steps. After about three of these numbers, I leaned over to Tamalyn and whispered, “Where are the Gothic fusion cloggers?” (yes, we found them).
Sprinkled between these numbers was traditional clogging. The Bailey Mountain Cloggers, a college team (yes, you can get a clogging scholarship), are dedicated to traditional styles, and specifically include trad categories in the competition; in fact, the grand prize goes the best traditional clogging team. They made us so welcome, announced Tamalyn’s project from the stage, introduced her, told the crowd we would make them all famous (this seems to be a theme in introductions), and generally gave us carte blanche.
So while Tamalyn filmed dances, I wandered around interviewing participants.
I’m kind of shy (I know, no one believes this), so I felt daunted to ask people to talk to me. Then I caught sight of a gal whose traditional group I had admired (the Hot Foot Cloggers), and asked her if she would be interviewed. She was delighted, and just as sweet as pie. Over all, I interviewed half a dozen people, including the director of the BMC and the daddy of the first girl, plus got us an invitation to a clogging group in Boone, NC, who happen to know a buck dancer Tamalyn has been trying to find.
Here’s what I discovered.
The roots of clogging were solo dances that were all about the dancer’s feeling from the music. Everyone had their own style, culled and developed from watching other dancers.
Then team clogging rose. The focus came to be on precision and choreography (except for hoedown, in which the caller calls the patterns and everyone freestyles their footwork). Nowadays, clogging is often fused with other dance forms (hip, lyrical, contemporary), in an effort to get and keep kids interested.
Sound familiar?
Traditional music is harder to dance than contemporary music, and young folks often don’t get it—they want what they know, which is modern music. But as students get interested in the dance, they realize the trad music is perfect for it, since they evolved together (I also saw many young kids dancing trad and whooping it up). And the Hot Foot group’s mission is to bring trad clogging to kids so they’d have something to do in a town with nothing.
The most important thing about clogging is having fun
Enjoying the dance and the team and making it fun for the audience. Every person told me this. And even the choreographer of the the most out-there fusion school (XDC), who maintains that you should fuse everything, says that if you are interested in clogging the most important thing you can do is learn the traditional styles first. Hmm. That sounds familiar, too.
So there you have it.
Like clogging, belly dance has evolved from a solo improvised dance into a team sport valuing precision and novelty. But also like belly dance, the traditional roots are seen as the best grounding, and as dancers grow in skill and appreciation, their interest centers on the traditional art.
