By Lizelle Vermaak
Living in a little village so small that we take up one page in the Telkom phone directory, one can expect that we do not have all those fancy extras bigger towns and of course cities can offer.
My motto is that of Winston Churchill – ‘ Do what you can with what you have, where you are.’ I would add ‘Bloom where you are planted’ to this mix and make this my very satisfactory outlook in life when I feel a bit sorry for myself for ‘missing out’ on what those bigger places might offer me.
So, you can imagine opportunities to perform are not that many here in St Lucia and it takes some creative thinking to ‘get us on stage.’ Speaking of which, we of course do not have. No fancy big halls with stages or drapes or lighting to create that much wanted atmosphere. We, the dancers, are the atmosphere. We must create this with what we have – Our costumes, our music and most important, our dancing. And that, after all, is what is all about, isn’t it? Stripped of all the bells and whistles, what lies beneath, is the DANCE.
The bi-annual St Lucia Hippo Festival is one platform where we can really showcase what we have to a lot more people we will normally have at our functions. This was our 3rd festival. The 2016 festival was no exception. We drew the crowds! The stage was set up in the big tent but...it was too small for us. We had to work with the grassy patch in front of it, which meant sandy, uneven surfaces. Our carefully rehearsed turns and spins could be heavily challenged by this. The evening before the festival, one of my dancer friends and I attended another function across the road from the festival grounds. At about 11pm, as we walked to the car, I wanted to show her the area where we will perform. Rows of chairs were set up already and so close to the stage, we would hardly fit in. Very casually, dressed to the nines in The Great Gatsby themed outfits, we moved the front row chairs a bit further away. I later had a good giggle about the absurdity of the situation. But, you do what you have to do!
Showday arrived and was not without problems. I went to the festival early to have my music sound checked and...their system failed to read it. Big sigh. Luckily we managed to sort this by bringing our own laptop on which the playlist was created. This again proved, never assume anything. Then, as we arrived with props in tow, we were told the band playing after us misunderstood and thought they were on at our time slot and threw their toys a bit. Another big sigh. We decided to press on and started dancing with them setting up ON the stage behind us, the one we couldn’t dance on. And the people came, lots more than what there was throughout the day. The flabbergasted oumas and oupas, the merry wives of the men watching the (despicable) bloody rugby in the beer tent, the young girls, their eyes darting from one dancer to the next, not wanting to miss anything of the shiny costumes, the non-watching rugby men, real appreciation on their faces, our friends, townsfolk I always invite but they never come, mouths hanging open with real astonishment as they see what it is all about after all... With no belly dance reference to compare us with, I take my role as ‘dance educator’ to not only my students, but those of our audience members, very, very seriously.
I created a 25 minute, non-stop mini show, with one song blending into the other, dancers going on whilst we do props change and coming on again. The audience was riveted. One compliment that reached me was the one about the city gentleman who said he never saw something so sensational! Thank you sir! I will take that.
So, with no stage, no fancy lights except the fading day light, no drapes and certainly no dressing room to do props change, we did what we could with what we had, where we were and WE MADE MAGIC!
Raq on Zahara Moon!
Cellphone photo taken by: Megan Siemens