Saturday, August 08, 2009

Things that mystify me

Well thank goodness I have some talented ladies in my troupe, one of whom is a pro graphic designer, because I? Just spent 90 minutes resizing an image and figuring out how to paste it into a blank document in order to fit 4 small flyers per page. I'll try printing it with some left over card stock and linen resume paper (it's time for a new batch) tomorrow so I have them to pass out at the All Seasons Hafla.

On that note, the Third Annual Kallisti Tribal Inappropriate Hafla will be Saturday September 12th! (dancers can contact me about performing)



It's all fun and games until someone loses a bindi. 

3 comments:

Desirée Cervidae said...

That is a really well-designed flyer, I must say. I'm also really curious about the Inappropriate Halfa...what sordid things might happen there? ;)

Unknown said...

HAHAHAHA! Love it! I wanna go to an Inappropriate Hafla!

Amy said...

Desiree - the flyer design is thanks to our troupe member Lyra, she's a graphic designer by trade.

The hafla is a place for people to get silly, or sexy, or funky, or crass, or whatever moves them but might "get them kicked out of the belly dance scene." It came out of our troupe goofing around in practice, and then meeting Troupe Hip'notic from Southern MD, who we realized were our soul sisters in being inappropriate.

Last year our troupe did a 10 minute mash-up satire piece that covered strict ATS (we played kazoos and zills and danced to Helm's "Amel), the ever present first veil piece to "Marco Polo" combined with woo-woo spiritual dancing (Lyra, who was 7 months pregnant, "birthed" Noralita), uber-serious goth dancing (vampire and victim role play), Indian-Belly fusion (bad bahngra to Panjabi MC), the "we can use every prop we can get out hands on including things that have nothing to do with belly dance" AND the Balkan trend (fans, swords, hula hoop, impassioned over wrought solo with live tuba accompaniment, tiny hats, poi and more) to March Forth's "Yiddish Blues", with the last part of that song being just us dancing as we dance all the time, no tricks, no gimmicks.

All of the poking fun came out of not only what we see in the dance scene but also at our own experiences (and missteps) with belly dance. If you go on Flickr and google "Inappropriate Hafla" and Kallisti Tribal, you'll see quite a few pictures from the past two years.