Wednesday, December 22, 2010

Raks Pro has been invited to perform at the World of Orient festival in Hannover, Germany, 11-13 march. We will be sharing the stage with some of Europes most well known dancers and have been asked to represent Belgium in the European Superstars Gala.





Tuesday, November 23, 2010

Congrats ladies!!

Just a short note to say how unbelievably happy both me and Artemisia are to be working with such great dancers for the RAKS PRO project. You all really rocked the stage in Duisburg this weekend, as a group with Razia's awesome drum solo choreography but also as individual dancers during the solo category!! Keep up the good work girls, you make us proud :)

PS: Here a sneak preview of the pictures from the Bozenka show, more to follow soon!

Photo by Maani

Monday, November 22, 2010

yeay!!!!

we won we won we won! and we had too much fun!! !

longer updates and pictures later, we promise

but we already want to share our hapiness at getting second place in the formations/classical category at the Bellydancer of the World competition in Duisburg saturday. and well, the price doesnt matter, but that we, as a team, just got that much stronger on stage again! extra applause to choreographer Razia as well!

a big thank you to our support team, a-team, who became third in the same category and were lovely backstage friends!

and a huuuuge congratulations to two raks pro members, Anadil and Nasreen, who became FIRST in the classical duo category!!!!!!!!!!!! Duo Bintani rocks!

Sunday, November 21, 2010

Backstage @ An evening with Bozenka

Together with my Raks Pro colleagues, we spent months of training and preparation for performing @ 'An evening with Bozenka'. It was amazing! I use the word 'it' because the day of the performance, there was so much more going on than the actual performance itself :-D

Before and after rocking the stage with my girls, I took the liberty of making lóts of backstage pictures.

You see the happiness in our eyes, the excitement of performing together for the first time, and the love for our coaches that made this all happen !

Check out some backstage pictures !




















xx Johanna















Friday, November 19, 2010

About Us

RAKS PRO is the first Belgian professional Oriental Dance Ensemble, bringing together a group of dedicated, enthusiastic and fantastic professional performers from all over the country, available for gigs, events, festivals in Belgium & internationally. Current dancers include troupe directors & choreographers Artemisia & Khalida, as well as Queenie, Chadia, Fédra, Johanna, Luna, Sahra, Anadil, Nasreen and Majidah. Our repertoire ranges from interpretations of the classics, over the last modern Egyptian pop, to drumsolo's, folcloric tableaux and prop work, from simple integrity to glamourous extravaganza. Our speciality is dynamic group numbers that showcase both the individual dancers' qualities and our unity as a group. Experience how an ensemble can offer an audience a different experience of oriental dance without loosing any of it's feeling!

Tuesday, November 16, 2010

We know what you did last summer

So what happened after we got the "team" together?

One of the first things Khalida and Artemisia decided was to get some guest choreographers on board. Yeah, we like our own choreo's plenty, but they are still... our choreographies. To make the whole project more exciting for ourselves, the dancers, the audience, variation was key!

So we devised a summer of rehearsals and workshops, including workshops with guest choreographers Queenie (Khaleegy) and Razia (Drumsolo). we also included a theatre and stage skills workshop with Artemisia, which nicely doubled as a team building day and a wings workshops with Khalida.

The big "intro" choreo, Khalida and Artemisia were going to make together. Our original plan of each choreographing sections individually, and then throwing it all together, simply didnt work, so we ended up with a lot of extra meetings, to really create a joint choreo. It was one of the most fun, and artistically rewarding things we've both done. Artemisia loves creating formations and troupe transitions, and Khalida has the best ideas on poses, arms and combo's! We both hear the music differently at times, but that turned out to be a plus, rather than holding us back. Whenever we got stuck, one of us would come up with something!!! I don't think we really know by now who put together what. Well, apart from the wings, that's alllll Khalida!

The choreographies Razia and Queenie came up with for the troupe were wonderfull! And those also ended up being joint projects somehow, as they needed some adapting to working well with a large group of bodies. Which is great to do if the material to work with is so amazing. Both "commissioned" dances turned out so well... and the dancers had a lot of fun learning them. The challenge here, after the choreographers had left, especially in the case of our long distance working relationship with Razia, was to polish all the last details (arms, hands, heads, etc), in the abscence of the original choreographer. We really hope we've done her proud. For the Khaleegy we had Queenies ongoing support! And boy, did she drill the troupe into getting the "feel" of it right! It's not just the steps, Khaleegy is a mood!

So, we had our start up meeting, followed by about 5 all day rehearsals this summer, and a few more spread over september and october, to learn and rehearse three brand new "big group" numbers: a six minute oriental opening (wings, veil, formation crazyness!), a looooong drumsolo, and a compilation-khaleegy.

Finding rehearsal times for such a large group of dancers, who mostly teach weekly classes themselves was NOT easy. that is why we ended up with an intensive summerprogram, of mostly weekend day rehearsals. At least people were free then, though many really sacrificed (part of) their family holiday time for this. Finding rehearsal time in the middle of the year, is going to be the next challenge.

Come and read us next week for more on the joint choreography proces and on getting costuming togehter for a professional troupe...

Wednesday, November 10, 2010

our motto

Prepare-Practice-Pimp-Polish-Perfect-Perform-Pass Out-Pine

and then on to the next round!

Tuesday, November 9, 2010

How it all started!

In the summer of 2009, right after our first RAKS summerschool, Khalida and Artemisia went on a little field trip to the Jillina Weekend Djamilla was organising in Offenbach. After an inspiring weekend, and on the long train journey back, we started a brainstorm... that would eventually lead to Raks Pro

What we wanted was to find a way to continue working with some of the great dancers that had participated in our summerschool. To our delight more professional dancers than we had hoped for, had enrolled for RAKS. Afterwards they all expressed how they were finding it harder and harder to find weekly classes that suited not only their level, but also their time shedule. They wanted to work more with us (blush and yeay!) but really couldnt make it to our classes. Could we please do something in the weekends?

So A and K set out to try and come up with something! We love new plans! Our original dream was the PPPP-program. (Prepare, Polish, Pimp, Perform). Over a series of weekends, we would offer solo choreography therapy, for advanced dancers to work on their own solo's...possibly leading up to a show.

(and we still might run that sometime in future)...

BUT

Somewhere in 2009-2010, we decided to go a different route. Artemisia's shows had plenty of solo-ists in it... why not work with a group of professionals to add some interesting group choreographies to the mix. A new challenge for us as choreographers, and a new challenge for the Belgian dance scene! No, not a student troupe of one local dancer, but a group of professionals, from ALL over Belgium, each with their own talents and experience, would join us for this adventure. with choreographies from several pro's, from Belgium and abroad, to assure the necessary diversity such a project needed.

In march 2010 we started emailing around, and assembling both a group of dancers, and a pretty intensive training shedule...

The original plan was to keep this a temporary project... but we changed our minds. Why change a winning team!

More about the process of working towards "An evening with... Bozenka" and turning Raks Pro into something permanent... in a seperate entry later this week!

signing off and off to bed

Artemisia

Welcome!

Artemisia and Khalida are very happy to present to you our brand-new RAKS PRO website and blog. Check it out regularly for the latest news updates, pictures and videoclips. More posts will be added soon!