Recently I began to incorporate 5-10 min. of practice on various dance things in my day. Ideally, I’d give myself an hour but well, time is a precious commodity. I figure the short practice can easily turn into a long practice and if it doesn’t, I don’t feel discouraged. So yesterday was veil, today is [...]

Like last year, Raks Nativity has some terrific live drummers and several of us, including yours truly, gets to dance to them. I have a small confession: unlike many of my dance friends, I have no experience dancing to live Middle Eastern music of any kind outside of Raks Nativity. I’ve never had a teacher [...]

Being sick has exacerbated how busy things are for me. I best described it yesterday as I wake up each morning and feel five steps behind. Through some miracle, I manage to get through the day and get everything accomplished for class/work, but I wake up the next morning, again five steps behind. Practice/dance really [...]

I spent the past few days perusing various message boards on ballet and found some interesting ideas on practice. Some beginning adult ballet dancers were advised not to practice by more veteran dancers/teachers. Why? The more experienced people felt that practicing can instill bad habits or poor technique ingrained in muscle memory; going to class [...]

Despite the threat of weather (wintry mix) and the mysterious line of traffic getting to Waltham, the semi-private class with Shadia of Boston ran. Shadia taught at MassRaqs this past fall. Although she is a well-established instructor in this area, I didn’t know much about her. Her workshop at MassRaqs convinced me that I should [...]

A few days ago, one of the search terms that led someone here was “why is muscle memory important.” The search term led me to think about why is muscle memory important. Many commonplace things we do are a result of muscle memory. Typing, walking, etc. Imagine if you had to make a very conscious [...]

A friend and I were chatting the other day about her unhappiness with her progress in a pole dancing class. She thought about quitting, because she wasn’t great at it. We talked for a bit, and I convinced her to keep trying since she is interested in it. I can relate to that from my [...]

Last night’s dance class in the hot, hot studio has me concluding one thing: it’s time to get new dance clothes. The longish yoga pants I wear are no longer working, at least in this weather. We had air conditioning, somewhat, yesterday, but it was only running about an hour prior to dance class beginning. [...]

I realized today that my summer will largely be themed by dance. Working through the intensive dance practices has taught me some critical things. Namely, I need to practice. Learning choreography is not my strong suit; I haven’t had to memorize a choreography in a really long time (years), and my choreography experiences have been [...]

By sort of, I mean I’m going to try to maintain a constant practice. Keeping myself motivated to practice that much daily was difficult. I skirted it a few times (practicing mudras instead of really dancing), but I think I overall did a good job of maintaining a practice. I discovered that I can’t be [...]