China was intense for me.  After a week of freezing performances in Shanghai, I went to Beijing to teach another week of workshops.  But it was even colder there.  Dressed in three pairs of pants, three long sleeve thermal shirts, a sweater, coat, gloves, boots, and fur hat, my face was so bitterly cold that I would get a brain freeze just walking down the street.  Not to be deterred, I still made my way to The Temple of Heaven and the largest Tibetan Buddhist Monastery outside of Tibet.  My workshops in Beijing were more challenging than I had anticipated.  I have taught there the last two years and the students were always quick learners so I planned to teach an intermediate course this time.  I even decided to push a little harder than usual until the translator had to stop me and inform me that I was teaching a group of bran new beginners!  The Chinese are so sweet and can follow along so well that they just let me go and kept up as best they could, never complaining.  But as it turned out they knew nothing of Tribal Fusion or what makes it any different from cabaret bellydance.  The Chinese don’t have access to youtube, facebook, or tribe, so the common way many of us bellydancers in the West stay abreast of current trends, study old lineage, or simply keep connected isn’t available to this entire country.  So I pooled what resources I had with me, namely DVDs and pictures on my computer, and showed them footage of Fat Chance Belly Dance, then Jill Parker, then Rachel Brice, then The Bellydance Superstars with myself, Mardi Love, Kami Liddle, Zoe Jakes, Sharon Kihara, etc.  This demonstrated  for them at least the beginning understanding of how Tribal shifted so drastically from cabaret bellydance in the 80s and then followed a specific tac in San Francisco until The Bellydance Superstars made Tribal Fusion a global name.  I wished that I had more resources with me to show the myriad of other tacs that Tribal belly dance has taken…ethnic, gothic, modern, burlesque…but a least by the end of the workshop the students felt they had a grasp of what distinguishes Tribal Fusion belly dance.

I flew home the day before NYE and spent the day unpacking, reorganizing, wrapping presents, celebrating a late Yule with my mom and sister and then before I knew it I was bringing in 2010 with loud Mariachi music in a random Mexican bar in some tiny town called Yelm, WA.  Life is funny the way it can pick you up and then put you down in the most unusual places.  So now it’s a bit of down time before my workshop in Mexico City next weekend.  I love the calm after the storm.  I love to fill it with projects that I could never complete on tour.  This two week project list consists of constructing a line of Moria clothing, researching ethnic jewelry to write a chapter about Tribal jewelry in belly dance, figure out how to post all my adventure pictures and video to The Bellydance Superstars website, and begin choreographies for our new Bellydance-Indian fusion show—I am SO excited!!  When I think about any one of these projects I want to jump out of my skin…and if you have ever seen my caffeinated, you can get a mental image of just how high my skin can leap!  It’s a luxury to have this time to work on my passions and I consider myself a very lucky woman.  Here is to realizing the fruition of your passionate projects in 2010!  I’d be honored to know what your new year’s dancer projects are…

Moria