Musings
an Online Journal of Sorts

By Alyce Wilson

It's hard to believe I just spent three hours belly dancing. I was practicing my solo performance for my second annual belly dancing performance, coming up on Thursday. I got so involved in what I was doing that I completely lost track of time.

The song is a piece called Sacred Waters by a belly dancer/musician named Jehan.

Since the piece starts slow, I knew I'd want to begin with some of the veil work that we'd been learning in class, the nice thing about veils being that even a subtle movement looks far more impressive. It only took me a short while to work out my sequence of veil movements.

Una, my dog, was lying on the floor watching. I am a constant source of entertainment to her, especially when I put on strange clothing and wave colorful pieces of cloth around. I was videotaping myself so I could critique my performance, and it was especially amusing, watching the videotape, to see her moving her head hypnotically, following the veil. It was so cute I had to pet her immediately and tell her what a good audience she was.

After the veil portion, the music picks up a little and I was stuck about what to do next. I tried move after move but wasn't satisfied. As I watched and critiqued the tape, I made a mental note of the things I'd tried that seemed better than the rest. I was getting there, but then I ran out of videotape.

It was time to walk Una anyway, so we went to the drug store to buy a videotape, then took a jaunt around the neighborhood, me running the song through my head and figuring out what I wanted to do with the second half of the song. I had a few ideas and was anxious to try them out. So after we got back, I stuck dinner in the oven and ran through it a few more times, this time wearing the costume I'd had custom made for the occasion.

As the dance evolved, I grew happier with it. Una, exhausted from the exertion of following the veil, had fallen asleep in a lump on the beanbag chair she calls her own. I would have kept dancing, but the cooking dinner suddenly reminded me that I was hungry.

I put the videocamera away, packed up my costume and sat down to dinner. As I was eating, I thought about ways to refine the second half of the song. Maybe I'll run through it some more later tonight.

People ask me if I get nervous about dancing in front of a crowded room. But this is the hard part. Once I've refined my dance, I'll run through it with confidence, mentally imaging Una sitting on the sidelines, hypnotized by my veil.

Copyright 2003 by Alyce Wilson

Musings Index

What do you think? Share your thoughts
at Alyce's message board (left button):