TribalCon! (Feb 24-26, 2006)

Its all kind of a blur right now, but one of the blurs that leaves a happy warm fuzzy feeling in your heart. I had so much fun! And so much shopping and dancing my body and brain was screaming at me last night as I tried to teach and share the wealth of information that I picked up.

And no Ice!

The dance classes were so much fun, and so informative that I am still trying to decipher my notes! Picked up some sassy new twists on tribal combinations from the adorably funny and hot lady Rachel, as well as rekindling my love with the veil in her Sunday class, the fan class, much like Onca, was sassy sexy fun, and Jennifer’s yoga class reminded me how much I miss having yoga in my daily schedule of late!

The Show – DAMN. I wish I could remember more – can’t wait for the video to refresh my memory! It was a little warm in the room, and I had a couple glasses of wine combined with some Night quill since I have been fighting a cough for weeks now, so everything was VERY SUPER SHINY. Folks I saw last year that I have befriended since like Gypsy Red Tribe was awesome with their fan dance, Devyani was perfectly precise and pretty, Awalim KICKED major A$$, and other groups I discovered last year were great treats too: Masmoodi and the Naughties were amazing hip hop funkified, Blue Moon Bellydance had an amazing pairs of sword and pot dancer and Dance of the Fates were ginormous winged beauties to behold! I also finally got to see some of my tribe friends perform that I only knew from tribe – The ladies in Mandara can spin like a whirling dervish, Onca & Baraka Mundi were a HOOT with their saloon girl Flamenco fusion outfits and fan dancing (open ….and close and open and close them fans like you mean it, and they did!!), and so many others that were wonderful to watch as well!

Drum class on Sunday rocked my world – I was a little intimidated to take a class with master drummers Solace and Tim Rayburn, but they made it a lot of fun! I didn’t know I could drum for so long and keep up with the others! And I am so proud of my student; she came to that class having never done drumming before and did great! Happy thoughts and total sense of contentment….

The video room – freaking awesome! I mentioned this elsewhere (Tribal Style, A Documentary tribe) but what a GREAT thing this was! I popped in to see some of the films that were playing at this event. They used a projection system and a big screen and it was BEAUTIFUL! Life sized dancers performing on the screen – wahoozah! I wanted to stay in that room the whole weekend and watch all the videos but alas I had also signed up for every single TribalCon workshop and couldn’t stay….

And now we have to wait a WHOLE YEAR before we can do it again?

Thanks again Awalim!

TribalCon 2005 or IceCon 2005?

TribalCon 2005 or IceCon 2005?

The first annual TribalCon (www.tribalcon.com/) was to be held in Atlanta GA over the weekend of Jan 28-30.

We drove the imperial shuttle (my minivan) up to Atlanta from Tallahassee, with 5 other folks Friday, arriving about 5pm, and caravaned with 3 of our other friends. Our plan was to stay with our friends Keith and Barb who live in Duluth, and while Tara and I danced, the rest of them were going to be gaming (RPG). Five other folks showed late Friday night for gaming, rbinging our total to SIXTEEN so there was a houseful!

Saturday morning the ground and all vehicles are covered in ice. However, having experience in living in cold climates before, I am dressed and ready to go, have the car warming up, defroster is on and only need to find an ice scraper. Someone in our group has one, but his car is frozen shut! After a fiasco trying to get into the car with the ice scraper, and trying to scrape the layers of ice off my van, Tara calls to find out the ice storm came which had come through Atlanta Friday into Saturday, had shut down the school where the events were to be held at due to power outages. This coupled with dangerous driving conditions, postponed much of the events scheduled by a full day.

IceCon

So, now that all the dancing girls’ Saturday plans have been postponed, we go back into the house. Barb is cooking up a storm, making muffins and some kind of egg quiche thing that was oh so INCREDIBLY delicious. Drink a little more coffee, and I am feeling like I will be having a relaxing day, but wait, I am trapped in Duluth for an entire day, I am not a gamer, and with not much else to do, I prepared for my class on Monday, napped, and then about 6pm the non-gaming folks (4 of us) escaped the house to find something to do. After finding the Regal closed, and the AMC closed as well, we found a private theater and thought we would check out “Alone in the Dark”. I love cheesy sci-fi, but this was an absolutely HORRIBLE movie! The theater was also host to a video arcade, and to “Dance Dance Revolution”, an interactive ‘follow the leader with music’ type game, so Barb and I had a dance off, then I danced against the other girl that comae with us (I am so sorry but I forgot the other lady’s name!!) What a blast! This got our hearts pumping, and by the time we were done, we had quite a little crowd watching us

By now it is 10pm, so we decide we should head back to Keith and Barb’s, only to find they were still gaming! but we had not had dinner yet, so, we made up some spagetti and salad, which was delicious, the game wound down, some western movie went in that I am unfamiliar with (Tombstone??) and once my food was gone, my gin and grapefruit was drank, I headed to bed.

TribalCon

We had only signed up for the Saturday workshops, but as it was canceled we attended on Sunday. But everything got all smushed together, since the show for Saturday had been canceled as well, so we went to dance class from 10-3, with an hour for lunch (and, due to no one’s fault but our own bad luck in navigating, we had a horrendous time trying to find food!) and then the evening show was moved to Sunday at 4pm. I was kind of sad since it seemed like ther was not enough time to shop, or relax and mingle much with dancers I had been talking to on various forums like tribe.net. Additionally, the ice kept falling from the trees onto the roof of the gynasium, making it sound like the roof was going to fall in (it didn’t, but the noises got a few gasps from us dancers as well as the instructors, who were absolute darlings about it).

We got out of the show at about 7pm, and we were all starving so we went to get food. Yummy fish tacos and sharing a pitcher of Guinness gave me an attitude adjustment, for the better, and we left Atlanta just about 9pm. I drove for about 1.5 hours, and was so tired my Michael took over while the rest of us slept the remainder of the way to Tallassee about 1:30am. What a great guy my hubby is

The workshops were fun and it is neat to see other people’s style of instructions. I am still tired and sore from Jill Parker’s conditioning exercises (my quads are KILLING me still!) and I know she took it easy on us so I feel like I need to work on that aspect of strength for myself.

The show was also good. All of the dancers were wonderful! I loved the Blue Moon Dance troupe, Awalim, Mamoudi; none of which I had ever seen perform before. Kassar was there, saw them perform at Spirit of the Tribes last year, and I enjoy their performance this time as well. There was another group whom I cannot recall their name, but they wore brightly covered skirts, were very ATS and I loved them too! I know the show was videotaped, and I hope that tapes (or DVDS) will be availbale soon!

Unfortunately, my camera decided it was as tired as I was, and took a lot of fuzzy pictures before the batteries died so I am missing pictures of some of the groups that performed.

Zi’ah was absolutely gracious and endearing the entire time. She is a wonderful hostess, and I hope that she will do this again next year!

This post was originally posted on my website: Feb 1, 2005

Habits of a Bad Blogger

It’s been over a month since my last blog. I think I am just too busy! I moved to Alaska for a variety of reasons, but one of the BIG ones was because we wanted to start to enjoy our time together more, and stop being such work work work people. SO what do I do just one year after I get to Alaska? I open a dance studio, with a small retail store in it, on top of having a full time job.

Hence my recent silence.

I assure you all we are fine. I am just busy and Michael is not a blogger. I swear I will get our pictures from our cross continent move up on the gallery eventually, as well as the photos from old versions of my website. SOMEDAY.

I actually am taking the whole week of the Thanksgiving holiday off from teaching classes and plan to spend some time on me. But that means mostly moving to a ‘new to me’ computer that I bought a few months ago and hav not had the time to move my apps and data to, something I REALLY need to do since my home PC has a failing hard drive.