Dance Web

just a quick note to any dancers that have been trying to reach me lately – i’ve tracked down at least two different people who tried to send email recently that didn’t make it to me. no explanations, no pattern – two different people in two different states. so, just to get on the record here, if you haven’t heard from me, it’s not because i’m ignoring you… i probably don’t know you’re waiting.

to compound issues, i’ve had [paper] mail trouble lately (surprise letters from a month ago showing up) and phone trouble. kinda having a general communication breakdown, i suppose.

please try again. don’t give up on me.

update: with the public announcement, there are now four people suffering from email black holes. one is partially resolved (sending again did work) – the rest are still a mystery.

i just want to throw a little push in here for all the visitors – what’s the point of this site, really?

well, it started with the calendar problem. i was trying to schedule my photo-work around a large and expanding community of dancers, spread across a fairly large geographic region. as you can imagine, there’s something happening somewhere pretty much all the time, so it becomes an exercise in prioritization. but to prioritize, you have to know what’s available. and therein lies the rub.

what i found in my personal experience was two kinds of calendars – the individual, personal calendar, which has the advantage of being kept very up-to-date, but the disadvantage of covering a big geographic area (see artemis), for one person, making much of the information… well… useless. the other calendar is the regional organization calendar, which has the advantage of geographic focus and performer diversity, but the problem that it’s usually just one person that has to do all the updates, so sometimes the calendar gets out-of-sync with reality.

so, after a couple rounds of experiments with calendar stuff (and we’re not done yet!), here we are. what you have here is a group-edited regional calendar. of course, you can browse through the whole thing with that link, or you can narrow your browsing to just maryland or just workshops – whatever suits you.

for the really geeky, you can also pick up that information in a customized rss feed, which you can integrate directly into your own calendar.

now, to be sure, there are still problems – not the least of which is that this system doesn’t handle recurring events (every wednesday at…) very well at all. but, i hope it’s a step in the right direction, and i want to encourage everyone out there to take advantage of it.

the boston globe is running a story on meetup.com (the site), but… the hook in the story is dance.

It’s after 9 p.m. on a winter Wednesday, and the Boston Bellydance Meetup is just getting underway. Ten people sit around a long table at the Middle East Restaurant in Cambridge wrestling with a tricky problem: how to transport a sword through US airports.

it’s a pretty big deal when bellydance makes the “real media,” so here are a few clips from the bigger universe…

an article on miles copeland and the birth of the superstars, from the free new mexican: Post-punk entrepreneur Miles Copeland’s bellydance diplomacy

from the pop music critic of the cleveland plain dealer: Success story goes on for Miles

interview in the free times (ohio): Soundcheck : Miles Copeland : Manager and Label Owner

just a nod from me for a great show and a good cause… it seems the dance from the heart show in dc was an all-around success.

A Russian-born ballerina who toured the United States for many years with the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo and was known for her lyricism. She was 86.

a soloist with the New York City Ballet; he was 52

since it seems i hardly get to spend any time at my desk anymore, i thought i’d bring along the 2004 logs from the dance site to play with on the road… as a mostly pointless, but distracting exercise. so, with a couple tools and a pile of data, here’s some silly things i thought i’d share with you about this site. it’s sad when you’re looking for “something else” to do on the laptop just for a change of pace. blech.

first, some popular search queries… what’s bringing people to this little corner of the web? let’s go to the tape… the top 50 queries of 2004 are:

inul daratista (this post about inul datatista is one of the oldest posts here, so it’s obviously gathered the most momentum).
melodia pants (presumably coming for this post from marta)
dance theatre of harlem (item here – which, actually, is a bit out of date. there’s more to the story now.)
rachel brice (a legend in her own space)
gambar telanjang (which is in a comment about inul daratista, see above)
najla video clip (here)
rai music (so far, only mentioned here, so someone should have something more to say)
najla
atash maya (which is a syndication feed brought to this site here)
maria antonieta pons (an obituary)
inul
anastasia volochkova (two items about the famous ice-cream-loving russian ballerina)
extreme flexibility (news from medicine
sahara dance (a local school)
samira photos (perhaps not the samira they intended, but we have a stunning dancer)
amar gamal (mentioned in march and june
najla clip
najla singer
interpretive dance (this event)
samira dresden
rakkasah east
bellydance blog
bellypalooza
summer dance party
sharon kihara
dance blog
inul daratista telanjang
bellydance superstars
bellydancer
bellydancers
rachel kay brookmire
rachel brice dvd
tel aviv cafe bethesda
livejournal communities
faten salama
christina petro
gothic bellydance
experimental dance
najla video
tribal costume
batman dance
dancers portfolio
taste of morocco arlington
bella lewitzky
lucy bowman
devadasi
gothic dance
raqs gothique
inul daratista picture
gothic belly dance

lots of personal references – so congratulations to inul, najla, rachel (of the west), amar, samira, sharon, rachel (of the east), anastasia, faten, christina, bella, and lucy – people are looking for you. (as an aside, if you’re one of those, or someone else people have come looking for, you may want to make sure your personal profile has useful information in it…)

anyway, that’s what’s popular… here are some queries that may make you go “hmmmm..?”

compose a ballet
how to ask someone to winter formal dance
holiday tea pictures
guys forced to wear leotards for dance
robotic dance moves clips
mood vs emotion
these are your hips
how do you get eyelash glue off??
guys with perm rods in their hair
knee hi’s history
i see lipstick
drum circle babes
pirate hairdos
house in desert
where was yahoo invented
jack sparrow scarf
i am pregnant
write a letter for a sentencing hearing in ga

i hope some of these people found what they were looking for (others, i’m not so sure i want to know that they can find what they’re looking for…)

and now that i’ve wasted some time playing with google… back to the grind. see you on the flipside….

just a quick word of thanks to all the dancers (and their friends) that participated in the photoshoot this past weekend…

special thanks to Sahara Dance for supporting this little experiment.

(since these dancers dance as a set, i thought i’d put them together as a set…)

i also want to publicly thank blaze for excellent technical support through the day.