This project required a lot from these featured dancers . Delilah of Seattle mentioned how hard it was to go through mountains of her life long dance and select only 10 minutes of archival material to send to my editor . She described her whole living room was taken up with boxes ! The featured dancers also could only pick photos , flyers , posters that they had legal rights to . They could only use music / dance video clips that were “ legal .” If they liked their video but couldn ’ t find or get official permission from the musicians , it was up to my editor to overlay from a list of legally approved songs from Hollywood Music to best match up movement to music .
The selected dancers also had to write their biographical story . We all know how difficult it is to write about yourself . Suhaila was lucky in that she had a professional writer do this for her , but the others worked through this themselves . To write a human interest story about yourself versus a book report style story is not easy ! Some dancers turned in long , long lists of awards and accomplishments . This was nice but not usable since it would have been boring to read into their segment . I was
Amaya and Addi Quadderron working on the voice-over for Amaya ’ s Bonus track
sure people wanted to know more about what made this dancer tick and learn about their struggles and journeys than listen to a list of titles . I jokingly suggested , tongue in cheek , to make their bio read more like the National Enquirer than the business page of Linked In .
October 2020 � The Belly Dance Chronicles 43