New Home!

Guess what everybody. I have a new home. I just got a call today saying I have been accepted as the newest resident of the Sunnyside house and I move in next week. Yay to new homes.

PS. If anyone has an extra double mattress laying around my lovely new room is so far without a bed.

I am in need of a new place to live!

Hello All You Lovely People,
I am in need of a new place to live. I am looking for a place starting in August, but if the ideal situation presents it's self I can move in sooner or latter. At this point the people I end up living with is more important to me than the space I end up living in. I would love to find a place with creative, fun, conscious people, who live in a community oriented home. I rely on my bike and the bus for transportation so I need to live somewhere centrally located enough that I don't spend all my time in transit. Ideally I would like to find rent under $600 but I know this is Santa Cruz so I may be dreaming. If anyone has any helpful leads it would be much appreciated.
Thanks Much.

No Phone

Hello all you lovlie people,
This past weekend I lost my cell phone, thus loosing all my phone numbers. Please PM me your number if you think I might want to have it at any point. If you wish to reach me I can still check my messages so call and leave me a message which I will check from a land line at some point. Otherwise I'll let you all know when I get a new phone.
Thanks much,
Ayala

Santa Cruz Fire Dancing Workshop With Silence

After our successful workshop lead by led by the Spinagogue Fire University Santa Cruz is hosting a fallow up. Silence, a member of the Davis fire troop Flux, will be coming here to teach Sunday March 16th at the Veterans Memorial Building ( www.vetshall.org ).

We will be offering three classes, Bull Whip, Contact Staff I, and Contact Staff II

Each workshop is $25 or $60 for a set of three.

• 1:00 - 2:00 ~ Bullwhip
• 2:00 - 300 ~ Contact Staff I
• 3:00- 4:00 ~ Contact Staff II

Space is limited, to pre-register please contact Ayala Kalisher at danceswithfires@gmail.com or call at 530.220.4047.


Workshop Descriptions:

Beginning bullwhip-
In this class, we will cover several whip cracking techniques, with an emphasis on safety. Whips of several different sizes will be provided. Class size will be limited due to space requirements, no experience is required.

Contact Staff I
Learn the basics of contact staff. This class will focus on the fundamentals of contact staff, starting with single part wraps around the hand, elbow, neck, shoulder, and moving into basic combination moves such as the SNS . Emphasis will be on correct technique, laying a foundation for more difficult moves and combinations. Correct contact staff design will also be discussed. No previous contact staff experience needed, though some staff spinning experience is helpful.

Contact Staff II
This class will build upon basic contact staff skills, with emphasis on flow and continuous contact moves and transitions. More advanced moves such as fishtails, propellers, and steve variants will also be discussed.

Santa Cruz Fire University Spinagogue Febuary 17th

Fire University Santa Cruz is offering a six part fire dancing workshop led by the Spinagogue.
Sunday, February 17 at the Veterans Memorial Building ( www.vetshall.org ).

Classes being offered include single staff, double staff, contact staff, and poi.

Each workshop is $25 or $60 for a set of three.

• 11:30 - 1:00 ~ Poi (Beginning) or Poi (Intermediate/Advanced)
• 1:00 - 2:30 ~ Single Staff (Beginning) or Contact Staff
• 2:30 - 4:00 ~ Single Staff (Advanced) or Double Staff

Space is limited, to pre-register please contact Dyami Kaplan at dyamitk@gmail.com or Ayala Kalisher at danceswithfires@gmail.com . You can also call Dyami at 831.227.5396 or Ayala at 530.220.4047.



Workshop Descriptions:

1. Beginning/Intermediate Poi - Greg Maldonado
Learn to spin poi the easy way: by understanding how poi works. This class is built around a series of simple exercises designed to teach you more than just tricks. By exploring how a few simple tricks relate to one another, an understanding of poi emerges that will make future learning easier.

2. Intermediate/Advanced Poi Spinning- Jordan Campbell
The goal of this class is to teach you how to develop all the skills necessary to transition from an intermediate to an advanced poi spinner and how to recognize what gaps remain in your spinning repertoire. We will explore concepts including concepts like spin and antispin flowers, isolations, linear isolations, 1.5 beat weaves, hyerloops, polyrhythms pendulums, inversions, insides, introversions and hybrids. After the class you will likely not be able to do all the moves we went over but you should know what you need to learn and how to go about learning them.

3. Beginning Staff – Krissy Humphreys
Explore various types of staff movement, develop technique to control the staff and learn to move your body in graceful unison with the staff. After this class you will be able to spin confidently in a variety of ways and will have a clear understanding of how a staff moves and how you must move with the staff.

4. Beginning/ Intermediate Contact Staff - Noel Yee
This class is an introduction to contact staff manipulation with an emphasis on drills, planes and delivery. This class will take you through the basics of wrapping, rolling and spiraling with a staff. We will cover some of the following beginner tricks: hand, elbow, shoulder and neck wraps, halos and backside spirals. No experience required!

5. Intermediate/Advanced Staff Spinning– Jordan Campbell
In this class is designed to fill out technique: we will take a quick tour through different ways to pass the staff from hand to hand, work on some pendulums and non-linear planes and then learn technique that uses the body like learning to use your body as a lever to move the staff and how to use the momentum of the staff to initiate body movement.

6. Beginning/Intermediate Double Staff - Krissy Humphreys
This class is designed for beginners and will cover basic double staff technique while introducing planes, beats, timing and direction. No previous double staff experience is required.


We look forward to seeing you there!

HOT!

Check it out everybody, FU Santa Cruz is on the cover of the UCSC paper.

cityonahillpress.com/article.php

Christmas In Mexico

I catch a flight to Phoenix tomorrow to go see my dad who I haven't seen in over a year. I have been stoked to go see him, to spend Christmas soaking in the hot springs where he lives and get out only to make snow angles, to have a cholla skeleton as a Christmas tree instead of a evergreen and mostly just to spend time with him and my step mom who is always full of the most exquisite stories.

The flight is in less than 24 hours and I get a call from him just now saying "Don't pack for New Mexico, pack for Mexico. We are picking you up at the airport and driving to Mazatlan". I try never to bank on any plans with my father until they have already happened, but I have to say if anything would be better than spending Christmas at the hot springs it would be spending Christmas on the beaches of Mexico. The town he likes to go there is this little fishing village outside of Mazatlan. All the pictures he has shown me have been of picturesque oceans right outside his front door, and of the fisherman neighbors who are always bringing home fresh crab. Supposedly there are very few tourist there and great snorkeling spots. I just finished my first semester of Spanish so the timing couldn't be better. It sounds incredible, just like most of my dads plans. We'll see if this one manifests.

!feliz navidad!

Culture Shock

Sometimes it seem like I am hardly breaking the surface of what is here. Put up on the hillside in a house that is a mansion in comparison to what people are living in only 10 minutes away, and given a bunch other Americans to play with. Then I take a step back and look around me, look off the balcony of the flat. In some lights the valley below seems like it could be anywhere. A sweeping green gorge, with a shiny colorful speckling of roof tops throughout. Mountains that take on a new look in every light. Mountain that always seem to roll on forever, like looking out at an ocean horizon. Ok, maybe it couldn't be anywhere. But there is nothing to place in India, only a gorgeous landscape. A landscape I forget to appreciate day after day, that is until the light changes, and everything is once again transformed. The weather has been an adventure all of its own. This morning it was overcast, but warm and lovely even before the sun rose. The valley was dark and blue. By mid afternoon it was clear and sunny. White clouds rushing through the sky in multiple directions. A cool breeze, and a cup of sun tea the only things making the temperature bearable. But before my tin cup was drained the weather had turned again. The cool breeze had driven me inside and it began to hail. The largest hail I have ever seen, at lease a ½ inch round. The sound it made on the roof was deafening. It went beyond the patter of a rain storm, to a constant roar. Then as the hail turned into a gentle rain the light broke through the clouds, illuminating a certain ridge in the mountains that I had never noticed before. It is dark now, and after the weather rollercoaster of this day we are having one of the most fantastic lightning storms.

No day here is like the next. And not only in terms of the weather. A new group of volunteers have come and with them a mini dose of culture shock. I hadn't realized how accustomed to "Indian time" I have become. "India time" in which it is perfectly acceptable for my Tabla (an Indian drum) teacher to tell me he will come in at two or three and nod his head back and forth. "Indian time" where there is no rush to get anything done, where your nephews getting a haircut is more important than going to work. "Indian time" where the whole world revolves around the unpredictable weather, where every thing stops when it rains, and that is ok. But "Indian time" is more than just a slower pace of life, it is a state of mine. Things will get done eventually, they will work out somehow, and it doesn't really matter either way. This attitude can cause its fair share of problems and frustrations where progress is concerned, but it also has its benefits. There is no stress over anything, it is so much easier to be optimistic once you adjust. The arrival of the new volunteers was like a hurricane hitting. A rush of energy, of all the same dramas that my group went through upon first arriving. They seemed so loud, dramatizing things that hardly mattered, just to have something to complain about. I found myself feeling more comfortable sitting with the laid back staff in a corner, listening their snarky comments about the new comers and making bets with thwm on how they would adjust.

With these new volunteers came a girl who was more suited to work at the special school than me, as well as a wonderful new volunteer opportunity. An already existing NGO is planning on starting an Elderly Daycare Center but are too swamped with other work to actually design the program. Me and two other woman are set with the task of figuring out what kind of elder programs would benefit the community and then creating a manual detailing everything from what staff should be hired and what their rolls should be to what services would be offered and how we could get the community seniors to want to participate. We are starting by talking to community leaders and will work are way through village councils and woman's groups all the way to poorest of the elders . We are creating surveys and conducting interviews, trying to understand the cultural stigmas around aging and elderly care. This is a project I can get excited about, it has the promise of making a deference, creating something that will last. And if nothing else it will be a learning experience I could never hope for from a book or even playing with preschoolers.

Yes, I am sure I am hardily breaking the surface of what this country holds . But it seems somewhat like the sorties of Greek gods and how they couldn't show their true form to mortals because a mere mortal couldn't comprehend everything they really are. The amount of things to take in and processes each day is so great, even from the shelter of this all American Flat.

PS. Photo of me dancing at an Indian Wedding thanks to Barbara

Photos

For anyone interested in seeing pitctures of my trip as I go... www.flickr.com/photos/kalisher/

Updates fron India

I am finally starting to adjust to the swing of things here. Driving down the road you may have to stop for a wedding of funeral procession. You may see cows or monkeys standing along the side of the road. But these things are becoming ordinary and no longer cause my jaw to drop or me to jump for my camera. The past two days however have been quite extraordinary by any standards.
After a period of silence His Holiness the Dali Lama is giving a 10 day teaching only 20 minutes from my flat. Because of my daily commitment to CCS (Cross Cultural Solutions ) I will be unable to attend the whole teaching. However Saturday I was able to go and see His Holiness. It was an amazing experience. You have to go and get an ID card made a few days ahead of time. Then two days in advance you go to the main courtyard at the compound of His Holiness and tape off you place to sit. By the time the teachings started Saturday, there was not an inch of ground that hadn’t been claimed. We got up before the sun rose and caught a cab up to where the teaching would take place. We went through a very thorough security check to make sure we weren’t bringing in any cameras or lighters and then entered the courtyard with hundreds of others from all over the world. The people sitting in front of us were Italians, I was never able to determine the nationality of the woman to my right. There was a man from Bombay who had sat in the middle of our taped of section, arguing there was a little space between our tape and the label in the middle. We decided we weren’t going to get in an argument while waiting to see the Dali Lama. Then the monks started chanting. People all around us began doing prostrations. And Out came His Holiness The Dali Lama. He came out laughing and touching people as he walked by. It hadn’t really sunk in until that moment that I was actually going to be in the presence of such an amazing human being and hear him speak. We listened to an English translation of portable radios we had brought with us. It was a poor translation, he would stop speaking for long periods of time and then repeat himself over and over. His Holiness would say something and burst out in laughter and Tibetans would fallow suit, but whatever he said the was humorous was lost in translation. It didn’t matter though, just to be in his presence, to be so close and to have this experience.
That was just the beginning of my weekend. Saturday was also Holi, the Hindu holiday to welcome in spring. And the people here welcome it as they do with everything, with much celebration. It is technically only Saturday, but if you can’t celebrate Saturday for any reason, Sunday works too. So after hearing His Holiness speak we walked back to the flat. Along way we had our first taste of Holi. Like most holidays around here it is celebrated with lots of music, dance, fireworks and drinking, but what sets it apart is the color. It is like a huge water fight, where all the water is multicolored. And then there is the bright colored powders which you smear on each others faces. Whole families wander the streets exchanging swipes of color. But no one gets more into it than the young men. They are covered head to toe. Blue , Yellow, Green, Pink. And whenever you walk by anyone you add a pinch of color to a forehead or a cheek. It is hard to explain such a visual feast. I will have to show you all the photos and even that can’t completely capture it. This was just my introduction to Holi. The next morning the CCS Staff threw us a Holi Party. The cook, Rakesh, made a whole feast of wonderful Indian goodies. There was a table covered in mounds of the colorful powder. We filled bags of water balloons with blue water and got our squirt guns ready. Hours later we were all soaking wet and my clothes are destined never to recover their original white. The staff would dance, climb on the roof and throw buckets of water on our heads, then dance some more. It was an all day party, not ending until we retreated shivering to our bucket showers and warm beds. I have decided Holi is my new favorite Holiday and we will have to start in up in the US. Ajay, one of the staff promises to come visit if we do.
There seems no end to the celebrating. It turns out it is also wedding season and the landlords son is getting married and we are all invited. Weddings here go on for days and I won’t go to the entire things. But this evening I’m putting on my fanciest Salwar Curta and am going to attend a real live Indian wedding.