(Founder and Artistic Director: Susie White)


Monday 18 April 2016

World Museum Liverpool 10th April, posted by Phoenece

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’.
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.

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.

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!

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!

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.

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.

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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