s e v e n i s a j o u r n e y

Saturday and Sunday was the dance workshop. Despite the fact that the flyer indicated this was to be taught by both Hossam and Serena, I was expecting Serena to do most of the teaching, with Hossam maybe providing some accompaniment or something. Instead, most of the workshop was taught by Hossam, who spent quite a bit of time lecturing on the history of the dance and the foundations of rhythm, all very much in an Egyptian context. (Karshlimma ? What’s that ? Chiftitelli ? That’s Turkish. The Turks invaded and occupied Egypt for quite a while, don’t you know.)

Let me back up a moment and describe the venue. The dance workshop was in the Riley Center auditorium of Wellington High School, which near as I can tell has a campus the size of, say, Drexel. There was a big stage, some fixed seating at the back, and a broad expanse of very badly gouged and scuffed wooden floor between. There were a good 70 or 80 of us there — quite a lot if you consider what I was saying earlier about the size of the community here. (Of course a lot of women came down from Auckland and elsewhere.) The floor had a slight rise in it for about the last eight feet before the chairs started, which made spinning a somewhat fraught affair, but not nearly so fraught as dancing next to (or even within 12 feet of) the woman who came wearing a brand new loop-beaded hip scarf. I’m surprised I’m not *still* picking gold bugle beads out of my soles.

The other thing of note about the auditorium is that it was *freezing*. The ceilings of course were way the heck up there, so it would have taken three days to heat the place even if it would have held the heat anyway, which I doubt. So the first day, we all huddled on the floor listening to our joints seize up during the lecture parts, and scurried back to discard coats and socks when it was time to dance. The second day, we all wore thermals under our dance togs and carried chairs out and back. Alan was taking photos during the whole weekend, and got plenty of shots of us all shivering in between the shimmying.

So we froze our asses off and absolutely loved it. Hossam, as I said, taught foundation stuff, and it was a very very solid, very stable foundation. A lot of stuff I understood about the dance in a sort of taken-on-faith kind of way now makes more sense, and I now feel like I’ve got a strong base to work on the stuff — like improvisation and choreography, for instance — that I had always felt uneasy about before.

Hossam himself is… well, I don’t know what I was expecting, but he seems like it, if that makes any sense. He’s got the sure-of-himself, settled air of a Master who’s gone through the egotistical rock-star stage and come out the other side ready to teach. Still a bit volatile, still a bit moody, still the Arab Alpha Male (PC he ain’t. Feminist, he ain’t, although he has a strong chauvanist respect for women and women’s strength, if you know what I mean), but also charming and funny and always *always* full of praise and admiration for the many skillions of other fantastic artists and dancers he’s worked with and learned from. A cream puff if you catch him in the right mood, but all kinds of unpleasant if you don’t (I saw the start of a row between him and the woman working the canteen over whether she did or did not owe him the cup of coffee he paid for but never got…). That said, although I would not say he was infinitely patient with us, he had the grace to not be obviously *impatient* with us, either.

Serena, for her part, was an absolute sweetie. Yes, drop dead gorgeous, a fantastic dancer, *and* genuinely nice. Not a catty, egotistical or vain bone in her body. She demonstrated certain things Hossam was explaining, and taught us the two (and a half, if you count the sort of drum solo) choreographies we learned when we got to the dancy bits. She teased Hossam and encouraged us. I wish there were more like her.

So anyway, I’ve got to go back to work tomorrow, so I’ll have to get to the rest later.

Okay. So. I have survived the Middle Eastern Death March Weekend. W00t !

Festivities started Friday with a concert at the Soundings Theater at Te Papa. The first half of the concert, as I think I mentioned previously, was local dancers and local musicians. But before that, Chris and Natasha and I went out to dinner at the Sahara restaurant on Courtenay Place. It was pretty good.

The musicians were up first — a put-together-pretty-much-entirely-for-this-show ensemble made up of Tim and Liz (on oud and violin respectively), Alan (the guy who drums for Beverley’s dance class occasionally), a guy I don’t know on tabla (tabla=doumbek=darboukka — and I think I probably saw this guy drumming at Zebos last full moon, but I’m still getting all the drek locked hippy guys confused), and another guy I don’t know on double-bass. They were quite good, although Liz looked concerned going on perplexed for most of the piece, for some reason. (Alan, BTW, as a total aside here, recently brought to class a pair of truly funktastic African finger-bell things made out of CAST IRON. Really. Each one looked like two cupped cast-iron leaves joined at the stem and the pointed tip. The “stem” curved over your middle finger, and you played them with iron rings worn on your thumbs. TOO freakin’ cool.)

After that was local dancers, some of whom were good, some of whom were merely passable, some of whom made good costume choices, some of whom didn’t. A nice wide variety of styles though, including yet *another* choregraphy to Marco Polo (I still like ours best).

[Whup. Just copped a dinner invite from Stephanie and Patrick -- gotta finish this later.]

Right. Dinner (Patrick cooks !) and a trip through Mt. Vic to the Kilbirnie Pak ‘N’ Save accomplished. (Total aside: I’m really looking forward to going grocery shopping with Stephen. Picking out a brown mustard to try. Picking out an ice cream to try. Comparing tuna prices. Gawd, I’m pathetic.)

Anyway, the first half of the concert was good, and I have to say just going and looking at the crowd brought home to me how small Wellington really is: I recognized — and even knew well enough to wave or say hi to — a *startling* percentage of the people there. (Note to self: Don’t burn any bridges. I can totally see pissing off the wrong person and finding an entire community effectively shut its doors. A sobering thought.) Huda MC’d, looking like a real diva in this gorgeous sequinned thobe.

The second half was Hossam and Serena Ramzy, pretty much alternating performances. They were both amazing. I mean, I was expecting Hossam to be fabulous, because you know it’s HOSSAM RAMZY. And he was. But his (quite a bit younger) Brazilian hottie wife, Serena, was also just stunning. (Go check them both out here.) She’s got hips that sing and a belly to die for. SO pretty, all of her. The only disappointing thing was that they alternated: Hossam would play some utterly gobsmacking thing on the tabla or the riq (the tambourine, which in the hands of an Egyptian who knows what he’s doing is something entirely else, believe me), and then he would go off and Serena would come on and dance to a recorded piece. I *really* wanted to see her dance to him playing — especially as it became clear that they have a very sweet and genuine affection for each other. But more on that later.

– 6.5 days to Snog Week !