Dance Web

yahoo seems to think so….

ask yahoo yourself

Bellydance Origins:

Trust me, a Belly Dancer will happily dress just as skimpy and flashy - and will dance with just as many wiggles and undulations - for an all-female audience, as they will for an audience that includes men. In fact, most of the dancers I know would rather dance for the all-female audience any day.

from the contra costa times (jan 27, 2006):

More recently, she saw a belly dance show performed by Suhaila Salimpour, a Kensington resident with a dance studio on San Pablo Avenue in El Cerrito. She e-mailed Salimpour (who professionally uses her first name only) and the two became friends. Somewhere along the way, an idea for a reality show was hatched. They spent this week at the studio filming material for a television pilot.

“I spend a lot of time working on reality shows,” said Lorene Machado, a television and movie producer who works closely with Cho. Machado said her reality credits include “Bridezilla” and the “World’s Wildest Police Videos.”

“This clicked immediately,” she said. “It has so much potential. You can’t keep it in the box. It’s kicking at the box to get out.”

could it be the end? or a new beginning?

a quick tip-o-the-site to our own Asharah, with her appearance in the washington post this week:

On a recent Thursday night, a 25-year-old belly dancer known as Asharah, who learned her first moves as a Princeton University student, winds her way up and down the narrow aisle between tables, snaking her arms through the air and eliciting catcalls with her Turkish drop, which takes her from a 90-degree backbend to the floor.

it’s not entirely dance, but it’s a cultural-technological crossover that piques the curiosity… from China Daily ( http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/english/doc/2005-12/15/content_503671.htm ):

An Indian model wears a Analog integrated circuit (IC) with intelligent charging capabillities for Lithium-ion batteries pasted on a bindi during a launch ceremony in Bangalore.

(pictures in the link)

just a brief note to share a pretty significant milestone in my work with a very special dancer…

my work has just recently been promoted to the “front and center” position at samira shuruk’s website.

after many, many months, I finally captured her in her veils and she seems to like the results.

thanks samira

With the end of 2005, I’ve had a chance to spend some time looking at how this site is used, and, sadly, my general impression is validated with that data… Warning: After the past few months, I’m pretty down on the whole belly dancing thing, and that’s going to come through in this message. My apologies in advance. Let me cut right to the chase:

Over 400 people are registered and have access to post material here on this site - but no one is.

There are a few visitors that consistently visit and consistently post their information, and I am thankful for their participation. That said, any concept of a “community” I had hoped would evolve with this space has failed to materialize. Now, I have to focus on this site and its future.

The last “forum post” of any kind was almost two months ago. The last comment posted here was more than 10 weeks ago. While I can provide what appears to be excellent coverage with search engines for material you put here, it’s almost entirely material *I* put here. I don’t need another space to spew my own thoughts (I’ve already got one of those and no time to write there). On the positive side, even this dark little corner of the web has attracted over 45,000 visits just through search engines from people around the world looking for dance-related content (and, surprisingly, a large number from France, Germany, Australia and Malaysia). Those people should be finding your material, but so far, your material isn’t here to be found.

So, good search engine magic isn’t enough to attract significant participation here, and despite my own [admittedly sporadic] efforts to stir up some commentary with dance-related items from the media, this site doesn’t seem to work for you. There are plenty of discussion sites out there (bhuz, orientaldancer.net, tribe.net, yahoo and so many more (many of which are available here too). Discussion stuff was always pretty speculative for this place, but I figured it couldn’t hurt to try something with a more local focus.

The original purpose here was the calendar, and even there, only a few people are posting their events. I know it’s not the prettiest thing, but it was intended to serve a very particular purpose that is still, I think, unmet: A [mostly] regional calendar with a full array of up-to-date events and happenings from a good number of the performers in the area. Straddling the boundary between the dozens of individual calendars on each of your personal sites and the limited updates of the WAMEDA and Baltimore Bellydance calendars. My hope was that by allowing the people responsible for organizing events to promote their events with a simple fill-in-the-blank form, rather than waiting for me to get around to posting their material it would be a) more useful and b) more accurate. The bigger idea was to help you find your audience.

I had plans to expand the calendar effort pretty significantly, and add some neat features that would help you with your own web sites (giving you tools to pull your own events from this site into your site so you only have to update one place), but there seems to be little point in making that effort given the level of participation.

This all leaves me with one last general appeal to the public, to follow this one, which has had no response. This time, I’m going to be a little more stark and blunt:

Is there any point in running this site? If so, what do you want from it?

I hate arbitrary deadlines as much as the next person, but in the interest of not wasting any more of my time, let’s say we figure this out by the end of January, or I’ll just pull the plug on the whole thing and move on to something else. Maybe it was just a bad idea; I’m ok with that.