Showing a little leg

I noticed the other day, as you do, how walking with a book on my head opened up my awareness, I could see so much more side to side, above and below. In the photos of a gig in a bar a client sent me it was the opposite, shoulders up to guard me and a sheet of hair covering my face. I hadn't wanted to engage too much with the drunken audience and was signalling this.

Its always a difficult question, how much to reveal, how much to keep back. As a performer I feel compelled to give everything, and as a teacher to explain everything. The audience are instrigued, they want to draw you out, to share the experience with you, enemy and friend, they demand an encore.

Veil dancing is the ultimate release as its so playful, its an invitation for the hidden side to come and play, to be included.
During my massage this week my therapist worked with the tension along my collar bone and along my ribcage, pressing on tiny knots I didn't know I had, and in response my ribcage inflated then relaxed, with a big sigh of relief. Massage is normally focused on the back of the body and yet the front is what we confront the world with, and as a performer what we present to others, in all our vunerability, or perhaps with the illusion of self-possession (which can, if held for too long, become a form of tension).

For me dance has for so long been about strength, power and freedom. I have always claimed I can dance to any music, anywhere at anytime. And I have lived up to this rule, from someone's suburban kitchen, slipping on the doormat in my bare feet, to a chilly hydraulic lift on-stage at the hippodrome Leicester Square.

Yet it is a certain bravado that issues this challenge, not the softness and subtle interpretation of the world of Sufi, from which my knowledge of the dance was born. In that Sufi state, of trance, hypersensitivity, intuition, it is not possible to dance just anywhere; the environment, the body and the mind must be prepared. And perhaps it is this that I yearn to go back to when I come of stage these days, smile fading as I change my clothes and am engulfed by loneliness. I am dancing in the dark, fumbling around, hoping to stumble upon a jewel or two whose light I can offer to the audience. Sometimes panicking inside, hoping they can see glimpses of the light in me. But there is, as all plants demonstrate, no life in darkness, nowhere to recharge, to dream, to receive thoughts and ideas and begin to translate imagination into reality.

At a recent gig a man began tipping me with ten pound notes, and then twenties, at first I played along with it, dancing slightly longer with him than the others, then I danced away from him as he held out the next ten. Dance is my demonstration of freedom and i will not allow it to imprison me, through money or any other type of control. Once you discover integrity and freedom you have two things no one can ever take from you, and it is satisfying, And yet it feels daunting to ask myself now to replace my breastplate with nothing.

My singing lessons are my only solace on this matter. My teacher patiently encourages me with vigorous hand movements pointing to various points of my anatomy including jaw, neck and back, while I am singing to let go of my tension. And in reponse to my voice swells and resonanates around the room, freed from its restraints, produced as if my by magic, not by will but by an act of faith.

A voice at last

I have been thinking a lot about writing. Sometimes when I'm on the tube ideas bubble up and push past each other in a stream of inspiration. But I've never quite known where to put them.

As a dancer people often say that you are lucky to be performing in front of people, to be basking in all the celebrity-like adulation that comes with a show. To me in particular they say they can feel my dancing, relate to my expressions, that the passion, the grace and the yearning for freedom are all evident. Yet when one of my students asked me backstage at my recent Belly Dance beats event if I was nervous I said "only about speaking".

We get comfortable communicating in a certain genre - I can almost lean back and dance, riding high on my emotions, on the intensity that runs through my fingers, sculpting the density of the space around me - but I find speaking on behalf of myself tough.

In an early rebellion against arrogancy as a teenager I made a pact with myself always to be genuine - and perhaps, without realising - withdraw a little of myself from the grasp of others. Then there is the modesty that a lot of English people are struck with, the unwritten rule that it is uncouth to boast about yourself.

I am also terrorised by those time-thieving drones who talk too much and take advantage of our patience. At a previous show i had thought it wiser to allow someone else to introduce me. This resulted in a monologue thanking everyone, including the bar staff, the drummers who had dropped by to play and the DJ and oh finally, as an afterthought, me.

Watching back the footage of the more recent Belly Dance Beats night I realise that I had assumed people already knew about me, who I was, where my course was, who the dancers were. I held back my voice and my thoughts in order not to be too annoying, and with this I held back my heart.

You are holding in your heart, says my massage therapist, you give it all with you hips, the rhythm, the playfulness, but your heart, you are protecting it.

In a recent posture/belly dance workshop I co-facilitated my co-instructor mentioned that there's no point in holding and hunching up your shoulders - if people want to hurt you they are going to do it anyway.

There's one rule I've always abided by, "feel the fear and do it anyway." Maybe that's why my heart is hiding.