Dance Web

from variety, august 3, 2003…

Also mining an allegorical vein, Nesher is currently developing “Oriental” — a humorous doc examining the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through a portrait of a Russian belly dancer and her troupe of Arab musicians.

i bring this up, as it seems to be one of the features shown at the jerusalem film festival a couple weeks ago. has anyone seen it?

just a short little thing to point you to… here.

having faced a “wave of criticism” and having her singing license revoked by the egyptian musicians union, najla has resorted to secrecy to film her second video.

Najla determined to keep new video top secret (al bawaba, july 22, 2004)

Under high level of secrecy, Alam Al-Fan Production Company started filming the new video clip for the Tunisian singer and belly dancer Najla. Najla’s first video clip “Hatlob Ieedak” (I Will Ask for Your Hand Tomorrow) waged a wave of criticism after the singer showed up in the clip with very revealing and seductive outfits.

The second song, which is currently being filmed, is composed by Hassan Ish Ish and written by Bahaelddin Mustafa while direction is by Ahmed Yusri. The video will be exclusively aired on Mazzika satellite music channel.

Najla’s license to sing was cancelled by the Egyptian musicians association but this cancellation does not include filming the video clip the thing that explains why Hassan Ish Ish agreed to compose her video clip. The head of Egyptian Musicians Association Hassan Abu So’oud composed Najla’s first song.

Najla asserts that her new music video will include even more seduction and boldness. Najla’s first video clip raised lots of criticism after she showed up with revealing clothes and riding on a horse.

Najla added that she is using a tiger this time in the video clip where she tries to tame it, adding that she will deal with him the same way she dealt with the horse in her first video clip. The Tunisian singer expressed her sadness after being banned to sing in Egypt but added that she will be using Ruby’s experience to help her change the decision of the Egyptian musicians association.

Since the release of her latest hit Najla has been receiving numerous offers to star in different films. The latest offer that Najla has received was for a leading role in a new film “Bustan El Viagra” (Viagra Garden) after prominent Egyptian actresses Laila Elwi and Elham Shahin turned it down. It has not been confirmed if Najla will accept the role or not.

Najla, whose first profession is belly dancing, ranked number one having the most seductive and e sexual video clip, and is the living example of sexing-up the Arabic video clips and changing it from a musical script to a mere cheap sexual performance.

hot off the presses in arizona, a brief, but pleasant article from the verde valley news: Tribal Belly Dance.

For organizing rides needed and seats available to and from the East Coast Belly Dance Classic 2004, rooms or couches to share and anything else that comes up. Post comments with anything you need or have available for people attending the Classic.

we saw this light up today, mostly through the indigo tribe.net feed….

the word is that kaeshi of bellyqueen was approached by playboy for an upcoming “girls of bellydance” issue (well, it’s more than a word, i saw the newsletter too…). this, of course, brings up a whole raft of issues that come with modern american culture - is it exploitation? inappropriate? acknowledgement and acceptance? good clean fun? good dirty fun? access to mainstream media? perpetuating inappropriate sterotypes? good for business? bad for business? good for art? bad for art?

or, is it all just a scam?

presented by the mayor’s fitness council (that’s mayor of chicago), a piece from the chicago sun-times: Get your groove on, and get healthy while you’re at it.

also here: Belly dancing classes shake up fitness scene - from the state (south carolina).

health and fitness and dance popping up in headlines. i can’t say much about healthy - i’ve been slowly rotting away for years now, but… i’ve also surrounded myself with amazingly healthy and talented people, so there is hope…

Please share your thoughts and suggestions…

you’ve found your way here, either through some prodding on my part or some random cruise of the net, and now you need to know what’s going on here and what you can do….

this is the latest evolution of my attempt to build a technological foundation for the dance community. it’s hardly an original idea, but i’m trying to leverage what i have available to do some good and make a difference.

reading is, and always will be, open to the public, so if you’re just here to browse, welcome. if you’d like to contribute and participate in this little community adventure, there are four major features here that you should be aware of: the calendar, the blogs, the “content management system” and the aggregated links from around the web. to participate, you’ll have to create an account (which basically involves verifying your email address).

1) the event calendar. the calendar is something i’m still trying to make effective. it’s been through several versions, and it’s still not everything i’d like it to be, but the motivation is to provide a single place where many people can help keep things up-to-date and accurate, and make it available in multiple formats so the information is useful for more than just this site. this particular calendar is still not very useful for recurring events, but it’s a major improvement from the last version. still a work in progress, but there is progress.

2) personal blogs and profiles. if you’re familiar with online journals (like livejournal) or blogs, then you already know what this is about. if you’re not, it’s a simple way to share your thoughts (or other things) with the world online. click on a few links, bang out some text and the world can come find you. you’ll probably notice the little blue “b” boxes scattered around so many of the links here. those are one-click “blog about this” links for you.

3) stories, polls, forum topics and such. i’m not sure how these will be used in this context, but they are available. got a story that you want to share with the world? you can “publish” here. got a question you want to ask? set up a poll. want to start a conversation? we have the forum topics. a lot of these things overlap, so please feel free to experiment and see what feels right.

4) aggregation from other resources. finally, i’m using this platform to pull content from around the web and make it available in one place - livejournal communities, yahoo groups, tribe.net tribes - these are all published in a computer-readable format. to save you some time in your around-the-web surfing, and to give you the opportunity to discover new things that you might be missing, i’m pulling all this stuff together her you’ll notice little “b” blocks next to the syndicated content - clicking on those will let you create a personal blog entry related to that material.

so there’s a brief introduction to the major features here. there is more (and will be more), but hopefully that’s enough to get you started. comments, suggestions and your thoughts are always welcome. this is your space, please make it useful…

once you’ve signed up, don’t forget to throw some information into your personal profile (go to “my account” and “edit account”) - particularly if you’ve got a personal web page you’d like people to find. you can also decide how much stuff you’d like to see on the “home page” here when you show up (you can turn sections on and off, depending on what you are interested in).

a special note to new users: until we get to know you a little better, your comments and other material may go through a “moderation queue” before they’re visible to the public. please don’t take it personally - we’re just not hosting for spammers here. once you’ve been around a while and become part of the community, we’ll make sure you get faster response time.

i’ll need to write something here to explain how all this works and encourage people to take advantage of it. it could be brief, it could be tedious, but it does need to get done, and i’m probably going to go ahead and do it in public.

———-

i suppose the best thing to do is start at the beginning (a very good place to start) and explain a bit about why i’ve done this and what i hope it might accomplish.

several months ago, i set up about a dozen dancers with access to a bloging system i was using for my own personal stuff, in the hope that they’d find some use for it - either the ease of getting information out there, or the inexplicably high search engine placement i get here, or something else. the idea was to simply offer up a platform and let the community figure out how to use it.

at about the same time, i was frustrated with the calendar problem, and used the same package in an attempt to fix that too. that was kludgy, awkward and while the results were pretty good for me (i had a single place to go for upcoming events and to look for conflicts), it was a pain for people to use and was completely useless for recurring events (which happen a lot in this business of dance). i kept experimenting with calendar solutions (and still am), and after