Dancing Alone

I've been doing nothing much at all today. Home alone, I slept a lot, read a bit (How To Be Good, by Nick Hornby), watched the rest of Dark City (Jennifer Connelly and Rufus Sewell - shwing!), ate pizza and dragon fruit and chocolate, watched parts 1 and 2 of Pride and Prejudice again, walked around the apartment naked, SMSed F through the day. I thought briefly of doing some beading, but decided this would be a day of complete rest.

If you haven't tried walking around your own house completely naked, try it. It's wonderfully liberating. I do it whenever I have the chance.

On Friday and Saturday nights I had dance gigs. Maybe that's why I was so tired. Friday's gig was for this guy's birthday, a rather old gweilo boss of some travel agency, with a rather young Thai wife. WY and I did several items plus lots of crowd interaction. About half the audience was very vocally appreciative and the other half was quite cold/shy/bemused. If I wasn't a dancer I might have said the loud part of the audience was being a little too rowdy, but when you're dancing your heart out, you want to see some sort of positive response... but stopping short at actually manhandling us dancers, of course. We're not doing that sort of entertainment.

On Saturday I followed QY (a new colleague - she's a part-time singer) to Shah Alam for my first ever solo gig. It was for a rather grand Indian wedding dinner, and we were there very, very early. The wait was exhausting... I was in costume hours before my item, as there were about 20 items in the programme. It went well, though! I did two dances back to back. Was just a bit nervous, but smoke (dry ice generated) and lights prevented me from having a very clear view of the audience's faces, so that helped a lot. I'm still a very shy person at heart. The crew and the rest of the performers were very cool people. Also, this gig might generate future ones, as the crew is interested in working with me again and the organizer approached me for my contact info on behalf of some guests.

I really have to start on new choreography and many more costumes...

P/S: Just want to note here that there is a lot more appreciation for fuller figured women among the Indians compared to the Chinese. Most of the other female performers were model skinny, but I wasn't made to feel like an outcast among them... I was regarded with friendliness and an admiration for my bellydancing, which apparently most of them have not been exposed to. It was refreshing.