Workshop: Improvisation and Emotion with Laura Zaray

I've decided to make myself useful (hopefully) and start reviewing all of the workshops I attend. This last week was the annual Stockholm Belly Dance Festival, which I participated in for my first time. I attended four workshops: Improvisation and Emotion with Laura Zaray (mixed level), Bollywood for Beginners with Elia, Intermediate Shimmy Technique with Zahra, and Tabla Solo with Camilla Lombardi (mixed level). I won't be reviewing the bollywood class simply because it was so short and introductory, but I will try to go into some detail about the others.

My first workshop at SBDF was with Laura Zaray. Before we go any further, watch this video. Do it.



Yes. She is absolutely surreal. The adorable Finnish dancer showed up wearing a leopard print top and fluffy red socks, and brought creativity to match. As you can see from the above clip, she is a truly fabulous dancer, with - sorry for my lack of eloquence, but - crazy mad skills.

Having said that, her teaching style just did not work for me. Laura didn't do all that much dancing herself, but most of the time stood in the corner by the stereo and just watched us after telling us what to do. Since the workshop was aimed at improving improvisation, I suppose that's not really a problem, but it didn't work well for me. Laura's tips seemed to be aimed at dancers who struggle with variety in their improvisation - not dancers who struggle with improvisation, period. She led us through several exercises, each focusing on a different aspect of the body or a certain type of movement. For example, at one point she told us to improvise using only our feet; next was our hands, then our abdomens. She also had us work with only "heavy" movement and then only "light" movement. She also went briefly over emotion, assigning four different feelings to the corners of the room and having us rotate between them.

These were creative and worthwhile exercises which I will definitely keep in mind in the future, when I do start improvising.  But when I try to improvise, my mind blacks out and I suddenly don't remember any steps or combinations. Unfortunately, the workshop did not help with that issue.

On another note, there were only four students in the class. I don't think this reflects anything about Laura herself, other than the fact that she is not (yet) as well-known as Tito and Mercedes. However, three of us were intermediate students, and the fourth was a semi-professional dancer who performs frequently as a soloist. After the very first exercise Laura informed her that she was "already improvising perfectly", and indeed she was. Which means that the three of us awkwardly jigged back and forth as she gracefully swept around the room ofr an hour and a half.

The workshop cost about $35 (250 sek), and having paid that much I felt somewhat disappointed. For a dancer looking to gain more variety of movement in her improvisation the class would have been wonderful, but it wasn't for me and I thus didn't think it was worth the price. However, Laura is a fantastic dancer and I will keep watching her youtube channel for inspiration and to appreciate her grace!

Photo from Laura Zaray's website

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