Belly Dance News

In Beaverton, Oregon an exotic form of movement and body language commonly known as belly dance has found its Tualatin Valley home in Poise Studio at 4700 SW 185th Avenue. The studio offers classes for yoga and Pilates, as well, but it's belly dancing that stands out as a fully multicultural event worth delving into. The specific origin of belly dance – also called “Oriental Dance,” or raqs sharqi in Arabic – is unknown. Many countries, however, boast origin stories. And countries diverse as Turkey, Armenia, Egypt and Lebanon claim belly dancing as their own. Several stories say that it began in tribal cultures as women dancing with and for other women, often to help prepare the abdominal muscles for labor, while imbuing and promoting unity. Other accounts point to religious dances depicted in Persian paintings from the 12th and 13th centuries and Egyptian tomb paintings from an even earlier era. These blended beginnings from various Middle Eastern and North African cultures have led to the increasingly popular and prolific styles now practiced in the U.S. – Tribal, Fusion, Cabaret and Gothic. Victoria Marchese, co-owner of Poise Studio, is a skilled belly dance instructor and all around dance enthusiasts. She began roughly eight years ago, after some initial hesitation, by taking a class with a friend. Marchese was hooked by the experience, and decided to take up the challenge of following a new path from her roots in cheerleading and dance team. Her first public performance came two years later at the well-known “Saqra’s Annual Belly Dance Showcase Festival” in Hillsboro. “It was so exciting. You get nervous,” says Marchese, “and then you just get out there and dance, and the creative energy hits you. It’s just a lot of fun.” Saqra’s Showcase for 2009 runs April 24 – 26 at the Washington County Fair Complex in Hillsboro featuring workshops, live music and of course belly dance exhibitions. After opening Poise in January, 2009 with co-owner and Pilates instructor Sarah Balmer, Marchese is now focusing on cabaret and tribal style for her professional and personal dancing. Only this is not strictly traditional tribal dance – it is a hybrid to which has been added innovations in music and costuming, a U.S. flare for Post Modern layering of other cultures and traditions, and the dancers’ personal creativity. American Tribal Style (ATS), says Marchese is group-oriented, focused on women and appears highly choreographed, though ATS truly has more in common with live improvisational jazz than a chorus line or hip-hop dance troupe. The troupe of ATS dancers follows the lead of one woman who chooses each dance move in the moment. The others, tipped off by a familiar gesture, like an arm movement, chime in. This technique is often called lead-and-follow. The seeming uniformity of this type of tribal dance comes from the dancers' intimacy with each other, their understanding of the moves, and their ability to anticipate the lead dancer’s cues. Poise Studio can be found on the Web at www.poisestudio.com.

Not All I Am I Am

Look away
At the street
Line of eye following line of curb
You won't see my colors
Just concrete blur
You think I'm thus
Flat as a photo pressed under plastic
It's not right to tear me and toss me
Away for an action
A few unthinking actions
They didn't affect you directly
You too eager bystanders
Chickenhawks, that dive at the wounded, expose more of themselves than my faults yet unscarred
Don't peck too quickly into business not your own
Stand off!
You do not define me with your words of white sprayed lines and narrow streets
Those go both ways
So look away
Look away again
It's what you're best at in the end.

Over the Hedgerow

Rabbit, hedgehog & dewy-eyed beetle, it is time to communicate again
Broken horses, stop churning your hearts into butter
We are pasture fed on things grown in rows and ground in metal vats
Debate this now!
Yearn beyond the shelf and icebox; 
Close them up
Turn them off
For what do you toil?
Not cardboard, never plastic
Look back
Look forward
Flesh on the unpruned branch, the tangled and unruly vine dangling inconveniently;
Flesh galloping on untamed earth under darkened woods
These are our release
Strive for them now!
Throw off,
Rear up,
Dig out from under.
Stall is cage
Walls prison
Doors never lead out, only deeper in
Look to our pampered and misused hands
What weapons these?
Not endless tools for the trade of those in power; not digits for profit production
Look to our fingers! 
Wiggle them in air not tempered
Flex and open them to the sun, wind & rain
Curl them into a fist to further our due purchase in their blunt arguement.
The communication of flesh, bone and blood is not office bound, nor industrial garden fed
It is weather torn!

Stand now, animals like me,
Tear the two-dimensional face from that book
It is not thee.

Visual Reasons to Impeach Bush and Cheney

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This video by James Cavenaugh visually presents many hard-learned reasons to move toward impeachment of president George Bush and vice president Dick Cheney.

Speech Saturation

Facts awash in a sea of free speech

Establishing fact over opinion is key. And this is very difficult it seems. So then it becomes like playing “Army” as kids – you use toy guns and shout pop pop or bang bang. The game always goes sour when a kid refuses to fall over and die – yelling that you missed him. You have no way to prove him wrong except to yell back, Did not. To which he yells, Did so. This leads to you refusing to die when getting shot, and then the game falls apart.

Keith Olbermann or Bill O'Reilly being able to have a news program in which either can say whatever he wants is equivalent to the above game of “Army” and does not a free society make. We can have the ability to say what we want and still be losing our true freedoms. Because at the point when everyone yells, all at the same time, and everything that anyone disagrees with is labeled as conspiracy theory, freedom of speech has lost it's power and importance.

If you have a container half full of pure, clean drinking water and this water allows people to be free and to live without tyranny, the best way for a government to gain more control without obviously cracking down is to open the flood gates, dumping a never ending supply of polluted water into the container – any purity is diluted.

It is this kind – Hannity, Olbermann, O'Reilly, and the news media in general – of speech saturation that makes for the broken game we now play.