When we arrived we were greeted by our lovely ‘minder’ Steve, who showed us to our very own dressing room.
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| In with the bugs! |
Over the years we’ve shared dressing rooms with some interesting people but never bugs! We hoped they wouldn’t bite and they didn't - thank goodness!
We started our first day with a Tunisian routine followed by a Moroccan inspired dance with scarves, giving us yet another opportunity to wear all our lovely bling.
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| Meroe, Kebi and Mish Mish all blinged up in their Tunisian costumes |
We followed this set with a mini-me workshop for some of our small, and not so small audience, who enjoyed joining us with a bit of swishing and twirling of colourful scarves.
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| Some rather fuzzy audience participation - it's a job to focus when there is quite so much swishing going on! |
We had three more sets during the course of the afternoon- Ghawaazee, Bedouin and finally Nubian – and a more formal workshop with a chance for our mini-me dancers to earn their special Ya Raqs Certificates! Meroe rounded off the day with a very colourful Nubian solo.
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| Aisha, Phoenece and Meroe in Ghawazee costume |
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| Queuing up for the Ya Raqs Certificates! |
As those of you who follow our blog regularly will know, we do try to keep our sugar levels up with some cake at some point during the course of an event - a must if you are dancing as much as we do! However, on this occasion we ended the day not with our now traditional tea and cake, but with ice cream.
We're not quite sure what the ice-cream man thought as we all queued up in costume! But he took it in his stride - doesn't everyone dress like this in Liverpool? OK, maybe not!
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| Forming an orderly queue - just blending in! |
As nice as the ice cream was it was clear that some of the Ya Raqs dancers didn’t want to get caught!!
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| Naima and Aisha - camera shy, or just hiding their ice creams? |
We sat out in the glorious sunshine after a super day for a well earned rest and were joined by a lovely gentleman called Billy, a 94 years young war veteran who entertained us with some of this war time stories.
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| Our new fan - Billy - with Aisha and Meroe |
Our Sunday performances were just as enthusiastically received as our Saturday routines. We had some FAB dancers and our mini-me dancers enjoyed dressing up in the glittery and jingly costumes. Those that didn't join us for the actual workshops were spotted swaying their hips and were quite happy dancing along to our music. What was nice on the Sunday was that we had some grownups join us too - it is always a pleasure to have adults as well as children getting up and showing us their moves.
Our final performance of the weekend was a World Premier – by dint of the fact that it was in the World museum and it was the first time we’d performed it in public – a group stick routine. The original choreography was by Serena Ramzy, but she had very kindly given Meroe permission to tweak it a little so that it would work as a group dance. We were very proud of our performance and it seemed to be very well received.
We also got the opportunity to wear our new Turkish inspired costume, made specially by Meroe and Phoenece. Watch out for a new routine that will be more appropriate for this new costume at a future event.
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| Phoenece, Meroe, Mish Mish and Naima in our new costumes |
So, another wonderful weekend at the World Museum came to an end. Check out our video for a taste of what we got up to on the Saturday.
We would like to thank the good folk of Liverpool, who came to the museum on such a lovely summer’s weekend – they could so easily have gone to the beach - but they came to see us instead! OK, so maybe we weren't the only reason they came to the museum.
And last, but not least, a very BIG thank you to the lovely staff at the museum, especially Steve, who never fail to make us very welcome and always look after us so well.
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