Avariel
New member
Hi guys! new poster on the forum but I've followed threads on here for years. Happy to have a community that's active online and tha tI can hopefully bounce thoughts and ideas off of
Recently I had a friend come to town from across the country and she's never seen bellydancing before. A local troupe was putting on a show at a big theater in town, a ticketed event that had been advertised grossly throughout the weeks leading up to it, so I felt it was a great opportunity to show my friend multiple styles and flavors of bellydance and be there to answer questions or comment while the show was going on so that she could learn a little while also enjoying great dancing! Unfortunately, in my hometown a lot of local troupes tend to put dancers on stages and in professional, paid venues while the dancers are still sort of going through amateur and student phases in their dance technique, so the result is a lot of awkward shows that leave audiences fidgety, restless, and not paying attention. Our town's support community is usually pretty dismal, and the low quality performances at paid shows is why. Not only do people not want to pay for what they're seeing, but they think that all professional bellydancers are like this and don't even bother going to other shows when they hear about them.
This show I took my friend to was no different. There were the typical (very) few bright stars in the lineup, but it was three hours of sort of lukewarm performance, and my friend, a non-dancer and uneducated "civillian" was very dissapointed that we paid for tickets (her words.) she is, bless her, very honest and while she was tactful she told me what she thought. I don't want to repeat it here, but nevertheless I was mortified, not only for myself, but for the dancers on stage. Many of them I know personally and as much as I love them all, it hurt a lot to realize that my friend was kind of right. I had gotten to the point where I was so used to seeing what we were seeing on stage that I had sort of fallen into accepting it as "as good as it'll get" and concentrating on myself as a performer, studying hard so that my contribution to the community was as big as I could make it. But after hearing what my friend said, and looking out over the (not even close to sold out) theater, I realized how having dancers on the stage that maybe weren't ready for it yet was seriously killing our community. What we were actively doing in front of the public, on stages and in restaraunts, was educating the public on what bellydance was, whether we wanted it to be how they saw it or not.
So me, being somewhat naive, sent a very professional, private, tactful letter to the event coordinater (the leader of the troupe in question) a few days later. I thought that perhaps she would be concerned with what a customer felt about her product that said customer had paid for. The results were disasterous. Instead of responding to me directly and discussing the issue at hand (i.e. amateur dancers professionaly representing this art form to the town at paid events) she blasted it all over facebook, while hiding it from me, and created a whirlwind of drama that swung around her like a sack of rotten potatoes. I had another dancer friend who clued me in to what was going on, and after 8 hours of facebook vomit (all hidden from me; the new method of talking behind someone's back is changing security settings on wall posts, apparently) the facilitator finally responded with a very unprofessional, personally scathing, and overly-dramatic response. To me it was devastating; to not only see something happening in our community that was obviously killing all of us professionally, but then have someone causing it be so intent on twisting it so it was about "them" that they miss the point entirely; I was really at a loss.
A lot of friends have advised me that I should just cut my losses, let the drama queens simmer and boil in their own created reality and go about my way, but the fact remains that their actions are still affecting all of us. I feel unable to let go of it completely because I feel like, amidst all the drama and name-calling, the point is entirely being missed, and that point is so, so, so important. I don't feel the need to create chaos for the sheer enjoyment of it; I'm a really good dancer, an inherent people pleaser, and I hate making anyone upset, much less drama-queen upset. (that's pretty epic upset.) I have no reason to drag anyone down, and would rather our entire community as a whole get phenomenally good and put on outrageously sold out shows that make everyone think bellydancing is the best thing EVAR.
How can I do this? Talking to the persons in question seems impossible; has anyone else ever struggled through this as a community? Any success stories? Advise for those of us that are still trying to solider through it? How do we deal with troupes and performers like this? Am I just being stupid in even concerning myself with this? Will welcome someone giving me a reality check if I'm totally in the wrong; I'm frankly at a loss at the moment and don't have a clear direction to go in besides, as Dori puts it, "Just keep swimm- er, dancing."
Recently I had a friend come to town from across the country and she's never seen bellydancing before. A local troupe was putting on a show at a big theater in town, a ticketed event that had been advertised grossly throughout the weeks leading up to it, so I felt it was a great opportunity to show my friend multiple styles and flavors of bellydance and be there to answer questions or comment while the show was going on so that she could learn a little while also enjoying great dancing! Unfortunately, in my hometown a lot of local troupes tend to put dancers on stages and in professional, paid venues while the dancers are still sort of going through amateur and student phases in their dance technique, so the result is a lot of awkward shows that leave audiences fidgety, restless, and not paying attention. Our town's support community is usually pretty dismal, and the low quality performances at paid shows is why. Not only do people not want to pay for what they're seeing, but they think that all professional bellydancers are like this and don't even bother going to other shows when they hear about them.
This show I took my friend to was no different. There were the typical (very) few bright stars in the lineup, but it was three hours of sort of lukewarm performance, and my friend, a non-dancer and uneducated "civillian" was very dissapointed that we paid for tickets (her words.) she is, bless her, very honest and while she was tactful she told me what she thought. I don't want to repeat it here, but nevertheless I was mortified, not only for myself, but for the dancers on stage. Many of them I know personally and as much as I love them all, it hurt a lot to realize that my friend was kind of right. I had gotten to the point where I was so used to seeing what we were seeing on stage that I had sort of fallen into accepting it as "as good as it'll get" and concentrating on myself as a performer, studying hard so that my contribution to the community was as big as I could make it. But after hearing what my friend said, and looking out over the (not even close to sold out) theater, I realized how having dancers on the stage that maybe weren't ready for it yet was seriously killing our community. What we were actively doing in front of the public, on stages and in restaraunts, was educating the public on what bellydance was, whether we wanted it to be how they saw it or not.
So me, being somewhat naive, sent a very professional, private, tactful letter to the event coordinater (the leader of the troupe in question) a few days later. I thought that perhaps she would be concerned with what a customer felt about her product that said customer had paid for. The results were disasterous. Instead of responding to me directly and discussing the issue at hand (i.e. amateur dancers professionaly representing this art form to the town at paid events) she blasted it all over facebook, while hiding it from me, and created a whirlwind of drama that swung around her like a sack of rotten potatoes. I had another dancer friend who clued me in to what was going on, and after 8 hours of facebook vomit (all hidden from me; the new method of talking behind someone's back is changing security settings on wall posts, apparently) the facilitator finally responded with a very unprofessional, personally scathing, and overly-dramatic response. To me it was devastating; to not only see something happening in our community that was obviously killing all of us professionally, but then have someone causing it be so intent on twisting it so it was about "them" that they miss the point entirely; I was really at a loss.
A lot of friends have advised me that I should just cut my losses, let the drama queens simmer and boil in their own created reality and go about my way, but the fact remains that their actions are still affecting all of us. I feel unable to let go of it completely because I feel like, amidst all the drama and name-calling, the point is entirely being missed, and that point is so, so, so important. I don't feel the need to create chaos for the sheer enjoyment of it; I'm a really good dancer, an inherent people pleaser, and I hate making anyone upset, much less drama-queen upset. (that's pretty epic upset.) I have no reason to drag anyone down, and would rather our entire community as a whole get phenomenally good and put on outrageously sold out shows that make everyone think bellydancing is the best thing EVAR.
How can I do this? Talking to the persons in question seems impossible; has anyone else ever struggled through this as a community? Any success stories? Advise for those of us that are still trying to solider through it? How do we deal with troupes and performers like this? Am I just being stupid in even concerning myself with this? Will welcome someone giving me a reality check if I'm totally in the wrong; I'm frankly at a loss at the moment and don't have a clear direction to go in besides, as Dori puts it, "Just keep swimm- er, dancing."