Dangerously Obsessed...

[wigglewhiz]

What I really *should* be doing right about now is geeking up, preparing for my interview. Or re-applying for that other interesting position (the one I previously applied for but was REJECTED at the starting line) that closes for some weird reason on Sunday. Sunday?! Really?!

But I'm not.

I should maybe also be tidying the house, hoovering up the strange trail of black sock fluff that Himself leaves all over the carpet on his side of the couch, wiping down kitchen counters and getting rid of the billionty pots and pans that I seem to have used for some many-pot dish that I don't remember (seriously, WTF, self? How many pots do you have to use for ONE MEAL for TWO PEOPLE?!), in preparation for Monday's Property Inspection.

But I'm not doing that either.

Instead, what I've been doing is:

A) working out, and
B) quietly obsessing.

I am a DANGEROUSLY OBSESSIVE person. Once I get an idea in my head it's all I can think about. The idea grows legs and arms and extra heads and wings and become this HUGE THING that obsessed my every waking moment. I plot and plan and re-plan and scheme and write things down and daydream and just genrally become a completely insufferable, obsessive weirdo mumbling things to my self or suddenly making weird declarations to people as if they'd heard my internal monologue for themselves. (Which of course they haven't. How INCONVENIENT.)

Have a guess what's obsessing me. Go on, you'll never guess. It's soooooo unlike me. Did you guess dance? Well FUCK YOU, aren't you a little know-it-all spoilsport?!

*ahem*

I've been thinking about dance a lot lately, having re-connected with dance pals online and been reading about their fabulous escapades. A post today by my CHC-based mate, suzycat , got me a bit down in the dumps on her behalf and got me to thinking. About dance. And specifically about dance in Invercargill. Because THERE IS NO-ONE DANCING HERE.

This is a bit of a strange situation for me, having come from a city with a fairly saturated (now, anyway) dance scene with plenty of classes, multiple teachers, several large scale and multiple small-scale events a year and blah blah blah. I used to host haflas myself (with live music! God how I miss live music!) and had around 250 attendees each time. Coming to New Zealand where the scene was so little was a bit of a shock. Coming further to Invercargill where the scene was absent was... well, more of a shock.

And I moped and I mooned for a bit, partly because I was already thinking: "I am FAT and OUT OF SHAPE and I haven't practised in ages, my dance career is OVER, WOES FML", and then because I was all: "OMG, I live in Bumfuck New Zealand, there's no dancers for me to talk to or ANYTHING, I'll never be happy again, SUPER WOE". I contacted a dancer in Dunedin to see if she would keep me in the loop if she had any events and she never replied. MUCH WOE!

Then I realised I was being a lazy cow. I was sitting here, waiting for there to be a dance scene for me to slot into. Which I have always done, because there have always been other, established dancers in my community and I have been very wary of The Stepping On Of The Toes and the Politiks And Avoidance Thereof and whatnot. Well.... there's none of that here. No other dancers. Zip. Zero. El Zilcho. So... what, I'm going to sit on my ass and do nothing but cry WOE because there's nobody here and nothing for me to do? Hm.

So I read Shira's article on starting your own dance community and felt that it was geared a little too much towards performing. I'm... not good at marketing myself as a performer. I do NOT like to do that whole SELLING YOURSELF thing, because I'm British and modest and just a pain in the arse like that. ALSO, because what I'm actually *really* after is a bellydance community. People to talk to about dance. People to get excited about dance with. Other people who might want to watch a dance DVD or something. I've done the restaurant dancing thing, and I've done the gigging thing (albeit only a couple of gigs, really), and while it's lovely to have an audience and be BELLYDANCING GODDESS, BOW TO ME MORTALS, its not the be all and end all.

Shockingly this leads me back to teaching. Let me just state for the record that I HATE TEACHING. I hate it because it makes me a ball of nervous nervey nerves, where I get really worried about my students. Do they understand me? Are they just working hard and concentrating, or are their eyes LASERS OF HAAAAAAATE because they think I suck? Am I giving them their money's worth? Are they bored? They're bored. OMG they're bored I need to do MORE STUFF and TEACH HARDER DAMMIT, AAAAAAAAAAAARGH. I am surprised that I would willingly go back to teaching. That I would MARKET myself as a teacher instead of just lazily saying, like I usually do: "Um, I could teach that class for you if you REALLY can't get anybody else, I guess...". Must stop selling myself short.

Anyway! So all today I have been plotting, plotting, plotting my return to dance. I'm not ready yet. This is a LOOOOOOONG TERM PLAN. Here's how it looks:

1. Shed 30 kilos

I was plus-sized when I went to my first class. I was plus-sized when I started my restaurant dancing career. I'm back to being pluz-sized again. I am absolutely keen on women (and men!) of ALL shapes and sizes learning this dance, because I think it makes you happy within your own skin like nothing else can.

But I DO NOT want to be a plus-sized dancer again. And I am NOT hating on plus-sized dancers, because I don't give a FIG what size a dancer is when I'm watching her, I just want her to dance. I was happiest when I was slimmer. I was fitter, I felt better, more confident, I was more able to do more - physically, athletically - when I was slimmer. I LOOKED BETTER IN COSTUME. And I was imminently more marketable, there's just no getting round (ha!) that. So when I market myself as a dance teacher, I will be doing it at my slender hawtest. The end.

To get the weight off, I'll be continuing to work out, and therefore getting myself back to peak dance fitness. I will be enquiring with the local dance school if they might do adult ballet. (probably once I've shed at least 10 kilos though. No Fantasia hippo resemblance for me, please). I've sent word back home to Ma to get her to SEND ME DANCE DVDS, DAMMIT.

The weight loss is also going to take time. I'm going to use this time to get back into my Arabic studies, which I have sadly neglected for... OMG, so long it's EMBARRASSING and I'm not going to tell you.

2. Plan a new curriculum

What seems to work for me is building a choreography, week on week, with a few movements per class that relate to that week's section of the song. I have precisely TWO choreographies that I designed for my college classes, because I did terms of folk styles (non-choreo) and IMPROV and other horrors. One of the choreos (my oldest) is strong, with good handouts and whatnot. The other is a veil number to Amr Diab's Hawelt (which I think is a lovely song for veil, but I wanted to do double veil with it someday and as a result the class choreo came out... I dunno, SHIT) and I hate it. I might rework it, I might trash it and start with something else.

This is new to me because I tend to wing it with teaching. Wing it, and get horrifically stressed because I AM WINGING IT. So this time, I plan to have a slew of material, more than I feel I'll need, before I even begin the first class.

I also plan to do a free taster class to start the classes (whenever they get going), and to invite the local journo to attend. (Because I've been reading the free paper and I can't be the *only* one, can I?) So that can't be a week-by-week choreo building type class, it needs to be GRABBY! BAZAM, ONE WEEK AND YOU'RE HOOKED! kind of thing. I'm thinking demo by yours truly, prooooooobably to finish (at the start seems to freak people out and you get them shuffling their feet nervously, with "I can't do THAT" emanating from their downturned little faces). So that'll take some thought.

3. Get media presence

Do I FINALLY get off my arse and learn how to do a website? I've been meaning to for... six years now?! Longer? I've never had a dance business card. Never. I've never had a website (well... a shitty little free one to advertise my haflas, not actually sure how many people ever READ the damn thing rather than just email me). Always been full of big plans of DVD DEMO BUSINESS CARDS and websites and OMG AWESOMENESS that never came to fruition. Well... maybe now's the time. Well... then will be the time, given the importance and time-suckness of 1.

This includes getting - HORROR OF FUCKING HORRORS - pictures taken. I HATE having my picture taken. Always have, even when I was at my lightest and not looking too bad. I just... hate them with the fiery passion of a thousand burning hot suns. But I will swallow it and just get them done. Ma's partner is a photographer, so maybe when they come over? Better get my arse shifting on 1, then!

4. Market

Contrary to Shira's advice, I reckon I *will* probably use the term "bellydance". Because it's in the GP lexicon - Middle Eastern Dance, Raqs Sharqi, Oriental Dance - are not. "Bellydance" is more likely to get punters in the door, where they'll learn the more correct terminology and get their assumptions battered out of them. Once they've paid. Heh heh heh.

I could be wrong about this - Invercargill is small and conservative, and they might not like the term "bellydance". I'll do my best to judge it right by the time I get to this stage.

Uh.. the end. That's pretty much my plan at the moment. But it's exciting and is giving me some real drive for the first time in quite a long time.


Perhaps it's the sunshine, which always makes me feel like I'M SO UPBEAT ANYTHING IS POSSIBLE! Maybe the drive will just disappear when the sun goes, or when I get a job and have to go to work everyday and have no energy to do anything but stick something to eat in my face and fall into bed. But at the moment, I'm going to hold onto that little plan and plan to make it happen.

Comments

[parasitegirl.livejournal.com]

I have lovely cards I designed myself, I am working on my presence on Japanese-language based networks, I dance at restaurants once or twice a week, every few montsh ro so is a show, and I will start teaching...but fuck if I don't plotz myself when I even THINK about website design.

[suzycat.livejournal.com]

Woohoo!!!!!

[suzycat.livejournal.com]

OH ALSO if you want to die of lols, consider lne dancing. My Invercargill aunty - admittedly a naturally thin woman and a smoker at the time - lost more weight when she started obsessively doing it once or twice a week after 30 years of staying home and knitting.

[beafarhana.livejournal.com]

I can't help feeling that you can Make This Work, bigtime. Xlnt plan.

I would agree, use the term bellydance. Own it!

[suzycat.livejournal.com]

Not least because people in Invercargill are very salt of the earth normal ordinary types and they would go "oh what is this Middle Eastern Dance, Raqs Sharqi what, that sounds a bit foreign and weird". Whereas if you go "bellydance" they'd do the normal run of "oh really, do you do that dancing, wow, that's a bit different isn't it, it might be nice to try for a laff". And this is how you get them obvs.

[khalidad.livejournal.com]

awesome! gogogo!

[wigglewhiz.livejournal.com]

Thanks for your support, guys! :o) I will totally keep you posted, most likely in excruciating OCD obsessive detail, on any progress made!

I'll try to learn how to do the cut clicky thing properly without it duplicating itself to spare you the tedium. ;op

[parasitegirl.livejournal.com]

"This includes getting - HORROR OF FUCKING HORRORS - pictures taken. I HATE having my picture taken. Always have, even when I was at my lightest and not looking too bad. I just... hate them with the fiery passion of a thousand burning hot suns. But I will swallow it and just get them done. Ma's partner is a photographer, so maybe when they come over? Better get my arse shifting on 1, then!"

Ok, I hated being in front of the camera when I started doing photoshoots. I did photography in art school, and it was often self-portrait, but I was in total control...someone else pointing a camera at me? I HATED IT. wanted to CRY when it came to posing. (I still hate casual shots and surprise cameras) But...I can dance. I can perform. Best thing that ever happened to me was Michael Baxter, at my second ever shoot, realizing I couldn't pose and turn off my "you have a camera pointed at me goddamnit" brain. He stopped lit the whole studio, cranked my music, and treated the shoot like a live performance.

It might not work for you but it is worth a try...but pre-shoot spend time figuring out what motions and poses work well for you in motion and might look good captured. Get music you really like...choreography something that uses those moves and poses...or just practice those moves and poses freestyle until it feels like the natural way to react and perform that music.

[bintblue.livejournal.com]

Now that's a plan! Good luck with it. I cruised over to your LJ from snarklandia, mind if I add you?

[wigglewhiz.livejournal.com]

Please do! Then I can reciprocate and read your secret friends only posts and subject you to my random drive-by commenting! Yay! ;o)

[bintblue.livejournal.com]

Look out, cuz they are thrill a MINUTE. ;)