No rest for the wicked

Whew! It's been a busy few weeks. You'd think being on holiday would have brought me a bit of respite, but no... lately my life has been all go go go.

My favourite part of my half-term break was painting murals for Kids Company. A day of physical labour can go by surprisingly quickly. I didn't want it to end.


Of course, before half term was Dubai, and I still haven't talked much about that. Dubai is full of steel and concrete; big fancy towers and shopping malls and resorts and 14 lane highways and every single brand name you can imagine. Even Canadian brands!


It's all very luxurious, I suppose, if you're into that sort of thing. I personally found it a bit sickening.

For me, Dubai had one single saving grace (apart from the sunshine): The Creek.


The Creek is the heart of Old Dubai and is where most of the traditional souks (markets) are concentrated. I had a brilliant time browsing and haggling my way through the labyrinths. It reminded me of India (though it smelled much more delicious), and I wound up getting some rather impressive deals.


It's also where I finally found some local food (shockingly difficult to acquire in Dubai!) and for a great price. This shawarma is about a fifth of the size of the ones they sell in Ottawa, but it was just the right amount of food and packed loads of flavour. The accompanying avocado juice was about the most amazing blended drink I've ever tasted. The total for both came to 11 dirhams (£1.84). I'm emphasising prices because they're so different from the rest of Dubai. My other lunches cost me between 60 and 110 dirhams (£10-18) and weren't nearly as nice.


Most people who live there will tell you there are too many Indians, but I think the high concentration of Indian expats was a big part of what made it appeal to me. Sights like these stirred up my memories of dusty, chaotic, magical India and made it seem like a real place where real people live and work, rather than a Wall-E wasteland.



I'll admit, I wasn't immune to the appeal of some of the nicer touristy spots...


And the dune bashing safari was a riot, if overpriced...


But if I were to return to Dubai, I'd definitely stay near the Creek and spend most, if not all, of my time there.

Next up: March 11-13 in Paris.

Post script

I decided to move on from the magazine for a while and sketch my stunningly beautiful friend Natalia (who also has a lot to do with me developing my visual side). Sorry the photo of my drawing is such crap quality, but you get the idea.




Now that I'm able to see the two side by side, I can definitely see ways to improve it. I should try doing this kind of compare more often!

Saying a whole lot of everything and nothing

On the timeline of my life, dancing (the artistic pursuit I tend to be best known for today) has only just barely stumbled out of its infancy. As a child, although I may have taken the odd class here and there, I was very much not a dancer. Evidence of my interest in drawing, however, dates back to the prehistoric age (and is still being dug up by paleontologists today). The trouble is that I never developed it. I was too innately drawn to activities that are more social in nature, and so I focused on singing and drama (and later, dance) instead.

Over the past few months, I've been slowly reintroduced to drawing. It started at Long Bay Camp, where I had the great fortune of spending several weeks teaching drama and musical theatre this summer. As an arts camp, Long Bay runs four simultaneous tracks in any given session: drama, dance, music, and visual art. When I wasn't busy teaching, I found myself producing vast quantities of art. It's amazing what one will do, given the right tools, an abundance of free time, and a lack of internet connection.

Fast forward to the past two weeks and you'll find me happily sketching alongside psychiatric hospital residents; as part of my work at the hospital school, I got to partake in drawing, pottery, singing, dancing, and drama (and you wondered why I loved it there so much).

Fast forward to the past two days and you'll find me with my brand new sketchbook and drawing pencils, madly copying images out of a magazine. Here's the latest one:


I'm enjoying this drawing thing quite a bit. But I've also noticed something... I've somehow gotten better at it since I last picked up a pencil. Over the past few years of working on my dancing, I've trained myself to see the overall effect of something, then look again at all its fundamental parts, then look again (many times over) and pick out minutiae--lather, rinse, repeat--all the while, doing my best to imitate and compare. I've had to do this in order to pick up choreographies and adopt new movement styles, and as a result, it has made me an increasingly visual person in my daily life. But not only has it improved my observation skills, it has also created a stronger link between my visual cues and my motor skills (monkey see, monkey do!). I guess it makes sense that it would also have an impact on my drawing.

I'm not sure what my next steps will be. I'm not where I want to be yet in terms of accuracy. I should, perhaps, work on some drawing techniques involving geometric shapes et al., but I don't seem to have much patience for that. I like freehand. And now that I've said that, I realize that I sound a lot like some of my beginner-intermediate dance students... so maybe I really should take some steps back and look at the fundamentals. But anyway, although I'm only imitating for the moment, I'm learning a lot through the process, and it's nice to imagine a day when I will be able to combine technique with my own individual style.

That, right there, is the sweet spot for any artistic medium, and I seem to be hitting it in reverse order. Although I will never stop working on it, I've been there with my dancing for a while. I'm just now starting to get there with singing, despite having begun voice training at the age of 8. And now, when it comes to the art form I have arguably been doing the longest, I'm beginning to see bits and pieces of it peeking out over a distant horizon.

Of course, I count myself lucky that I can even fathom that sweet spot in any respect. It is one of the greatest joys in life that I know. That's why I teach in the arts... to share that. It's good to know that teaching can bring new pieces of that joy back to me.