A night at Nur

It is always a pleasure to watch Lorna of Cairo dance. I think I might have mentioned this before (hang on, I'll just check... oh yeah, just all the time) but it's worth restating! For me, Lorna lights up the room when she starts to dance. She exudes joy, she gives so much to her audience, she is graceful, honed, and interprets music beautifully. Her performances at Glasgow's Nur restaurant last night was no exception. She also sported some awesome new costumes, adding even more excitement!

Sadly I have more complaints about the night than I have good things to say.

We arrived for a 7.30 start, and finally got our main courses at 10pm. We had some pretty stingy mezze at about 9pm, but it was served just as the dancing started, which meant that we couldn't do justice to either of our jobs as diners and an audience. By the time the main courses arrived most of us were so hungry we would have eaten anything! There really wasn't much food either - three tiny tagines of meat between 5 of us at the table, with 4 chunks of meat in each tagine - not enough for a piece each!  Plus two tagines of (frozen) vegetables in what tasted like a tinned soup; and rice - but when the rice eventually arrived (unannounced, 10 minutes after the meat and veg) we'd been so hungry we'd polished off most of the tagines.

The tables in Nur are the same height as the chairs, so you have to lean over the table, which is not good for the digestion and lead to more than a few sore tummies afterwards!

The sweet menu was really limited and some diners near us left when they were told that there was no vanilla ice cream left (surely the most basic of sweets??) - mind you, that was hardly an early exit, it was about 11pm by then!

The sweets (like the previous two courses) were served immediately before the dancing began, meaning that if we wanted to watch Lorna, which we came to do, we ended up with melted ice cream. At a restaurant which has regular belly dancers, I would have thought they would have known how to do justice to both the food and the dancer. The lighting and the music were also poor, which perhaps is more evidence that Nur isn't really bothered about dancing, only about getting bums on seats.

The staff were  in short supply, and when you have to pay for each drink you buy as you buy it, it's good to have plenty of people serving. The staff who were there were stressed, not particularly helpful and occasionally bordering on rude. They seemed to feel that the dancers were an inconvenience and didn't seem bothered whether, in going about their duties, they got in the way of the dance.

It was 11.30pm by the time we'd eaten.  A long night, and for those of us who'd travelled, a long drive in foggy conditions was still to come. If we'd come by train, we'd have missed Lorna's last set to catch the last train back.

I was told that the restaurant was closed between Christmas and New Year, apart from this night - so this night, effectively a private function, was giving them work they wouldn't have otherwise. I would have thought it was good to get the work, not an inconvenience. As one of the very few restaurants with belly dancers in Scotland, a night full of belly dancers should be a real showcase for Nur, a great opportunity to get a good reputation. An opportunity lost.

I love watching Lorna dance, I love a good night out with bellydancers. Sadly I can't recommend Nur. 

Which is why I'm so excited about Lorna's dinner night as part of the Middle Eastern Peace and Spirituality Festival on 3 March! More later - something to look forward to!!

How we shimmied by the Shore!

Leith (where I live) is a great place for bellydance. There are lots of dance classes here (including the one I teach!), many dancers, and some smashing teachers. Leith has lots of shimmies per capita. For a while I've wanted to have a bellydance event in Leith, and today it happened - welcome to Shimmy By The Shore.

      I wanted this to be a small, relaxed and informal event.  Haflas can sometimes be too big to know who’s watching you dance. To me, being able to get a good look at the audience adds to the enjoyment of dancing. When I introduced the afternoon, I asked the audience to remember that they are as much a part of the performance as the dancer. The relationship between the dancer and audience is such an important part of the performance, and I wanted it to be a two-way relationship for as many of the dances as possible.

      And as Lorna of Cairo told us last time she was here, Egyptian dancers like to be near their audience - maintaining your distance from the audience is often interpreted as the dancer being aloof and superior.  So a living room atmosphere was just what I was aiming for.

      The venue was the very lovely Red Room at The Constitution, a new bar on Leith's Constitution Street. It was nicely packed with 37 of us there. I was reminded of Leith's diversity when I was at the bar. A man sitting at the bar asked what we were up to, and when I told him, he took a wee piece of paper out of his wallet with a venue and date on it, and told me about a "wee lassie" he knows who's having an event for charity along the road. "You ladies might be interested in it. She's a lap dancer." When I tried to explain that belly dancing and lap dancing aren't similar (I was being gentle, because he genuinely seemed to think he was being helpful), he said he knew that belly dancing wasn't like lap dancing, but still, I should try to go along. Later on he came over to apologise. "I'm so sorry", he explained, "I goat it wrang. You shoulduh slapped meh, course you're no interestit in lap dancin, ah goat the name wrang. She's no' a lap dancer. She's a *pole* dancer." Which, *of course*, makes it all right... Ah, Leith.

      In keeping with the informal nature of the event, anybody could turn up on the day and dance if they felt like it. Dancers turned up with their iPods and we agreed the running order at the start of the afternoon. We had 11 performers, 5 of them were dancing their first solos! I am delighted that the beginners, Kim, Ruth, Jade, Claire and Amanda, made their first performances at Shimmy by the Shore, and from talking to them afterwards, they seemed pretty happy about it too. I will single out Kim for her energetic, well put-together performance - because she comes to my classes at Fisherrow. Well done Kim, you were great!

      Among the more experienced dancers who performed were Caroline Rose and Moyra Banks, fresh back from Shafeek's stage school in London, who did their beautiful meleya lef duet, full of charisma, confidence and joy.  Moira Berry was also freshly inspired, recently returned from Morrocco, she performed a joyful, exuberant Berber Morroccan dance with, as she put it, "plenty of  bum". Eleanor Trueman did a jazzy showstopper from Chicago and got the most awesome audience response of the afternoon! It was wonderful to see my friend and fellow Leither, The Exotic and Soulful Shelley, perform a very beautiful but all too short piece to an Ella Fitzgerald song - she was commanding, sensitive and very lovely indeed.

It was great to see Claire, new to Edinburgh but not to bellydance, performing too; and Basimah was kind enough to share a very lovely dance with us to start off the afternoon.

      Overall, it was a lovely afternoon of dancing. I'm so grateful to everyone for coming along to make it successful, and especially to the performers. Thank you all!

      I would love to Shimmy By The Shore again, and hope to organise another one early next year. I want to keep up the momentum for a community, friendly, informal event - hope you'll join me then!

To talk or not to talk?

I had a great experience teaching classes tonight!

I've had asthma for 8 years, usually very mild, but after some extended time with some dogs, I've been suffering miserably for the last week. Copious amounts of ventolin are being consumed and I've had some oral steroids too - not much good so far, sadly. So tonight I turned up at class feeling very sorry for myself, and for the first time that I can remember, wishing I'd asked someone else to teach the class for me.

Unable to dance and talk at the same time without fainting, I thought I'd try the dancing part, not the talking part. I've been a student in classes with visiting teachers whose English is limited, and still learned a lot by through the "follow the bouncing butt" technique (phrase coined by Zafirah!) so I knew it could be done.

What I didn't expect was how liberating it was! I realised that I was trusting my classes to follow me, having confidence in their ability to copy my body instead of listening to my voice. It also allow me to concentrate more on watching my students while they copied me - which was such a pleasure, noticing more than usual what moves they were excelling at! I guess I learned that I don't always need to give a bucketful - sometimes an eggcup is enough.

Sadly, when I tried the same technique in the later class, my iPod ran out of power! With no music I had no choice but to talk while it charged up again! But oddly, instead of being tireder after an hour of teaching, I found my lungs had opened up (especially through the arm and chest work) and I managed to get through an hour of mayas and tight, modern legs-together moves. Without feeling obliged to shout out moves or technical details while I danced, I felt much more able to concentrate on the music and the dancers in front of me.

As usual, I feel that there isn't a right or wrong way to teach (within reason!) - every lesson is different, every student takes something different out of the class. But it makes me happy when I try something new and, I hope, it works. Like a new pen in my pencil case!

I left the class feeling 20 times better than when I arrived. Hurray for the restorative power of dance! On Thursday evenings I almost always feel very, very lucky - I can go to work feeling dreadful and leave feeling great!