Here are all six of the fascinating interviews I carried out with dance teachers of all kinds, from Yamina the samba dancer to Fiona the fire-spinner. They were featured by the Centre for Stories from 2019-2020. Without further ado: stories for any dancer, anybody who has wanted to dance, or anybody who has wondered about the inner lives of performers that stir our hearts.
Suhki Krishnan – Classical Indian Dancer
I’m Sukhi Krishnan. I teach at Saraswathi Mahavidhyalaya (SMV), formerly known as the Temple of Fine Arts, and we’ve been around since 1981.
We teach many classical forms at our school, and most of our teachers including myself are volunteers. Our ideal is to promote art for the love of it.
I come from a family of dancers.
I started my formal training with my parents and teachers at the Temple of Fine Arts (TFA) in Kuala Lumpur. As a child I was surrounded by dance and music. My father used to choreograph at home and had musicians at home quite often. This was the environment I was brought up in. At school I did well in gymnastics and represented my state. Being in Asia apart from classical Indian dance, I was exposed to Asian culture and learnt Malay and Chinese dance. I loved my Malay dance training with my teacher Marion D’Cruz. I did some ballet training from my teacher Lee Lee Lan, a good friend of my dad.
I completed my schooling in Malaysia. I also completed my dance graduation at The Temple of Fine Arts Kuala Lumpur. I then came to Australia in 1987 to do my degree in Politics, Philosophy and Sociology. I studied in Melbourne initially and then transferred and completed my degree at Murdoch University in Perth. I got married and have been living here ever since.
Our founder, guru, mentor, Swami Shantananda Saraswathi, with the help of my father Gopal Shetty, started the Temple of Fine Arts here in 1981. They also started the Temple of Fine Arts in Kuala Lumpur, Singapore Sri Lankan and India. The Temple of Fine Arts is an international institution.
Our founder wanted art and Indian culture to be accessible to everyone, especially for Indians and Hindus living in a foreign country; to be able to understand their culture and art form. He wanted for the general community to appreciate and understand Indian art and culture.
I met Swamiji when I was five.
We belong to spiritual group that that met on Sundays. As my parents were dancers, Swamiji decided to start the Temple of Fine Arts. Indian art has spirituality as it’s backbone.
I started teaching in Malaysia as a teenager. My dad used to choreograph on me and I was expected to teach the choreography to the students. My father learned Bharatanatyam, Manipuri, Kathakali, Kathak and moment from Udhay Shankar.
I am blessed to have had been part of numerous creations, choreographies and productions done by Swamiji and my father. These experiences mould who I am today.
I started to have my own students only when I came to Perth in the 80’s and some of my students have graduated and become teachers in our institution. I have also been teaching at WAAPA for about 14 years now.
At SMV we teach various classical Indian dance forms. This was something every student leant at TFA. Learning various Indian classical and folk styles was part of our syllabus. Creating a dancer that had a diverse vocabulary of movement was the uniqueness of TFA. This holistic teaching began in the early ‘80s from the inception of the institution. It’s quite different from most other schools.
I too learnt all of these various styles.
Challenges
I think personally my major struggle was when I had my three kids and continued my career in dance.
I think the challenge was not having extended family support here.… but I self-managed, and I think that was the major struggle in my dance journey apart from some injuries.
Achievements
My life revolves around SMV and I head the institution. My individual achievements are also collective achievements.
It’s great to see our school grow. It’s very rewarding to see kids come to you to learn dance from the age of 5 and continue till they graduate at 19 or 20 years old. I believe it’s an achievement to keep them inspired and passionate to want to continue dancing. It’s absolutely fulfilling to be able to pass something cultural to the next generation.
One of our huge achievements is the creation and production of the “Swan Festival of Lights” in Perth. What started as a simple celebration of Deepavali, grew into a Festival that has attracted 30 to 40,000 people to attend over 3 days. We’ve run it for eleven years now. And it brings the whole community together. Personally as artistic director, I have had the pleasure of curating the festival for the past 11 years. Something I never thought I would do one day!
I think the fact that my whole family is involved in the arts is something I am most proud of. I’m very blessed to have my three kids dance. It’s also rewarding to lead and nurture a fraternity of dance teachers in our institute who have the same passion and dedication for the arts. Most of us volunteer our time at SMV.
Having a team that’s so passionate is the strength and pillar of this institution. Producing dance productions yearly is something we take pride in, like for example we just did a Midsummer Night’s Dream – with our school.
Yeah, we had a hundred and forty students take part. There are many aspects to a production. Having a story line and a narrative, putting music together, choreography of scenes, rehearsal schedules, costume for hundred and forty students , props, lighting design, stage management, publicity and marketing, ticketing and foyer set up and ushering all done completely by us and not external professionals. So can you imagine the extent of the task. There are challenges but the achievements are definitely rewarding. To have the whole institution take part, and to have the support of a team, a group of my peers and my colleagues who have the same mindset and passion to devote their entire weekend and week nights to pursue the Arts is a blessing. They come from various walks of life but are connected through art for the love of it.
And to still keep continuing as we age [she laughs]… that too I think is an achievement.
Telling Stories Through Dance
Indian dance is all about story telling. Dance was create to tell stories to the masses. Hindu epics, stories and legends were passed on through storytelling, using dance and music as a medium.
So, in those days, communities used to gather in the temples and dancers used to narrate stories like the Ramayana, and Mahabharata through the night. Through storytelling people learnt and understood Hindu scriptures easily.
I think one of the strengths of our institution is that not only do we choreograph Indian epics, but, we’ve taken stories from other cultures like Swan Lake, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, a Chinese legend called Butterfly Lovers and a Malay legend called Mashuri and created dance dramas.
We take a stories and put our own Indian thought to it. There is always a message in the stories we do. Ramayana is huge in this region.
The Ramayana
Ok. Well, it’s a very long story. In a nutshell, it’s about someone called Rama. He is the first born child out of four boys to king Dasharatha. He grows up to be loved by all as he is very righteous and kind. He has four brothers, Lakshmana, and Bharata and Shatrughna. And as they grow older, he conquers many demons, he meets princess Sita, who he gets married to. Unfortunately his step mother Kaikeyi gets jealous that he was proclaimed King of his Kingdom and not her son Bharata. She tells King, Dasharatha, to banish him to the forest for fourteen years. King Dasharata is forced to fulfill her request as he promised to grant her two wishes anytime for saving his life in battle. While Rama is in the forest, his wife Sita gets abducted by Ravana, a demon-king. Rama meets Hanuman the monkey who helps him on his journey to find his wife, Sita, in Lanka. Hanuman and his monkey battalion set themselves to go to Lanka with Rama and Lakshman to rescue Sita. A Great War takes place and Ravana is defeated. They returns back to Ayodhya (his kingdom) and takes his place as King. As victory of good over evil, the defeat of the demon king Ravana and the coronation of Rama as King, celebrations take place by lighting lamps everywhere. This is called Deepavali or Diwali.
Indian dance is spiritual and devotional. Just say you’re talking about Rama, and you’re talking about his virtuous qualities and his beauty and his greatness, in a cultural context it’s devotional to someone who is Hindu and believes these stories. So devotion comes through their movement, their expression, their feeling…
But it doesn’t have to be understood to be appreciated. Because movement itself, when it’s performed, and when you’re onstage, there’s no thought, there’s no ego, there’s no you… it’s powerful! The audience do feel it even if they don’t understand it. It’s a very hard point to hit as a performer. Movement is a form of meditation, I truly believe. You can call it spiritual, you can call it energy, you can call it being present in now, being aware that you are one with everything…
These moments are rare, but they do come. It is when you surrender… There’s no movement, there’s no you, there’s no stage, there’s no audience, you’re just you. You then are transported to a different realm…
And I think each person as a dancer/artiste, especially as a mature artiste there is “spirituality” in your practice.
I don’t think this only applies to Indian dance forms. I think it’s universal.
I dance because I want to learn more. It stimulates my mind and spirit. You are always a student… you cannot really say that you’re accomplished, it’s an infinite amount of knowledge. I am still a student… always will be.
Why do you dance?
I think dance – it makes me happy. I can lose myself in it… In whatever mood you may be in, you know, it elevates you. Yes, sometimes it’s really hard to motivate yourself to get up and practice but when you do it feels great. It’s a discipline. You feel good. It’s like someone who exercises, you get up and think ‘oh my god I have to run’, but once the adrenaline kicks in the feeling that you get [she breathes in bracingly] wow… it’s addictive. It motivates me to want more.
However, dance for me at this stage of my life is also a prayer and a form of meditation.
This excerpt of the “Festival of Lights” features the dancers of SMV: (67) Swan Festival of Lights Perth 2017 – YouTube
Jen Nie Chong – Traditional Chinese Dance
My name is Jen Nie Chong. I teach and learn Chinese dance.
I’ve been dancing since I was six years old. When I was younger, my mum was the principal of the first Chinese language school in Perth. I was born in Perth actually. But my family’s from Malaysia. Their family is originally from China.
And I went to Chinese class, Mandarin language class, every Saturday morning for two hours, and as an extracurricular activity they had Chinese dancing, so that’s where I started learning Chinese dancing. I think I’ve pretty much learned solidly since that age, every week, and I’ve had a lot of different teachers. I’ve also gone to a couple of different dance training courses in China. But yeah, pretty much solidly from that age. I’ve also done other styles as well, so I started doing ballet and a bit of contemporary dance, just as extra.
I first started teaching at the Chinese school on a Saturday, so I’ve been doing it all along, and then I was leading our group at Chung Wah here, and then I started teaching at the Chinese schools, different schools in Parkwood. I taught there for many years.
And now I’m teaching at a primary school, Oberthur Primary School, they have a Chinese immersion program where they do six and a half hours of Chinese language every week, and as extracurricular activity they have Chinese dancing, and they learn that before school.
Types of Dance
Well, there’s actually fifty-six minority groups, I think, in China, there are six major styles of Chinese dance, and the most common one would be the Han classical style. …let’s see. There’s Xin Jiang, which is in the west, western China, and there’s Mongolian, also Tibetan, and Korean, and Dai dance, d-a-i. So… if you’re learning Chinese dance, you would learn these six styles.
For us it’s more of an extracurricular activity, so we did mainly Han style, so we do mainly our fans, ribbons, umbrellas, because Chinese dance uses a lot of props. So we do all of those things but we also did some of these other styles like Xin Jiang or Mongolian. Those styles are really different depending on what region they’re from.
So, if you’re doing Tibetan, it’s more mountainous, so the movement’s more hunched, because, they’re like, they’re going up the mountain, the air’s really thin, it’s hard to breathe, they’re carrying lots of stuff, so the movements will be more like this [she hunches her back]. Then there’s Mongolian, that’s on the grasslands, so it’s more about riding horses and the hands will be like this [she holds her hands as if holding reins], with horses and stuff like that, so it’s all different styles depending on the region.
You do movements that kind of depict things. And they use a lot of eyes as well. And a lot of finger gestures, in Chinese dance, a lot of different styles like, that would be the main one [she elongates her fingers gracefully], one that’s like this, if you do a peacock dance, then it’d be, you know, like this [she puts her pointer finger to her thumb and raises the other fingers gracefully].
But a lot of the dancing is done at festivals, celebrations, celebrating the spring harvest and Chinese New Year, that type of thing. But it has its basis, I think, in opera.
You know Beijing opera? Maybe google Beijing opera or Peking opera and have a look at how they sing and do some hand gestures like this. It was a court dance, I believe. So they had costumes, and they’d be singing in this Chinese opera-like voice; a high-pitched voice, and kind of dance and move around. So that was the basis.
The men and women dance, but in Australia it’s more popular amongst girls. But yeah, men dance as well in Chinese dance, just like ballet. But the men have different movements and different hand movements, like the men’s hands might be like this [she puts her hands face-down and flat with fingers together], where the women’s might be like this [she parts her fingers gracefully]. So that’s slightly different styles.
I don’t really have a favourite (prop). I quite like ribbons. For ribbons you need a lot of arm strength and you also have to be very flexible as well, like in your hands and wrists, in some of the movements you have to be able to put your hands like this [she bends her wrists]; you have to turn all the fans or umbrellas, so your wrist has to be quite flexible to be able to go backwards, a bit like that [she moves her wrists in backwards in a circle]. A lot of the movements in Chinese dance are circular and based on figure eights, so everything like the ribbons we might do in eights like this, or big eights.
All the different styles (have a certain costume). Um, the peacock dance, it’s a long dress and it’s got peacock eyes on it, the Tibetan one has long sleeves, so sometimes you have to dance in dresses that have long sleeves on them, the sleeves would be about this long [she indicates well past her fingers], and you have to really learn how to flick them and things like that, and to move them, which is quite difficult, you know.
So there’s different costumes based on the area they are from. I mean for us, as a dance group, it depends what we’re doing, sometimes we have to wear costumes with pants because its easier to dance in them. Of course, long dresses are hard, and you have to watch when you sit down, then you have to stand up, and so sometimes pants are more practical.
And the costumes are usually like stage costumes, colourful, bright, sequins, like usual dance costumes. These days the costumes have become a bit more modern, by showing a bit more midriff and things like that, but not all… I guess like Bollywood as well, they become a bit more, like, showing the midriff and all that. So yeah. But it’s still the traditional style.
Challenges and Achievements
In Australia, I think my struggle would be finding places to learn. And also, if I wanted to do things like a Chinese dance exam or a curriculum or syllabus, we don’t really have that here. As well as finding good teachers.
Well, I’ve produced a dance theatre. It was to celebrate the hundred-year anniversary for Chung Wah Association and it was called, ‘New Gold Mountain’. And that was what Chinese people used to call Australia when they first came here.
Continuing Her Journey
For the children that I teach, one group is doing a red lantern dance for Chinese New Year, and the other group is doing a dance with ribbons and also fans. And they mainly learn the Han style of dances, also because the costumes for each of these styles, actually have a specific costume, and they mainly use the more Han style costume which is like, the Chinese collar, the top and pants, a samfu, that’s just a top and pants.
So they’d mainly perform for their school assemblies, celebrations, that group gets invited to perform at other places like the Chinese Consulate, and other occasions. So, it’s good that all of them are interested to learn Chinese dance, and they’re not all Chinese as well.
Changes to Chinese Dance
A lot of people try to make Chinese dance a bit more modern, more mainstream, something like that. Or mixing different styles, like fusion, hip hop and Chinese dance, yeah, that type of thing. I think it’s similar to other dance styles. Also, a lot of older ladies like to do Chinese dancing, in China, they like to do it in the streets or in the courtyard, you know, like these ladies (in the studio behind us, currently practicing). They’ll just be dancing around, they do it for exercise, and some of them will hold fans. But its not really traditional Chinese dancing…
I think they just do it for exercise, you can watch these ladies. But the style we do is more choreographed; I think some of the ones that they do would be more like line dancing, you know, where they do similar steps each side, that type of thing. But it’s popular amongst old ladies and now we have a lot of Chinese dance groups in Perth.
But our association actually has four Chinese language schools now, we’ve got aged care, which does quite well, and we’ve got all of our cultural groups; we’ve actually got lion and dragon dancing, we’ve got Chinese orchestra as well, they play the traditional instruments, and then women’s groups, yeah, we’ve got dragon boat team, lion dance team… it’s a lot of cultural groups.
Lion Dancing
I used to be in the lion dance group as well. It’s based on martial arts, so all the movements, you’ve got to have a strong martial arts base to be able to do lion dance.
Do you have a strong martial arts base?
No. [She laughs]. I used to do it but I never learnt martial arts, but we used to like, train here, and I used to do it for a little while. But you’ve got to be quite strong, and you have to be able to do the, like, the horse stance [she gets up and stands in a squat-like position with legs wide apart]. So you need to be strong to do all that stuff, but the lion actually moves like that, like a martial arts movement.
And the way the lion dance actually started was… I think there was this monster that came down from the hills every year, and it was called Nian, with means ‘year’. So, they started making loud noises, setting off firecrackers, to scare away this monster, using the lion, in the end. So I believe that’s the story. [She googles it]. Yeah; making loud noises chases away evil spirits, brings good fortune, that type of thing.
Why do you dance?
For me, it’s just to learn more about the culture. Also to keep fit. And just because I like dancing. I really do. [She laughs].
See the Chung Wah Association perform a Lion Dance here: (67) Chung Wah Lion Dance High Pole Performance Chinese New Year Fair Perth 2021 Western Australia – YouTube
Todd Annetts – Ballroom Dancer
My name’s Todd Annetts. I work for the Humphrey’s Dance Studio, which is a ballroom and Latin dance studio. We also have a very strong schools program in which we teach other styles of dance as well, including things like salsa and merengue and some line dancing and all sorts of different things. But primarily, I’m a ballroom and Latin dance teacher.
Just at the moment the company is dealing with just about a hundred schools a year, so our student count is probably somewhere around the 15 000 range… Personally, this year, I’ll go to about thirty-five different schools, reaching from Perth to north of the city up to Quinn’s Beach, I’ll go as far as Kalgoorlie, I’ve been to Esperance this year, so we’ll essentially go anywhere in the State if a school is interested in our program. I’ve been to small towns like Lenster and Leonora, in the outer Goldfields areas, so yeah. We’ll go anywhere.
I have been teaching full-time for the last thirty years. This is actually my thirtieth year, this year, so it’s a bit of an anniversary. Prior to that I was teaching part-time for the same dance studio whilst I was finishing my high school studies and started working in retail for a little while, but that only lasted about eighteen months or so. I pushed that to one side and started teaching full time, and that would’ve been back in 1989.
I actually started dancing in high school when the company I now work for came to my school to offer dance lessons. A couple of my friends and I went to the dance demonstration class, just to see what it was about. I did that first course in 1981 with Pam Humphreys, my now boss, as the teacher, and they came back again in ‘82 and we did another course then, at the end of that second year I started doing one-on-one private lessons – one of my friends and I shared a lesson together. Unfortunately after about three months she dropped out, but I kept going. When I turned about fifteen, back then there was always too many ladies in the classes, so they were after extra men whenever they could get us. They asked if I could help out in some of their adult classes. From there, the teacher one night was away, so they asked me to take the class. Being fifteen, of course, we knew everything, so you’re like ‘yeah, that’s not a problem, I can do that’, not realising just how limited your knowledge really is at that point! [He laughs.]
And from there it just slowly increased. More classes, then some more one-on-one clients, as I said, I finished school, got a job in retail, was teaching part-time two or three nights a week, all day Saturdays. When my time in retail was over, I went full-time, started helping in our schools program, teaching in the studio in the evenings, and that’s been the last thirty years. So, the person that came to my school and got me on the journey is now the person that I work for, all these years later, nearly forty years later.
Challenges
Um, I didn’t really struggle with anything too much. Ballroom dancing by its very nature has several avenues that you can follow. You can do it socially, just for fun, you can do examinations, which is what I did, where you present performances for an examiner and they grade you, you can do it competitively, and a lot of young people when they start go into the competitive side of things.
But I’m not a particularly competitive person, so I don’t have the drive to do that. If somebody gets out there and dances better than me, that’s fine, I don’t have a problem with that. So I pursued the teaching side of things, which is why I started helping in-class at the age of fifteen, I got my first professional degree at the age of seventeen. So that was the only real difficulty I suppose, it’s finding where you want to be under that ballroom dancing umbrella.
Because it really is accessible in so many different ways. Some other forms of dance, and I don’t mean this in a negative way at all, for example classical ballet, it’s almost an intellectual exercise. There’s not something you can do with that. You learn it, you perform an exam, you go up to the next level, you learn that. A few people may turn it into a career either teaching or performing, but the majority of people… they just do it because they have the interest in it. You can’t go out and dance ballet, you know, it doesn’t have that sort of broader coverage that things like ballroom and Latin dance do, which is what I found a little more interesting. You could use it for other things, it didn’t just have that ‘well I’m going to class, I’ve got a ten-week course, then I sit my exam’; it’s a little bit broader than that.
But other than that, I never really had what I would consider problems. As I said earlier, being a teenager when I started teaching, I was quite confident as most teenagers tend to be, you know, you go through that stage where you don’t have a lot of life experience, but you think you’ve got a handle on everything. The older you get, the more you realise that you really didn’t [he laughs]… But by starting then, I found it fairly easy to make that transition, to stepping up and being in charge and saying ‘here’s what we’ll be doing tonight, this is what you have to learn, do the steps this way’. I didn’t have any issues with that sort of thing. I’m quite comfortable with public speaking and being in front of other people, so teaching classes and things was never a big issue, whether it’s a one-on-one lesson with just a single person or like just recently, I did a class with some year nine students and there were 331 kids in the whole class that I was teaching at once. I’ve done social evenings where we’ve had over 450 people there, and I don’t have a problem with standing up and saying, ‘well, I’m in charge, this is what you’ve got to do’.
If you can’t get it right the first time, that doesn’t mean that you’re not going to get it right. You just persist until you’ve improved, listen to your teachers and your coaches, let their knowledge help you get better, and yeah. It’s just a thing that with practice, you will overcome.
Social Dancing and Dancing for Fun
We have quite a number of people in our dance studio that only learn to dance what we call ‘socially’. So, they do it for fun. They either come with their partner or maybe with a couple of friends, some people even come on their own, just for some social interaction, rather than, say, going out to the movies where you sit in the dark and don’t say anything, or go out to a club by yourself, buy an overpriced drink and don’t talk to anybody all night. So there is quite a strong social aspect to it for a lot of people, and I think that gives the average person a chance to dance for a long period of time.
Because as you get older and maybe you’re not as physically strong as you used to be, or you start to suffer from other issues, you can still dance to the level of your ability. Being able to, I suppose stagnate, at a level, and go ‘oh well, I’ve learnt enough, I’m good enough, I don’t need to push myself’ – you can do that, and you can stay there for ten, fifteen, twenty years, just going out dancing with your partner or whatever you like, whereas when you reach that pinnacle in some other forms of dancing, that’s it. Your journey’s essentially over. Because if you can’t improve, there’s nowhere else to go. And like I said, I don’t mean that in a negative way, I’m not bashing other types of dancing by any stretch of the imagination, as far as I’m concerned, if someone’s dancing I don’t care what type of dancing it is. As long as they’re dancing, because it’s so, so good for you.
So yeah, that social side of things is very popular. We had our annual, formal ball just recently, and we had nearly 200 people come to that. And it’s not a cheap night, because it’s got a sit-down meal, we have it at Government House in the city so the venue’s quite expensive to hire, and we still got 200 people without any trouble at all. And all they do is come along to dance and mingle and have a bit of fun. And the forum for that is the dancing. That’s why they’re there. It provides them with a reason, I suppose, an excuse, to get out and do all these other things, and not just sit in a crowded restaurant shouting over the top of other people all night. I just think it gives an outlet for all the work that you put into it where it doesn’t just become, ‘well I’ve stopped doing my lesson, and I’ve gone home and now I don’t have to worry about it, I won’t think about it again until I go back to my lesson’, there’s lots of different social functions going on at all times in a lot of places in the city, and you can go to any of them, meet new people, take your own partner, go as a group of friends…
Changing Age Range – And Giving Men Permission to Dance
It used to be skewed a lot older, but with the advent of things like Dancing with the Stars and So You Think You Can Dance? and a few of the other dance-related programs, it became a much more socially acceptable thing for that middle-range of sort of like twenty-five to forty-five (year old people to do). I think a lot of people, when they settled into a long-term relationship, if they weren’t both interested in dancing, the dancing stopped. And often, that meant that when the lady that had danced when she was younger got herself a partner, he didn’t want to dance and so she stopped.
At the end of that relationship, if, or for whatever reason, they would often come back. They say, ‘I haven’t danced for fifteen years because my husband didn’t want to’, or something like that. But with those dance programs, where you’ve got your footy stars, your cricket stars, your TV stars, all these men getting up there in their mid-twenties and mid-thirties and dancing and saying how much fun it is, and how much harder it was than they thought it was going to be, how much more physical it was than they thought it was going to be… They get tired, it’s hard work, it’s not just running around on your tippy-toes and prancing around the room. It’s hard work.
And I think that gave a lot of men of that era or that age permission to be able to have a go. As I mentioned earlier, when I first started, we would often have three or four ladies per man in class. The ratio was terrible. Now, we have classes where it’s fifty-fifty. We even have some classes where it’s more men than we have women, which when I started thirty years ago, was literally unheard of. It just didn’t happen.
But we’re also seeing a generation of men that grew up with Hi-Five, the Wiggles; men dancing. Music videos and pop stars and things, instead of just standing there behind a microphone or playing a guitar, in these new video clips and things, the singer is leaping around doing all sorts of things, there’s half-naked women leaning all over them and what have you, and it makes it more appealing to the men that, at one stage, would not have been interested; it’s become more socially acceptable. Like, the Wiggles, there you’ve got four middle-aged men getting up there and dancing. If that doesn’t give everybody permission to have a go, I don’t know what does.
Well, we go into the school and we have boys that rush to be at the front and learn the steps so they can do it right and things like that; when I started, you literally had to move the men to the front of the room so that they would pay attention and do what they were supposed to do. Nowadays, we don’t have to do any of those sorts of things because there’s this social acceptability that dancing’s for everybody. And that’s fantastic. I think that’s probably the best thing I’ve seen happen in my time in the industry, is that it’s now socially acceptable for everybody. There’s no negativity about people saying ‘well, I dance’, or, ‘I go to lessons’, or… you know. It’s good. It’s very good.
Achievements
As far as an achievement, I think I would look at something from my work career. When I started teaching in the schools program, we were in round-about seventeen to twenty schools, something like that? And over the last thirty years I’ve seen that slowly grow and grow to being a hundred schools. And I know I’ve been part of that expansion; as I’ve gone from one school to the next, the teachers have seen the program at their school, and when they transfer to another school, they bring us with them. And that sort of acceptance of our program, that recognition that the program has value and the way we do it is good, I would think of that as my greatest achievement. I’ve seen a business that started out thirty years ago basically five times the size now than it was when I first started with it. And I feel like I’ve been part of that transition.
Teaching Kids
Oh look, it’s everything from kids that just flat-out refuse and there’s virtually nothing you can do for that to children that – they stand there waiting for you to arrive, they tell you what they’ve been practising, they made their parents learn the steps as well when they’ve gone home, and there’s everything in-between. I tend to not worry too much about where they start, I try to think more about where we can get them to by the end, so that those kids that were very resistant, if we get a smile out of them and they look like they’ve enjoyed themselves, even in once dance, or they’ve had a good time with one of their mates, then that’s an achievement.
The kids that love it already – they’re like sponges. Everything you throw at them they grab, and take, and learn, and they’re great to teach as well. But it’s those ones that are more resistant, if you can get them to sort of go, ‘well, I enjoyed that more than I thought I was going to, I‘m going to miss it now that we’re not doing lessons anymore’…
Well, how did you feel about the program when we first came to your school?
I’ve always loved dance, so I was one of those sponge kids.
Up in the front row going ‘what are we learning today?!’
And as I said, I remembered you after nearly twenty years, even if we haven’t talked for ten or more.
And that’s the thing. Getting kids started young enough, it gives them the opportunity to maybe later in their lives go further afield, like, ‘okay, I don’t want to do ballroom dancing, but maybe I want to do Bollywood, or maybe I want to do bellydancing or I want to learn hip-hop or maybe I want to do something else’. And they’ve already got a positive memory. They’ve already gone, ‘yeah, I actually enjoyed that, I look forward to that, so now I’m an adult and I’m looking for something to do, it’s ok that I can try something else’.
And as I said earlier, as long as people are dancing, I don’t care what it is. It’s all about just getting them up off their backsides and doing more exercise and all of those sorts of things. There’s been so many studies done in the last thirty years that link physical co-ordination with cognitive ability. The more physically co-ordinated you are, the better you learn. The endorphins that get released by your body when you dance are always positive, and they did a study – now this is just a stab in the dark here, because they did it a while ago – probably about fifteen years ago, I think it was in Sweden, where they proved that whenever you dance, your body gets an endorphin rush. Even if it’s been a bad lesson or you’ve had a stinking great argument with your partner or things haven’t gone the way you want on the inside, your body is getting all the good stuff. So it’s good for you, even if you don’t know it.
It’s the top thing for staving off dementia and those sorts of things.
So dancing is by far the best thing for your mental acuity and all those sorts of things. Plus, you get a physical workout, which we can all do with [he looks down at his stomach]. So there’s really no downside, as far as I’m concerned.
Australian Wildlife
I’ve had numerous birds over the years, I’ve had a snake come into class once.
In Leonora, and I was teaching a group of junior primary kids, probably year two, year three, and a snake came crawling across the undercover area. The teacher that was out there supervising – he was starting to panic. So, I said to him, ‘Go and get the gardener, so we can take care of it’, because he was about to lose it. I got all the kids sitting up on the benches with their feet up off the ground away at the edge, we just left it in the middle and it just… out the other side, you know, just stay away from it.
I’ve had blue-tongue lizards come stomping through class. Occasionally, you have some not-so-good things, like I’ve been involved in a couple of school lock-downs where there’s been criminal activity in the area, evacuations and things like that where, because we’re the centre of attention, it’s easiest for us to marshal the children rather than the teachers trying to do it. I’ve got all the kids looking at me, I’ve got the microphone, I can get them lined up and ready to go where they need to go much quicker than if I’ve got four teachers all yelling and kids panicking… So you just, I don’t know, I suppose you just learn to deal with these things. If they happen, they happen, if they don’t, well, you just keep teaching.
[He laughs.]
And when you see that, you step up. I know, technically, I don’t work for the education department, I can’t provide a duty of care for the children, there has to be a teacher there with us, and ultimately it falls to them. But if they’re not going to step up, somebody has to. So you do what you need to do. I suppose that’s how it is in any emergency situation. If you come across a car accident, and everybody else is panicking, you get out your phone and you’re the one who calls the ambulance, because nobody else is doing it. You step up.
Continuing His Journey
Still pretty much the same as always. We’ve got our busy term coming up with term four where we have lots and lots of schools. Fourth term is always quite popular, because then the dancing lessons can be attached to graduation ceremonies and end of year performances and things like that. So, this is always a very busy time of the year for us. The studio where we teach our private lessons and adult classes and things, that’s jogging along just fine. We’ve got plenty of teachers and plenty of clients. I’ve been there this morning, after this I’ve got some more lessons this evening. Yeah, so pretty much the same as usual.
I’m actually working with a very, very dear friend of mine that I’ve known for twenty-odd years. She’s getting married for the first time in a couple of months, and she and her partner are having bridal dance lessons at the moment. So that’s really, really nice, to be able to help somebody that I know from a different walk of life and prepare them for something that’s coming up that’s a very special day for them. So yeah, I’m really looking forward to that, and that’s something that’s maybe a little bit different. But like most jobs, you come in, you do your job, you go home, you go back and do the same job again the next day. The content doesn’t change much day to day, but what changes for us is the clientele. You know, one day you’ll go to a school and might be doing junior primary, the next day you’ll be in a high school dealing with year tens and elevens, the next day you might be teaching in the studio, so I’m dealing with retirees, elderly people… and it’s the variety from day to day, it’s the clientele that keeps it interesting.
Why Do You Dance?
That’s a very good question. None of my family growing up danced. I am very much the black sheep. It came from that time at school when the dance company came and did the performance session. Even when we went to see it, we made up our minds to go and see it on that day. We hadn’t planned on going, but it turned out it was raining that day, and to watch the performance meant we could go inside; we didn’t have to sit on the verandas out in the cold… now it’s become my full-blown career. And I have nieces and nephews that dance in other genres, but my sisters and my parents, we come from a completely non-dancing background.
I just found it by good luck. And now, all these years later, it’s still such a big part of my life. Something I still enjoy. Watching somebody go from not being able to do something to being able to do it, and that sense of accomplishment and that look of pride that they get in themselves to go ‘hey, I couldn’t do that before; I can do that now’, and helping people on that journey… that is why I do this. What else would you want from your life? I didn’t put twenty years of my life in to go ‘yeah, that’s enough of that’ and draw a line over that twenty years of my life and say ‘something else now’… And I imagine, at some time in the future, maybe I won’t feel like that anymore and then maybe I will move away from dancing. But I can’t see it at this point, I really can’t. I can’t imagine doing anything other than what I do now.
It’s just so important that people try things. Because you never know where that thing that’s going to make your life fantastic – you never know where that’s going to come from. And if you don’t expose yourself to different things, you might miss that one thing that could transform your life. And not doing it because you don’t think you’re going to enjoy yourself – that’s not a good enough reason. Don’t write it off before you’ve tried, because if I didn’t try, I don’t know where I’d be now. So always try. Because you just never know, that might be your thing, and you don’t even know it.
See a floorshow by Humphrey’s dance here: https://youtu.be/QUve0KlaOLU
Nikki Irwin – Bellydancer
My name is Nikki. I’m a bellydance teacher. Actually, bellydance is not the term we usually use, it’s oriental dance, but it’s the widely accepted term, or the publicly accepted term for oriental dance, and it doesn’t really have a lot to do with the dance at all [she laughs].
Actually, when you talk about the Orient in Australia, most people relate it to Asia, not the Middle East, where the Orient Express travelled. Again, this term isn’t the greatest, as it is a Western perspective. Oriental dance is what those countries call it; bellydance is a Western term. There was a fair in Chicago in the 1900s and the promoters gave it the name then, just to indicate there would be a dancer there with her belly bare. We’ve been trying to lose it for many years, as it doesn’t do the dance form justice. It’s not a tacky dance, it’s tactful and skilful. The style where your belly’s bare, that’s just one style of hundreds. But it was extremely good marketing. In Egypt they call it ratshaki, but it changes by style.
So, I started bellydance, or oriental dance, when I was about fifteen years old. It had already been in my family because my mother was a bellydancer. She emigrated from England when she was about eight years old and lived in Sydney, and growing up her best friend was Egyptian, so she got to see a lot of cultural Egyptian stuff, so that was actually the start of her love for Egyptian or Arabic dance. She’d always wanted to do it, and she started – I think she was maybe thirty when she started, saw a class advertised up in the hills somewhere, went with a friend and that was it.
Yeah, she was actually studying at university at the time, completed her degree in environmental and biological science and had one year teaching in high school and realised her passion was actually in teaching oriental dance. So, she gave it all away, and did that, and I kind of followed in her footsteps.
I don’t know the name of her Egyptian friend, actually. But she used to go to lots of family celebrations and they’d be dancing on the table, it was real fun; fun, fun stuff, like a lot of cultural stuff is.
So, her teacher here in Perth was a lady called Yasmin. She was the first woman to teach bellydance in Perth. She was Armenian, and she moved to Egypt with her family – actually, I believe her family was exiled from Armenia – and moved to Egypt, where they were a very well-to-do family. She had lots of maids and nannies, and she actually learned how to bellydance from them. She kept it a secret for many, many years, because within that cultural context, it’s not actually considered the thing to do. It’s like everyone has bellydancers at their celebration, but nobody wants their wives or their children to be one.
Yeah, so she learnt off her house staff, and later continued to learn by going to clubs and she actually learnt from some of the dancers that are kind of my heroes now from back in the sixties and the seventies. They were her teachers. So, Seperzarke is one of them, Mal Gou Huan… yeah, a couple from that era, and that was back in the day when everybody was using video cassettes, so she had a nice collection of video cassettes (of them). And she had actually married a man over there, and it wasn’t a good marriage. She fled Egypt to come to live in Australia and I believe she brought her collection of video cassettes with her and started teaching bellydance. So that’s where my mum learnt, from the very first bellydance teacher in Perth. Very Egyptian in style too, because all the different countries have their own versions of oriental dance, but they all differ slightly, because they are always influenced by the environment, or politics.
I started dancing when I was three years old; I’ve danced my whole life since then. I started in the more conventional styles, so, ballet, jazz, tap, modern, acrobats, and I did that all the way up until my teens. And then, when I was about fifteen, we heard about a contemporary dance company and I auditioned for that… it was a company where they auditioned for year eleven and twelve students in Perth and just took the top twenty. And that was our company, so I did that for two years; it was my first and only introduction to contemporary dance and it was great actually, because my mum had already been doing bellydance, and my friends all thought she was amazing and cool and I was absolutely mortified, because I had grown up doing these very conservative forms of dance.
But when I did contemporary dance it really, really changed the way I thought not just about dance, but about many different things. I became influenced by some really great people, but my biggest influence from that time was… have you heard of Claudia Alesey? She’s a contemporary dancer, she’s amazing, and actually, she helped form my love for all things vintage. Because I do vintage bellydance now; that harks back to her influence when I was fifteen and sixteen years old. And we did a contemporary piece and it was set in the fifties and we wore long dresses and we had Greensleeves playing… and it was just like, I don’t know, just like a trip back to the streets of the fifties, but it really stuck with me. And she stuck with me, she inspired me a lot.
So then I kind of opened up to other dance possibilities, because that wasn’t something I’d experienced before. I had lots and lots of input from many places; we worked for the Western Australian Ballet Company, Two-dance Plus, Chrissie Parrot’s Dance Collective, Rig Osbourne you may have heard of… So, she was the principle choreographer at the time, and yeah, then we splintered off into smaller, more intimate groups and that’s where I got to work with Claudia.
I continued to do bellydance, but not for long; I used to practice with my mum. My mum had her own classes by then. I went overseas when I was about twenty three; I went to Indonesia and I stayed there for ten years. I didn’t do a lot of dancing when I was over there, (but) I did have an Israeli teacher and that was a great class. We used to do something different every week. And I taught in some schools over there, taught children (bellydance) and did some performances…
Well that’s one of those places where it’s really quite open; the cultural and ex-patriots there are very open to input and influence. Yeah, so I’d come back every six months because my visa was for six months at a time and I’d come back, have a dance here, then go back, sometimes I’d stay here longer… but when I did come back here to Perth, the dance scene had completely changed, and I really felt like I was completely out of my depth. I no longer had the confidence that I had before because in that time I had been away, people had improved so much. Once upon a time we only had the video cassettes to learn off or watch, we didn’t actually have physical people, so that time when I was away was the start of master teachers coming to Australia, which meant the whole quality of dance for oriental dance in Australia lifted up. The influence was broader. There were so many more people getting involved, so many more dance schools popping up around the place, and festivals all over the country and people were travelling to them, so you know, they were really progressing their skills.
There’s following along, and doing the choreography, or… with oriental dance especially, it’s not just the steps, there’s the feelings that go with it. And getting to know the feelings and getting to understand the music behind it is a layer on dancing that I don’t think I’d ever experienced before, with all those other dancing styles that I did while I was growing up. Because we used to, you know, put your costume on, put your make up on, your hair’s done and you’re out on the stage and you’re immediately smiling… it was kind of really fake, and I feel now when I dance, if you see me smiling, there’s no fake in it. It actually comes from inside me, and it comes from connecting the music with the movement and I just love it. I love it.
Dance and Politics
Politics is a very big influence, for dance, all over the world, but particularly in Egypt… or maybe it’s not particularly in Egypt. Maybe it’s because I know about it so much that it seems to have quite a huge influence.
Sometimes you have conservatives in power, so through Egyptian history, when there was change of power, there was change of lots of different things so… in the late fifties – 1955 to 1958 – there was a change of power, and the government decided that bellydancers couldn’t show their bellies. They also couldn’t do floorwork. And it was kind of funny, because prior to that the costuming was beautiful, beautifully classic and really quite covered. They would have like, long slits up to the belt, but otherwise long sleeves, thick belts, very well-covered bras and the style was classic, very Golden Era, just like in Hollywood at that same point in time. And then, this came along, and they said, ‘now you’ve got to cover up’. So they did. They covered up their bellies, their costumes ended up with bodystockings and often they’d co-ordinate it with the rest of the costume; so if they had a blue bra and a blue skirt they’d wear a blue bodystocking, which ended up looking a bit like a dress. But at the same time, what they did is they made the belts smaller, so the belts dropped down the hips a lot more, they made them thinner, the skirts became less full so there was a lot more leg, and usually two legs showing, and the bras became not-so-covered… so it’s funny; they weren’t allowed to (show their stomachs) but they kind of put their own spin on it and… [she laughs.] They still managed to put their own thought into the costume despite the fact that by law there were certain things they had to follow.
Challenges
My mum first had Bellydance Central, which is my company now. I’m not sure what year she started that, but we had a studio in Osbourne Park and we had that for eleven years I think. She finished teaching when I was twenty years old, so that was twenty five years ago, so she had already been teaching for quite some time… So she would’ve started in Osbourne Park in about 2005. She retired in 2014 and me and my sister took over the studio. Then a year later my sister left and retired from bellydancing; just, she lived a long way away and it was too much for her, so I kept going until they demolished the studio to put up factory units. That’s when I started to branch out a little bit and not just have one centre, one base. I kind of moved a little bit around the place, which meant I could attract different people from different places because I wasn’t stuck in one area. Sometimes, it’s too hard for people who don’t want to travel.
I was absolutely devastated when we did lose the studio. We watched the whole thing get demolished, because I made an agreement with the studio next door to do classes in their studio, but the whole time – and all of my students too – we’d turn up to dancing and we could actually see how they were just demolishing it. And it was such a beautiful studio, too.
But yeah, I didn’t realise it was a blessing at the time. But it definitely was a blessing. And a lesson. Because often when things like that happen you think the worst, you go ‘oh my gosh it’s the worst thing in the world’, but you never know where it’s going to lead you. Lots of different paths can lead you to lots of different places.
Achievements and Teaching A Disability Class
(My biggest achievements) are definitely my sons [she giggles]. I’m a single mum, on my own, their father lives overseas, so I don’t get much help. And my family is not very present; my mum likes to travel, she’s a gypsy for sure. So, I’d say my biggest achievement is them, but I’ve also excelled in lots of different areas. I do have a passion for life and a tendency to just throw myself headfirst into everything.
I’m just about to start a new term. I have lots of different levels that I’m teaching; I teach a disability class which I absolutely adore. I’ve actually been doing that for nearly ten years in Guildford… weekly for the last ten years. At the same time, I started teaching a lady who was blind. She was Turkish, so it was part of her culture, and I’ll never forget the first time she came to my class.
Somebody had called me just to come and do a one-off class at Subiaco Arts Centre, and she arrived with her friends and they weren’t interested in dancing at all, but she wanted to dance. And she danced in these high heels that were so huge, and I did suggest she took them off, but she said, ‘oh no, I’m fine’, and she’s completely blind… and she was fine, she managed the class and she was absolutely fine. So, I went on to start doing private lessons with her. And it was amazing for her because she had grown up in a culture that dance and music was such an important part of, and she’d always been told that she would never be able to dance. And she could, it just took the right person to guide her… But her, and her brother, I worked with for a year and a half and at the end of that year and a half her brother hugged me… he was amazed. It was amazing. [We both cry].
But I’m still good friends with both of them. My mum actually already had a good relationship with the Turkish community because she used to do Turkey tours – she’d taken ten tours over to Turkey – while she ran the studio, so we already had a very close relationship with them and I’m still in touch with them now. But doing that, and working with the disability class at the same time, it kind of really overhauled the way I taught dancing. Like, I took it from a completely different place because I was so used to having mirrors, and having very able-bodied people who could visually see what they needed to do. And I had to change because I had to then start to talk, well for Zaleha, the Turkish blind student, I had to explain a lot to her. I had to use verbal cues and come up with suggestions and you know, in my classes, I use analogy a lot, so I started to use that more and more, and use touch a lot more, so I’d get her to feel my body and the moves; we’d use walls or the floor the sofa or a prop to help to get the point across. Yeah, it was really a great thing for me and my own teaching journey to have those experiences and it helped me to understand the student a lot better, because often I find that teachers don’t understand all the time. They’re very used to ‘do this, do this, do this’, but it’s the breaking down which sometimes needs a bit of working on.
I also want to mention that I do have my own dance style called vintage bellydance. Me and my sister at the time looked back on some of those videos that my mum got from her teacher, dancers from the fifties through to the seventies. We’d already been looking at them while we were growing up, it was part of our growing up that we got to see that kind of stuff, and then of course the internet … ten years ago when we started, there wasn’t so much (copyright) and that was where the majority of our research came from. So we call that the Golden Era, like I was saying before, they had it in Hollywood, you know, the ladies had the pin-tuck curls and red lipstick and winged eyeliner… that was happening in Egypt at the same time, and it was a really specific look, very specific in makeup, hair, music, movement repertoire… (there were so many) changes through history, and if you go to a bellydance teacher now and say, ‘that’s a hip push’, you don’t really think about where it comes from. Who originally learnt that from who? Back to the fifties, that actually showed us where some of the movements came from. So that’s really, really interesting…
So that’s our ten years, this year, ten year anniversary of vintage bellydance in Australia. People do it all over the world now, and in Australia all the master teachers are doing it, but we were doing it for years and years and years and were the first here to really teach it.
Continuing Her Journey
I have my disability class, I’ve got all levels from beginners, intermediate and advanced, I have a professional performance troupe, and we do four terms a year and each term is a different choreography. So this term – I actually start next week – some of the dances that I’m doing I’m rehashing, so I don’t come up with new choreography all the time, because some of my choreography, like my advanced choreography, can take up to twelve hours to choreograph. It’s quite involved. So, I usually do only one new choreography a term, sometimes two. Depends how brave I am and how much time I think I’m going to have. And sometimes I do two when I really shouldn’t! But I can’t help it. I hear a piece of music and I have to do it.
I’ve got just one this term. Actually, I’m doing something a little out of my comfort zone; I’m doing a sword dance. The use of the sword is actually more fusion in style, it’s always taken really, really well by the public though and my advanced class requested it because it’s been a while since we’ve done one. I like props that are actual extensions of my body, so I like to zill, or I like to use the stick, and to a lesser extent, the veil, but when I’m dancing with the veil I still find it’s like an extension of my body. The sword, for me… it doesn’t fit into that at all. So, for me, it’s going to be a bit of a challenge. And the movements are very different, not traditional at all, the music is not traditional, so yeah, it’s completely out of my comfort zone.
We can move with the sword, balance it on our heads, do floorwork with the sword on our heads or the hip, there’s lots of different things, things on the shoulders… and I think for me this will be a lot about how we block as a group and the group dynamics will become a really important part of the choreography, not just the movements. So that’s my new one for this term. I’m also doing ashabi, which is like street dancing in Egypt, great to pop music.
Why do you dance?
Because I have to. I can’t not dance. I’ve danced my whole life, and if I don’t dance, then the boys will remind me that I need to get back to dancing because I just get grumpy. It’s my outlet and it’s my passion. It keeps me sane…ish.
See Nikki and her troupe perform here: (67) Leyla – Vintage Melaya Bellydance at WAMED 2011 – YouTube
Yamina Hofer – Belly-samba Fusion
So, I started dancing when I was five years old in France with ballet, classical ballet. I was born in France. But I had my first – let’s say – “world” dance experience when I started taking classical Indian dance lessons at about thirteen – kathak. And then, later on, I was doing a trip into the Sahara with my parents, and I fell in love with bellydancing. Not the bellydancing you imagine, not the women dancing, but I just saw the men – our camel guys, they were dancing around the fire at night, and I just saw that, and that was enough for me to be mesmerised. So that’s how it got started with me, and because I already had a bit of kathak Indian dance, I started fusing right away ballet, kathak and oriental. So, I was already a fusion dancer from the beginning, because I would use whatever dance vocab I had to express myself.
Then, much later on, when I was about twenty one, I discovered samba. And I started samba in France. So, to finish off with the French story, while I was there, I took as many workshops as I could, in any kind of dance style really. I used to go to a festival which was a huge influence on me called the World Culture Festival of Gannat, in France, and from a young age I used to volunteer there and have access to workshops from people from all around the world. So, it built my identity of wanting to travel the world, wanting to learn dancing from the source, and wanting to find out as much as I could about dance. Then I went to Australia in 2006, and I continued this journey in Australia. I went straight to dance lessons in Sydney with renowned instructors and as you know, since I’ve been in Perth, I’ve been learning and taking workshops as often as I can as well as teaching.
Yeah, so in terms of the style I teach, to go back to your question, I started fusing samba and bellydance after I met Michael, who was my partner and my husband for ten years in Perth. We collaborated together as husband and wife, because he was a samba drummer and I was a bellydancer it was natural that we’d fuse our styles. And so, bellysamba was born, and I taught it around the world whenever I went away, teaching workshops; it was a really popular fusion, to fuse samba and bellydance
But I’ve used lots of styles. Like, I studied flamenco in Perth with Farida Rabih for about three years, and naturally I fused flamenco with bellydance. When I did contemporary dance and started developing my contemporary dance, I started wanting to fuse contemporary with bellydance. So, whatever style I learn, I always want to fuse it with bellydance! It’s just a natural tendency I have.
Challenges
Ok, in terms of movement, I was stuck with the technical aspect because a lot of people don’t realise how difficult bellydance is until you start learning it. I struggled with bellydance because I was self-taught. At the beginning, I didn’t have any teachers. I struggled with learning things like reverse undulations and isolation of muscles, and you know, I always also struggled with things in ballet, like keeping my balance in spins, I think it’s something really difficult, but I love it. And, also, yeah, the footwork of some of the dance styles that I learnt like kathak, flamenco, the footwork can be quite tricky and it requires long and long hours of training and persistence. These were some of the most challenging movements for me.
And I think, as a teacher, what I struggle with is… I have people that come and pay and expect to learn to dance in three months. They tell me, ‘how long until I can dance like you? You reckon three months? [she laughs] If I pay you, can you teach me?’ And that’s something that blows my mind, every time! That people just see dancing as something you shop and you get. It’s something you dedicate yourself to and like any skills, it can’t rub off on you in three months. You have to put the hard work in, just like I did. That’s one misunderstanding, when people learn world dance such as bellydance or African dance, they expect it to be easy. They don’t think it’s like ballet. But I can tell you, it is like ballet. There is just as much technical aspect as ballet.
Achievements
Well, I’ll just do a couple of dance ones. I can’t classify one greatest but there is a couple of great moments in my life. A couple of things that will be forever with me. One of those things was in Rio de Janeiro. I was lucky enough to dance with Unidos da Tijuca for a show they did. I had done workshops with them that day, and I had just found out that I didn’t have a costume for the Passita Ala at the Carnival so I was kind of depressed. And they had a show that night, and I had bought myself a new samba headdress in Rio and I was like, ‘hey can I just join up and dance with you guys?’ and they were like ‘yeah! Ok’ [she laughs].
So there I went, the video is on YouTube, and I still can’t believe it to this day. That year, they won the carnival, I had some of the top musicians on the stage with me, some of the top dancers, one of them came to Perth actually, this year, his name is Mayombe Masai and he is considered one of the best samba dancers in Brazil right now. So there I was onstage with them and I realised the dream, just like this. Just with one question. Sometimes, it pays off. Sometimes, you just have to be daring and have the courage to do things.
That was one of the great moments, and another one – same thing, it’s also due to coincidence – I was in Reunion Island, and I was participating in a festival with Michael, we were teaching samba workshops, and it was a festival about the abolition of slavery, quite a significant event for an East-African island that was colonised, you know? And there was a band from Mali called Salif Keita and the Ambassadors. It was a band that was around since the seventies-eighties that reformed for one year to do a last world tour, and they happened to finish their world tour at this festival. So – this is like their last concert ever, they’re all very old guys, and Salif Keita is a legend for me, he’s like one of the top African musicians that I can think of. And believe it or not, I went to the rehearsal, I started dancing a little bit in the corner of the room, somebody noticed me, said ‘why don’t we get this girl up on stage tonight?’
So, I performed with this big, big band at the event of the abolition of slavery [she laughs] onstage with Salif Keita and the Ambassadors; it just happened. And that was incredible. It’s also on YouTube. And I did a fusion of African dance and the local dance as well, Maloya, that I learnt, plus my own style, and the people in the public said it was wonderful to see a white girl on such an important date, so that was great you know, that we all reconcile. People were touched by it. They were touched by the fact that I was white, up with that band, and they thought it was planned all along. When it wasn’t, of course! So that was quite amazing for me.
And then – I’ll finish with an event that happened in Perth in 2015, during the Rio Olympics. It’s an achievement, maybe not the one I’m proudest of, but it is an achievement nonetheless. We were asked to perform at the Premier’s Dinner, Mr Colin Barnett’s, in Perth. Don’t have much affinity with him personally [she laughs]. But anyhow, that was the biggest production to date. I had to put together a community group as well as a professional group to perform a big opening ceremony, it was at the Perth Convention Centre and yeah, it was amazing. We prepared for three months with Michael, we prepared the community, we did the costuming, I had to rehearse the choreography with a guy that would come from Sydney, so you know, I had to rehearse with a backing track, and we only put it together on the day. He came here and everything went fine… So it was a huge production that Michael and I did, it went well, so that’s an achievement in itself, but the fact that we performed for Colin Barnett for me was not the greatest [she laughs] of audience, but anyway, that’s how it is. He was Prime Minister at the time of Perth – not Prime Minister – how do you say? – Premier.
Continuing Her Journey
Yes, Michael and I are not together anymore, since two years now. Michael moved to Melbourne and is continuing his journey over East, and I moved to Cape Verde in Africa. So, I’m in Cape Verde right now talking to you. Cape Verde is the place of… the first mixed people were born here, because this was the first island that was colonised by the Portuguese and where they brought in slaves; it was like an experimental place before slaves were sent to America and Brazil, and this is where the first mixed people started. The first mixed language as well, Creole, so I’m in a very important place historically. In terms of all these Afrocentric cultures – and what I mean Afrocentric culture is any colonised country where they sent African slaves and where the mix of African slaves + other cultures created a music or a dance style, just like in Brazil, America or many, many other places in the world… so yeah, it’s like, I’m interested in that, I’m interested in fusion of Africanity and Europeanness, in a way.
There are plenty, many, many dance styles that originated here (in Cape Verde). It’s very rich, that’s why I’m here, and some of the dance styles I am learning, to me, I consider them to be the birthplace of samba. I’m learning a dance style called Batuku, also Funana, Coladera, there’s Morna, Tabanka, Cola San Jon… there’s all these dance styles and it’s very, very rich here. Absolutely fantastic in that regard.
Since I’ve been here, the community has been very welcoming with me; they are welcoming of my skills, they give me great opportunities which I’ve never, ever, ever had in Australia. Here, I work with the top dance schools, I work with the acrobatic teams, I work as a choreographer, and so some of the opportunities I got last year were to choreograph for a young team of Cape Verdians, fifteen young people, to create with other choreographers a show which they would present at a big gala in the country. And then they went to China! They went to perform in Macau in a huge youth festival and they were considered one of the top acts, the three best acts in the festival, and there were about seventeen countries represented from all around the world, so my choreography went all the way up there in China and was performed in Cape Verde as well.
And so right now I am working for the same gala, it’s called Somos Cabo Verde, and it celebrates the culture of the Cape Verdian people across the globe. Because you have to understand that Cape Verde is such a poor country that two thirds of the population is expat. Because they don’t have enough resources to live in their own land, they’re only one third of the population here and the others are working overseas sending money to their families so they can survive. So there’s two thirds that are expat; they are spreading the culture and spreading the language and music overseas, abroad, so there’s a huge diaspora of Cape Verdian people across the world. Even as far as Australia. And so Somos Cabo Verde is an event that rewards the best-achieving of these people across the world, whether they are living in Cape Verde or another country; what they do for the community, what they do for the country; it’s an awards night. And so, we are in charge of performing the opening ceremony again, so I’m starting rehearsals tonight with some of the top ballet and contemporary dance choreographers in the country. It’s just amazing to be working alongside such people, people that have such experience, something I haven’t had in Australia.
I also get to perform here in the top theatres; it’s like if you saw me at the Perth Royal Theatre every night – I never, ever, ever performed there, but here I get to perform in the biggest rooms they have, the biggest infrastructure; I get to have the stage to myself sometimes to perform solos. It’s really amazing because I am in a tiny country, and because it is so tiny, everybody knows each other, quickly people hear about you, this white girl in the island doing this and that, and I get called and I get to perform at festivals with 40 000 people, onstage with local artists… so since I’ve been here, it’s been really amazing. I got to meet all my idols, particularly, I got to dance with lots of them… most of them anyway, all my music idols from that island. So, this is the dream.
I’m also working (as I said) with acrobatic schools, to help them with their expression, because they’re very good in the technical aspects, but whenever they get to the competition, they lose points in expression. Because they haven’t been taught how to express feelings, and it’s not something easy to teach, but something I’ve done, because I always improvise my shows. I rarely choreograph and when I do, it’s like a free choreography, with some spots for expression in it, and so expression is my thing. To me, dance has to be expressive. A series of steps for me is not dancing. And because of this, always, I cannot imagine dancing in any other way, it just comes in natural. It’s like breathing. I have to express whatever’s going through me at the moment. And actually, yeah, one of your questions was ‘why do you dance?’
Why do you dance?
So why do I dance? Today, I can’t imagine my life without it. As a little girl, I was fascinated. By the age of three, I wanted to dance; I had to wait until I was five to start because the ballet school did not take children younger than that. I consider dancing like breathing, and I also think it helps to transcend emotions. Whatever is going on in your life, good or bad, you can dance it out. If you’re angry, some people like to go to the gym or punch the punching bag; I like to dance angry. If I am feeling sad, I like to dance sad and cry my body out. If I’m feeling happy, I dance happy. So whatever is going on for me, I’m going to dance it, that’s my way of transcending my emotions so they don’t get stuck inside me. And I believe it’s very healthy. It keeps me healthy mentally, physically, it keeps me in good shape, and it’s also very confidence-building. Being a dancer and being onstage can be quite frightening, when you’re by yourself in front of a big crowd and you don’t know how they’re going to react.
I actually experienced stage fright here in Cape Verde because I was the only white girl in front of a crowd of black people and for some reason I was afraid maybe of receiving a kind of inverted racism, so I did experience fear and all these things, but I think overall once you – how do you say in English? – once you get over it, once you win over your fears, the confidence you gain is amazing. Yeah, it’s confidence-building to be a dancer, because you have to face a crowd, face people watching you in every minute detail, especially when you’re a bellydancer. People look at your belly, they look at your breasts, they look at your hips, they look at parts of your body that are very intimate, so you’ve got to make sure that, you know, everything that you do will touch them deeply in their soul. You don’t want people to just look at your body and have dirty thoughts, that’s not the idea; the idea is that you transmit the experience of dance and people are touched by your movements, rather than actually looking how you’re made, you know?
I just want people out there to not be afraid to dance. You’re never too old! Please come and dance. So, it’s something to build confidence in your own skin, and also to express who you are, spread the word out there, to show who you are, your authenticity onstage and spread a good message of peace and love. That’s my message, anyway.
See Yamina perform bellydance-samba fusion here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FXiUpprrxic
Fiona Kranz – Fire Spinner and Flow Artist
I’m Fiona Kranz. I’m a flow artist and dancer. So, as a flow artist I do many props, including fire fans, fire staff, fire hoop, I also do fire palm torches as well. Other props I do are silk veil fans, lots of LED props such as LED fans and Isis wings. And I do fire poi, which I forgot.
How long have I been dancing? That’s a really hard question, because I did ballet when I was young. I probably did ballet for at least six to seven years but then I took a big break, and then I came back before I was thirty. So at least this time around I’ve been dancing for about five, six years after my break. I was probably about five or six when I first started.
I took a break in the middle due to work; I also had an ankle injury, which is why I gave up ballet in the first place; that’s why I put that all aside. And then I had a baby. And since having a baby and going through some traumatic events in my life, that’s what actually made me take up dancing, as a new style.
I wanted to try something completely different. I have a best friend who’s Pakistani, and I think because I’d heard some of the music she was listening to, that may have been an inspiration for wanting to try Bollywood. I don’t actually know why I decided to go with Bollywood, but for some reason, because I love other cultures as well, I wanted to have a different experience and immerse myself in someone else’s culture, and I enjoy the music. So that’s why I took that up as a style. And that was after my break for ballet. I’ve always loved ballet, and I did actually go back and do ballet classes as an adult as well. So I’ve still kept that up and that is still something that I hold close to my heart.
After I did Bollywood, I decided to take it further and be in groups outside of the studio. So I took up jazz and heels, and I also took up lyrical jazz; one of my favourite classes was with Tonia Santoro. And I really enjoyed that. So basically, I guess, my drive to improve myself as a dancer led me to do other styles. As a result of that, I started to do flow arts at some point. I decided that I wanted to do something more creative myself as an individual, so I took up poi. When I picked up a fire fan, that’s when I fell in love with fans, and I knew that was my prop. And then flow arts went from there, as a result of me wanting to be more creative as an individual.
It was actually my sister… She did fire poi, and I think, because I had seen her do that, I had decided ‘that looks really cool, I want to give that a shot’. Because then, it’s another platform where I can have fun and just enjoy doing what I do.
Flow Arts and Improvisation
I guess maybe it was the kind of dances I was doing, being in a Bollywood group or a group doing a routine is very structured, that you have to know the choreography and also know all the techniques behind what you’re doing. So in other words, I guess, you’re doing a routine that is choreographed by someone else, so you have to do basically what they tell you to do. Which I still really enjoy and that’s great. But I guess part of it, doing improvisation, allows you to do your own choreography, and even if you’re doing your own moves, it allows you to put your own style on it. You’re not being told what exactly to do, you just do whatever you want and have fun with it.
A lot of (flow artists) do improv, and it’s quite funny in the beginning that I had a lot of trouble doing improvisation. I felt when I was doing my flow, I had to have a sequence. I went from a windmill into a two-beat weave, or a three-beat weave… I actually think it’s very funny that as a dancer, I found it very hard going into flow arts, because I’m used to having a sequence mapped out. And it actually took me a while to get into the flow of doing improvisation.
But definitely, in the flow arts community, a lot of them might have a sequence of ‘this move flows well into this move’; but a lot of flow artists get up onstage and improvise. They’ll be told to do a performance, they’ll have a song, but in the beginning for me it was shock-horror, ‘you don’t know what you’re doing?!’ But they would just get up and totally just go with the flow. And once you have a certain amount of experience behind you, yes, you can definitely, totally do that. And I guess what’s really great about that as well is that you can do your own thing with whatever you feel like at that moment. And enjoy what you’re doing.
Challenges
I think… the first thing would be politics, which was a thing I had a few issues with. Other than that I haven’t had many issues; I haven’t had any big injuries. I had one glute, so, butt injury, and that’s not good for Bollywood when you can’t wiggle your hips. Actually, I did have one injury, and that was really hard having to rest and not be able to do what you love. Having said that, most of my experiences the whole way through have been very positive and I’ve really loved all of my teachers.
It can be quite hard when you first start in a new style, especially as I started off doing ballet, so that’s very structured, then trying to do things like twerking, or hip hop, which is very loose [she laughs]… I think styles that are completely the opposite to what you started out doing can be quite tricky. And that’s why I actually took up Bollywood. Because it’s totally different from ballet, because I wanted to loosen up and try something completely different. I’ll be honest, Bollywood was very difficult for me in the beginning. Trying to get my hips, and trying to get different parts of my body to do certain isolations and techniques, yeah. I guess with anyone it’s practice.
I wouldn’t say any one style was harder than another, except for maybe heels. Because I’m not a confident person, and I don’t see myself as a sexy person, so I took that up to take myself out of my confidence zone. So for me, that was personally hard.
Regarding SETTING THINGS ON FIRE and spinning them… Were you afraid?
Yes. Luckily, you don’t burn in the house, you have a special place you go. But I was definitely afraid of burning myself. Definitely. I mean, that’s why you have to practice before you put it on fire. And you have to be very safe, and you have to make sure you know you’re confident in the moves before you set (your props) on fire. Particularly fire fans. There are a lot of people in Perth who don’t do fans because they’re very hot on the hands. But I have, through experience, worked out what moves are good to start off with so I’m not burning my fingers.
I burnt myself at Spun Out because the choreography someone else had done for me was not choregraphed in such a way that, at the beginning, if you have hot fans, it doesn’t go very well; as in, isolations. If you’re keeping it still, then you burn your fingers. You have to keep moving, and Shannon, my poi teacher, taught me that. The very first thing he always said was, ‘you will not burn yourself if you keep moving’. You can even bang yourself, bang your clothes or your arm, and not burn yourself; it’s the contact time on your body.
Yes, I was very scared the first time I lit up, it’s always ‘oh my God’, and you completely forget your moves to begin with. It’s almost as if you need to light up and just get used to the fire first, and then, when you’re used to it, start spinning. There’s a certain period of time, I think, with each prop, that you’re scared of it. Well, even my fire hoop, because I had fire all around me, and I was spinning it on my hips, even though I’ve done fire, I was scared of it to begin with because I didn’t know how it felt. But after a few light-ups, then I was confident with it.
So, I think even every new prop has got it’s own little insecurities until you’ve worked out it feels and where you can put your hands. Like, how far away can you have the flame from your hand? With my hoop when I’m doing an isolation, I can hold right on the edge because the wick will be here [she indicates just near her wrist], I can hold the wick there and it won’t burn me. But to begin with, I was really worried.
Just for readers, how dangerous really is it? How likely is it that professional fire performers might burn themselves?
You obviously have your fire safety, I mean, in the last two years I’ve been doing it I’ve burnt myself badly twice. I mean, it can be quite dangerous. If you are not careful, you can make a mistake. Even the best of us can. I saw the best staffman in the world in a performance in January. He’s literally one of the best staffers. He had his staff slip on him and he ended up with a bad burn on his arm. So it happens to the best of us.
Achievements
I think… having the courage to step away from something I was enjoying. But there were also a few negative things as well, it’s not like I wasn’t enjoying what I was doing, but I felt like I wasn’t being as creative and actually doing my own thing. Especially with my personality, because I’m a very passive person, I don’t see myself as a leader. I would never have seen myself as teaching necessarily dancing or anything. So for me, as an individual, it’s been a huge challenge to step away from something I actually enjoyed and take it further to now where I’m actually being a confident performer as an individual.
I’ve only really just started teaching flow arts, so I have been teaching people at fire group. That started probably quite early, when I started picking up fans, because there’s not many people that like to do fans for some reason. Other than just wave them around. I’m one of the only ones who is a real tech person. So I guess I’ve been teaching that for a year, just, people asking me how to do a move at fire group, but as a class point of view, I took my first class at Spun Out, which was in October.
As I’m not a leader, or necessarily a person that goes, ‘hey! Look at me!’, I found it very difficult, and I’m very self-conscious that I would love people to enjoy, I want them to learn, I want people to enjoy the class, so I just had to try and have courage [she laughs]. And just say to myself, ‘No, you’ll be fine, you’ll put on a great class’. So yeah, I found it very challenging personally, and I put a lot of preparation into all the moves that I was teaching so I ensured that people would come away with a quality class, learning lots of different moves, and hopefully have fun. I try to put a bit of humour into it as well, because I think when you run a class, you also want people to have fun, relax and enjoy themselves.
Continuing Her Journey
I’ll start with teaching first. I would definitely like to do more silk veil fan classes. At the moment it’s currently down to just workshops, so there’s one, a fundraiser I’m doing in January, for the Cat Haven, so I’m going to provide all the silk veil fans for people. That’s also good because they’re not cheap. So, the fact that I can provide that for people as well… I don’t necessarily do things for money. I also like to help people and give them a good experience. And as a result of a fundraiser as well, I’m helping cats, and I’m hopefully giving people a fun time and teaching them how to do silk veil fans and they don’t have to necessarily afford fifty dollars to buy their fans as well.
I’d like to teach classes down the track, but it’s a matter of finding a studio where I could do maybe a six-week course. That’s definitely something I’m going to try to look into, but I’m a bit busy with other performing opportunities. I’d also like to teach fire fans; it would be good if I could mix it up and do three weeks of fire fans and three weeks of silk veil fans.
I’ve got a few things coming up; I’ve got a Fringe Show on Friday, I have… you know, there’s the Pride Parade on the 30th? I’m going to be in the Pride Parade and I’m also performing LED as a fundraiser for Danceopia, which is a camp at Blazing Swan. They’re a dance camp, so they do dancing around this temple event; I don’t know… they burn down this big effigy. It’s the fire tribe.
Of course the fire tribe has an effigy they burn down. That sounds like something they’d do. You should probably explain the fire tribe…
[Fiona laughs] Okay, I wish I could explain it well, but basically fire tribe is the camp through Blazing Swan. Blazing Swan (is an organisation that) has got different camps that quite often come down to various entertainment groups, so fire tribe is one of them, which I’m in. Every night of the camp, we burn for people. We take our props out, we take our fuel, we go out on the truck, we set up a spot and we put on a fire show for everybody. Quite often we go round to different camps within Blazing Swan and do a bit of a fire performance at the different camps, which is a lot of fun. And there are a lot of other events we do, like they have a dance events where we go to each camp – because each camp has a DJ – they have their own DJ and we all go round to each other’s DJs and dance at Blazing Swan. So fire tribe does all these other events, not necessarily fire events, but also, it’s all linked to Perth Fire Group. Fire tribe is the Blazing Swan subgroup that gathers on a Tuesday night to do circus and flow arts.
So some of the tribes include fire tribe, Danceopia, there’s Steampunk Pancakes, they make pancakes for everybody… Yes, they are a group of people who dress up like, steampunk, and make pancakes. There’s Black Lagoon, and they make coffee. There’s Tribal Tribe and they play the drums. There’s God Says No.
And they all have a theme camp buggy that we decorate and ride around to different places. It sounds crazy, I know. It’s about freedom of self-expression and decommodification. You know, there’s no money. Someone even made a free paella last year, like, these big vats, and they just gave it out to everyone. It’s about giving to people.
Why do you dance?
I don’t know why, but it’s enjoyable. It’s good for your mind, body and soul. It’s great to have fitness while doing something you really enjoy. But it’s really good to express yourself through movement.
I do not know why (people choose to spin fire). For me personally, I think it’s a bit of an outlet, because I’ve been through some traumatic things in my life. For me, it’s a way to enjoy myself and forget about other things that are going on. Even though it’s dangerous, maybe the fact that it is fire appealed to me because I have nearly died. It’s almost like, I don’t know why, risk-taking or doing exciting things makes me feel good. There’s definitely that risk factor that makes your adrenaline increase.
But fire’s beautiful, as well. For me, it’s a positive thing. People might see fire can be very destructive, but for me fire is also light, and light is also hope. So, I see it as even though it’s a dangerous thing, it is a beautiful thing as well. And I think it’s really beautiful to entertain people with something like that, even if it is dangerous.
See Fiona perform fire fans here: (67) Koto – YouTube
Thank you so much to my interviewees. As ABBA says, ‘Without a song or a dance, what are we?’
If you’re interested in reproducing these stories, contact the Centre for Stories.
About the Author: Emily Siggs
I have danced all my life, in styles from contemporary to ballroom. Now, I dance with the Bollywood Bandwagon, and recently choreographed for the Sacred Earth event with Extinction Rebellion. I hope to continue spreading love and hope through dance and writing.
See my performance for Sacred Earth here: (67) ‘On the Mountain Tall’ Oh Hellos Flash Mob – Extinction Rebellion WA and Sacred People, Sacred Earth – YouTube
All photos taken by me if not otherwise specified.
Emily-Oscar Siggs - Writer, Editor 