I’m hitting the road! I’m super excited to announce that at the end of the month I will be teaching an amazing two-hour workshop in Glastonbury:
I work as a Tribal Fusion Belly Dancer (it’s my other big passion) and on Sunday the 26th July (the weekend right before Goddess Conference, woohoo!) I will be popping over to Glastonbury to teach my workshop, Presence of the Priestess. It’s like a masterclass on stage presence where I tell you all my secrets and get you to play and practice!
Whenever I perform, people always remark upon my epic stage presence. Stage presence is the indefinable something that makes one performer mesmerising to watch and another really dull. It transcends dance technique – the most technically advanced dancer can still be soulless to watch, and a naieve beginner dancer can bring so much stage charisma that she sets your heart on fire. Stage presence is the thing that makes you suspend disbelief, sit on the edge of your seat and really be with the performer in the moment. It’s a form of theatrical magic: intangible, hard to describe, but super powerful.
I think being able to hold an audience and rock the stage is a super important part of being a performer and making amazing belly dance: additionally I think it’s a super important part of being a practising priestess. Being able to calmly hold an audience’s attention and project an energy out to them is vital. I don’t think it’s a co-incidence that so many of the famous and charismatic priestesses of the past (I’m thinking Maud Gonne, Monia Mathers and Florence Farr) had theatrical backgrounds or at least a taste for theatrics. I’ve been to rituals where priestesses had strong presence and where they had weak presence, and I can tell you – it can be the defining factor between a powerful ritual and a meh ritual.
I’m super comfy on stage, and I have a bunch of tricks and mindsets I use to really project out to my audience. So in this workshop I’ll share all my secrets and coach to start and powerfully inhabiting and projecting into the space you are in on stage, and show you how to practice presence ie. how to be present.
Stage presence is a really tricky thing to explain, as it’s not really a dance technique thing. So in this workshop we are not going to work so much with dance technique as with concepts, play, and some friendly hippy stuff. Presence is a mindset thing, and a cultivation and projection of a feeling, so we are going to use guided visualisation and lots of moving mediation and movement exploration to really access the feeling and the movement quality we are looking for with our stage presence. We will use inspiration from Danu, the crone goddess of Air and Stillness to create and inhabit and explore the experience of presence and centred power. For me, she is the perfect example of powerful presence, and my work with Her is what inspired this workshop.
At the end of the class, you will learn a short section of (really awesome) choreography to really play with and delve deeply with the concepts and practices we learnt today. Stage presence practice time!
The class is open level, as it’s not heavily dance-technique focused – the challenge is really embodying the concepts and putting them into practice. Since it’s a belly dance focused class, it’s intended for people with belly dance experience of some kind, but honestly due to the nature of what we’ll actually get up to it’d be super fun and valuable for anyone wishing to power up in the stage presence stakes.
Additionally, there is a Beginners Bhangra Workshop taught by Samantha Riggs available, a Dark Bellydance Cabaret workshop taught by Kash Salem and an evening party too – you can do the whole day for £45.
The two hour class costs £18 and booking is over at Scarlett Lotus Dance – click me to go to the booking page. Join Us!
