Ahhhhhahahahaaa! We are in the home stretch. Only 3 shows left of a 6 week, 36 show run that started in Vancouver, traversed the width of Canada, spiraled down through the mid-west via Graceland, Lincoln’s house, and The Alamo. We have met and performed with hundreds of bellydancers and drunk a Starbuck’s from every state in the union. We did it. And just in time. It’s come to that time in tour when food doesn’t taste interesting anymore. You have a strong sense of craving, but nothing seems to satisfy. Salt is too salty, sugar is too sweet, caffeine is too strong, yet you are always tired and somehow high strung at the same time. Our jokes have all run out and we’ve told the same ones so many times that there isn’t a need to laugh at them anymore, yet out of habit they still need to be said. It’s come to us staring at each other and periodically making angry camel noises when the time seems to be ticking in reverse. I’ve felt this way towards the end of every tour. Sad to leave all our fellow dancers who seem to be the only people on the planet who really get you, yet so hungry for new stimulus that a half hour shopping stop at Target seems like a wondrous journey to Wonka’s magical chocolate factory. When sleep has become boring and staying awake arduous, it’s time for a trip home.
So now the planning of all the amazing things I will do when I get home. This list becomes longer and more fantastical as the future planning of all the experiences I will manifest with all this pent up energy grows! Such ideas as buying a house, turning the basement into an ancient Indian temple with faux stone walls, “vine” shaped shelving, murals on the ceiling mimicking the jungle’s open sky full of stars and monkeys, and grand silks hanging from every corner; traveling to Portand to find NagaSita and make her build me lovely crowns with all the bits of Mata Hari like jewelry I’ve collected over the years; travel to Seattle and find my Odissi guru and renew my training; plan a trip to Java, Bali, Thailand, Cambodia, and Samoa after our tour in Australia next spring. Find dance schools there who will teach me the quirky arms and ultra flexed mudras of Indonesia’s ancient court dances. And then such mundane things as building a new website, up dating all my workshop descriptions, and posting all the new photo shoots I did this summer. And then just when all of these grand ideas have run through and I feel scattered and over-whelmed, tour will begin again with it’s sweet regularity, beautiful venues, concrete schedule, happy laughy daffy friends, and simple unarguable joyful dancing! Ahhh, I look forward to the next tour already ☺
Updates from moriachappell RSS
-
The Last Week.
Moria Chappell
-
Ancient Dance, Familiar Joy
Moria Chappell
Odissi is a multi-thousand year old art form that nearly came to extinction as a result of war and commerce. Through the courage and rebellion of a brave woman who kept the dance alive despite the laws and taboos she was breaking, this incredible dance survived. If not for her and her son, the dance may have been lost forever. Certainly the flesh and blood link would have perished. As it is there is still a way to participate in the direct lineage from ancient temple dancers to modern performers. I’ve traveled to India over the last four years pursuing a passion for this dance that began ten years ago when I first beheld it. Throughout India I looked for the connection between women and their living goddess. Not everywhere in the world is the goddess as alive as through the dances of ancient India. As I’ve brought this nugget of knowledge back to America and begun teaching even the most basic of Odissi stepping and mudras, I see the same light that I felt brighten my students’ eyes–a glimmer of strength, rebellion, and connection. While the shapes are foreign, the stepping strenuous, the mudras perhaps confusing, and the eyes exaggerated, the feeling is very much the same. Joy welling up from a depth unknown, throwing off the expectation of a modern sense of beauty, rebellion against conflict and commerce, an underground expression of sensuality and spirit. There is a familiarity that bonds us as women, as dancers, as revolutionaries and as artists. I am so happy to share this work with all my fellow bellydancers. I think we have an important roll in the expansion and recognition of this ancient art. It has a lot to offer us too 
-
Criminally Insane!
Moria Chappell
I’m exploring madness with my new solo in the show. My skirt is striped with strange fabrics hanging hither and thither. I didn’t know I was exploring madness. I just liked the song, “Frontier Psychiatry”. But I was dancing it and not quite getting to where I felt proud so I made Sabrina dance it for me. Watching her move while hearing my own music made me see the vision. She came out holding her head like she was hearing the voices herself. And that was it. I AM insane…the song is talking about me! And that story line now carries me through. As I find joy through the dance it’s joy of madness moving into itself and coming out happy. The dance of a thousand voices speaking all at once. It might also be a good time for this break through to have happened. We are just past the half way mark of tour and have about 13 shows left and about 2.5 weeks. The show is set and the costumes only require maintenance sewing, so things have begun to get a bit repetitious as far as getting on the bus each morning, driving 3-5 hours, getting to a foreign city and trying to find a restaurant and a Starbucks before tech rehearsal. Then getting ready for the show, performing, getting all the grit and glitter off, riding the bus to the hotel, bedding down for the night just to do it all again the next morning. So exploding with a little madness each night in my solo is a nice release for the pent up energy. Now is the time to focus and remember the joy of each day. We are also chasing fall, so that helps to keep the inspiration flowing while we drive. The leaves are golden, red, yellow and falling. So lovely. The weather has blessed us on this tour. Each day has been sunny and sweet with a slight breeze. The moon has been full and the nights calm. But in the end we only have each other to stare at, laugh at, talk to, and wrestle with. Problem is none of us have much in the way of new stuff to talk about, so we get really bored and then make each other say strange things, scream like a peacock, repeat each other in weird accents, throw plastic spiders and chocolate at each other…criminally insane. But we get each other, and that’s the important thing. Insane is only a bad thing when nobody gets you -
Moria Chappell
Moms on Tour
This week my mother joined us on tour and has scooched into the belly bus with us. Since there are only 5 of us on there, there’s plenty of room, but we still share a seat just to be close. It’s wonderful having a tour mom around. She tells you all the little things she sees from the audience, if you need more lipstick, what the lighting looks like, how a piece is emoting…all the bits you would pay attention to if you were watching yourself dance. This is in-valuable information as often it feels like we are dancing in a void. The audiences are always wonderful, and the high you get from the energy of the crowd is stellar, but the details aren’t spoken to you, so you always wonder; is this the right blush for me on stage? Is my hair too low, too high, too big, too blond? Moms can answer all of these things. And my mother is just perfect because not only was she a theatre major in college, she’s also extremely loving and positive so you never feel bad about anything she says. The first time she saw me perform with the Superstars 6 years ago she raced back stage to tell me, “Put darker lipstick on, you have no mouth!” Then at intermission, “Fill in your eyebrows, you have no eyebrows!” Next it was, “Put your bindi higher, you look like you have a unibrow!” She was right on all counts. Another time she told me to be more free, let loose and risk more in my dancing. She was right about that too. So I’m very happy to have her here now. She is such a fan of the show and of the whole project in general that I think she has run out of feed back as far as corrections go, so now she just holds the camera (the only one in the audience allowed to video) so that we can hook it up to the flat screen on the bus and watch ourselves large and in detail. The camera is brutally honest. Wow. Not as kind as the mommy filter. But it is so useful. If you want honest feedback, watch yourself dance on video. Geeeez. Sometimes you will surprise yourself with how good something looks, and then other times you just wince and think, “That will never happen again.” She has video taped the last three shows in a row so we are quickly making adjustments. I’m finding that I like for some sort of story to evolve through a performance. Straight dancing doesn’t hold the interest for me that it once did. I must see some kind of motivation on the dancers face or else I drift off into my own imagination. I’m struggling with that a bit now because my song is really strange. It’s all words and typically there are never any words in the songs that I dance too. What’s more is the words don’t follow much logic. There is talk of insanity, cowboys and midgets, the man with the golden eyeball, something about an optometrist, a violin, and a bird/parrot/record. So story doesn’t happen so much. But it is evolving and with mom and Sabah’s trusty camera, I think my solo and I might come to some sort of a regular working pattern soon.
Also she reads our palms, our natal charts, and tells us all about mythology and world conspiracy theories while we put our make-up and hair on before each show….I love my mom on tour -
Fellow Dancer as Mirror
Moria Chappell
There is an infinite trust among performers when rehearsing pieces on a large stage with no mirrors. We must listen to our fellow dancer’s judgment of what they see when we run a piece. Some people can become largely defensive and others just don’t listen at all, but what I’ve noticed about those who really seek to attain perfection is that they always listen and even crave the feed back of their dance mates. The eye of the watcher must be the eye of the performer because there is just no other option. Video is useful, certainly, but there is something about a witness to the living breathing moment that speaks a testament only she can say. To this end I have felt such love for the other dancers on tour. If something isn’t sitting quite right and you ask someone to observe and correct, they take it as seriously as if it were their own piece and offer up as genuine a creative solution as they can think. Nothing reserved. And Vice versa, when a dancer responds to your input, there is such satisfaction in seeing the whole picture change and become a piece greater than it’s parts. Sabrina has mirrored me beautifully these last two weeks. As I’ve prattled off imagery and flung out movements she will repeat them back to me and after I scream, “Yes, that’s perfect, that’s just what I was thinking, how did you do that?” “Well you just did it” she replies humbly “I just repeated what you did.” Hmmm, I think, no, you did it better. And thus two Pisces compose a piece ☺. We mirror each other and others and ourselves and it all works just beautifully.
It’s Thursday morning about 3 am and we just finished our first show back in the US and while the drives have been long, the shows have been such fun. Each first act is new and full of fresh energy and smiling faces. I know we all feel so blessed to reach out and sweat hug all our fellow bellydancers at the end of each show. Some girls ask if what we blog is the real truth of how we feel, or is it just the positive version. The answer is yes, as cheesy as it sounds, we are all just gushing over how fun this tour is. Yes our muscles hurt, and Canada is too expensive to eat, and American gas stations have horrible food, and the bus smells like diesel, but at the end of the day when you sit down to write about it all, only a smile is available. And isn’t that a shared story among us all. Sure work is work, but dance is a passion and for that passion joy will always win.
-
It’s a 6 not an 8!
Moria Chappell
Oh geez, so usually I write about all the things that are exciting and inspiring for me…this week it’s about a really dumb thing I did that is dancer 101 and fixing the mistake made me want to rip my face off!
Ok, it all began simple enough, as great plans do. Sabrina and I had this upcoming duet to create for this very tour, and I got to begin the concept and choreography. Sabrina is gorgeous as FCBD style bellydance and I really love how many of the combination can shift slightly to give a totally different mood. So I began playing with my favorite moves, Chico, Orbit, Arabic, etc. I also worked in some of my favorite Tunisian combinations knowing that while almost all FCBD combos are based on a 4/4 count, Sabrina and I also love Gypsy Caravan and thought it would be fun to link it all together with some of their Tunisian combos mixed in with some Tribal Fusion spot turns, shoulder locks, belly rolls, and shimmy layers. All seemed fine until the first 5 songs I submitted for the show were denied and the 6th was something I just sent as an after thought. Of course the 6th was the winner. No worries, I thougt, I can work with anything. So our day to complete the choreography together came and we crammed all of our favorite things together, hit play and showed it to our friends! ….when the song finished Sabah had an odd look on her face…Stevie struggled to say something positive…and Victoria sat quiet. We knew something was wrong…say what you are thinking I encourage….Sabah blurts out “You know it’s a 6/8 right?” Doh! No….I didn’t figure that out. I knew it was a Tunisian piece of music and uh…yes, I should have thought it was a 6…well to be fair it is a 6 that repeats in rounds of 4 and the base beat is a 5…so, yeah, yeah, no excuse…I should have known. Well, no problem, I can fix this, I’ll just slow some combos down and speed some other ones up. Sooooo, 5 hours later we would run the piece and one time the music would end before the choreography and the next time we ran it the choreography would run out before the music…grrrrr! I wanted to rip my face off!! But now, we pushed through laughing and hurting the whole time. Finally! Eureka! The music slowed down to something reasonable and the 6s spoke to us. It all became languid and lovely. Sabah encouraged, “Once you get used to a 6, you’ll never want an 8 again.” On the walk home (hotel) we were chanting 123456, 123456. But I must say we have performed it a couple times this week and just saw a video of it and I love it. Next week we are putting zils on it and I think it will become even more alive. The response has been wonderful. The Tribal Bellydance Community loves seeing Tribal Style in the show and I think the zils wll be just as well received. So thank god for friends who can count a 6 and then tell you about it! HA! I probably shouldn’t admit something this embarrassing but maybe some of you have had a similar 3-stooges moment….this one was pretty big. -
