Teressa-Belly Dance Artist in Toronto

On Saturday August 7th, 4 of my students and I had the opportunity to perform at 2 community events here in Scarborough; the first at the Taste of the Woods Festival at the Warden Woods Community Centre and the second at the Scarborough Village Summer Festival. It was a great chance for us to learn new choreographies and revise some of our old favourites.

The first show at Warden Woods was a great start to the day; we arrived at the centre just before noon and found our stage to be the grass in front of the centre (luckily, I had thought this through beforehand and made sure that we all wore shoes), so we were all set for our natural setting. The only challenge was that our grassy stage was on a slight slope, which made dancing a bit more challenging as we had to make sure we didn’t fall backwards down the slope as we shimmied and undulated! However, we all had a fantastic time performing and the audience seemed to really enjoy it as well (I also heard that there were a few in the audience who even knew the words to some of the songs we were dancing to!). I performed a bellydance entrance piece fighting with my veil against the wind, while my students Camille, Elizabeth, Miriam, and Susanne performed a pop song and a drum solo. We also did a little audience participation and found some natural bellydancers in our audience!

For the second show at the Scarborough Village Summer Festival, we did a similar show to the first, but the girls also had to perform a short veil choreography to the classic song, Tamra Henna, while I also added an upbeat modern Egyptian song to the repertoire. Now I should know better than to try to manoeuvre veils outside with the winds blowing and I should really know better than to force my students to do the same…but yet, there we were, with our veils battling the fierce winds on stage. Audiences love props and I love happy audiences, which meant that veils would just have to be a part of this show!

I performed first and my veil developed its own challenging personality that I couldn’t control, then the girls took to stage as I worried that perhaps I should have really rethought the whole veil situation. However, they were all lovely (although I’m not sure how they felt) and the veils looked totally in control! Afterwards, they said that my veil didn’t look like it was out of control either, but we were all just thankful that it looked much better than it felt. The rest of the show was great as we danced and got the audience involved once again, teaching them how to do hip circles and shimmies.

At last, after our 2 shows, we were finished! We took lots of photos, which can be found here.

We also made it into the Scarborough Mirror! Here’s a photo of Miriam and Susanne performing: