We kicked off our 2016 dance season
on Sunday at one of my favourite venues – the World Museum Liverpool. I
was joined by Kebi, Meroe, Naima and one of our new dancers, Lina, whose name
means ‘little palm tree’.
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| Kebi, Meroe, Naima, Pheonece and Lina |
Despite only having one short
afternoon of dance we still managed to entertain 386 visitors! Not a bad total for what we were told was one
of the quietest Sundays for some time.
On arrival we were warmly greeted by Steve who, as always, looked after
us throughout the afternoon and even joined in the fun, dressing up and helping
out with the children.
We performed four sets during the afternoon
and included lots of audience participation. We started with Tunisian and Moroccan
dances which were followed by a scarf dance with our mini-me dancers; one or
two of the parents even joined in too.
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| Scarf dance |
We followed this later on with Egyptian,
Bedouin and Nubian sets. After the Egyptian set there was a formal workshop led
by Meroe. This is where we dress the children
up to dance with us. Everyone received one
of our special Ya Raqs certificate to take home afterwards.
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| Budding dancers queuing up for the workshop! |
Our Tunisian costumes drew the most attention
from some of the ladies watching the performance. They were very impressed; no
doubt due to the elaborately adorned headdresses and copious amounts of jewellery
we wear with the costume!
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| Meroe's Tunisian Headdress |
Our Tunisian costume consists of a
full length skirt and shirt covered with an oversized tunic fastened at the
shoulders with a pair of fibulae. It is
the bustle and cord hip tassels that accentuate the twisting hip movements in
Tunisian dance. Our costumes were made by Meroe, but she drew the line at
producing all of the distinctive hip
tassels, so she gave us a pattern to work from and we made our own!
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| Meroe and Kebi adorned with jewellry, including some bought from our many trips to Morocco and Egypt |
Tunisian dancers wore mainly silver
jewellery often inlaid with lapis, coral, turquoise and sometimes amber. We
make the costumes our own by adding our own individual jewellery.
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| Fibuale to fix the costumes |
Our fibulae were made for us in
Morocco and they are all different, but equally as beautiful.We all have such a
large collection of jewellery now, which we have added to over the years. I love
the large collection of beautiful re-cycled beads, rings and bracelets that I
have accumulated from my trips to India.
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| This is the jewellery I chose to wear on Sunday. |
I’m spoilt for choice now when we
dance Tunisian; the jewellery is quite heavy and we need to limit it so it
doesn’t affect our dancing, particularly as the Tunisian is one of the more
energetic of our routines!
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