Sass, Savvy and Sweet Salvation Thanks to Sadie Marquardt

Last week was a rough chemo week, but it wasn’t anything a few good shimmies couldn’t fix.  The usual chemo side effects crept in around Sunday night and then laid me flat by Tuesday.  However, after spending way too many hours in bed sleeping or reading Deep Down Dark: The Untold Stories of 33 Men Buried in a Chilean Mine, and the Miracle That Set Them Free, the effects of chemo started subsiding. By Friday, I was feeling perky enough to head to downtown Seattle for a dance workshop with the amazing Sadie, and the weekend just kept getting better from there.

I love going to belly dance workshops.  It’s what feeds dance creativity, and I believe it’s important to support our dance community whenever we can.  I would have attended the entire weekend with Sadie had life not been so interruptive lately.  As it was, I was able to attend the Friday workshop and half of the Saturday workshop, and I’m absolutely grateful that I did.

Hailing from Denver, CO, Sadie is a lovely dancer and a beautiful person.  I must confess I didn’t know that much about her before attending her workshop except that one of her dances seems to be ubiquitous on YouTube.  Or, at least, ubiquitous for those of us who use YouTube to relentlessly search belly dance videos.  That video alone has had nearly 29 million views.  Imagine if every living soul in Ireland, Norway, Switzerland and Greece had watched you belly dance.  That’s how many people have seen that video alone.

The Friday class focused on “Creating Your Signature Dance Set.”  As far as restaurant dancing and putting together a set, I’d probably put myself in the “veteran” category.  I was fortunate to dance in lots of Seattle area restaurants and clubs for a period of about seven years, often performing 6 or 7 sets a week.  It adds up (over 2,000 sets!) so I sort of had my signature set down after a while.  However, I wanted to get Sadie’s insight to see if there were any great nuggets of wisdom to pass along to my own students.

Sadie is one hot tamale!
And just as beautiful as a person!

Sadie was smart and honest about what it takes to succeed as a belly dancer.  It was also clear how much she honors the dance and its origins.  She gave us a chance to practice stage presence and gave us some fun tricks, especially a tasty little veil wrap. 

I wasn’t able to swing childcare for Saturday morning and was also being careful about my energy level, so I slipped into only the second half of the Saturday workshop which focused on “Drum Solo Secrets.”  This is where Sadie’s technical abilities really shined.  She kicked my butt for sure, and maybe every butt in that room.  I was especially impressed with her patience to see a move through.  There was a part of the workshop where the collective frustration of the attendees was palpable.  We weren’t grasping a layering technique and the mechanics of it.  If I had been teaching, I might have crumbled and simply moved onto a different technique.  But Sadie stuck with it, and continued to explain and demonstrate the move in different ways.  Eventually understanding seemed to click into place around the room.  She didn’t back off, and in doing so, we learned a tricky technique and the value of tenacity.

The weekend with Sadie couldn’t have come at a better time. After a rough week, it felt good to be in the presence of such a positive and inclusive instructor.  It was also great to be surrounded by friends. I attended Friday’s workshop with one of my best dance buds, the lovely and talented Mirabai, and at the workshop were many sweet and familiar faces.  There's nothing like a bunch of hugs from sparkly, fabulous women to make a person feel loved and alive.

It helped, too, to hear Sadie's thoughts on what it takes to be a great restaurant dancer.  She talked about how restaurant gigs force a dancer to be extremely versatile, intuitive and clever, while being thick-skinned enough to deal with sharing attention with distractions like flaming cheese.  I had always beaten myself up for not being a great theater dancer.  In the two dozen or so times that I’ve been able to dance on a theatrical stage, it hasn’t always gone well.  For example, I fell off of a dumbek in front of 800 people at the Bagley Wright Theatre.  Not cool.  But restaurant gigs, well, I had those down.  Lots of practice helped, of course, but after several years of gigging on a regular basis, I feel like I wasn’t half bad at reading people and situations and adjusting my performance on the fly.  I’d still like to nail a stage performance someday, but after this weekend, I let go of feeling like a failure because I was primarily a restaurant dancer.  That’s big!

The dance workshop was also healing because cancer treatment had recently forced me to give up a part of my dance life that was precious to me.  After 12 years of teaching belly dance, last week I announced that I would no longer be teaching.  I love my students and it broke my heart to let go of my classes, but with chemo, and then surgery, then radiation, then reconstruction, I just couldn’t see how I could continue.  I have taught through getting a Master’s degree, two pregnancies and a move to Olympia.  It was cancer treatment that finally forced a difficult decision. 

As I told my students, I have to believe that something good will come of this. Already after dancing this weekend, I see hope in the future.  I’m determined to become a stronger dancer after this, even if I have to dance with scars. Maybe someday I’ll start teaching in Olympia. And for my students, I knew another teacher had been arranged for them, but I didn’t know who she was.  The beautiful coincidence is that she happened to be at the workshop with Sadie, and one of my dance friends was able to introduce us.  The new teacher, Soraya, has a long dance history and is a lovely, lovely person.  I’m so happy for my students and I know they are in good hands.   

At Zaina in Seattle's Pioneer Square in 2005, and,
no, I'm not balancing a speaker on my head.
That would have cost extra.

I am so grateful to Sadie, to the amazing Roxy for hosting the workshops, and to my many wonderful sisters in dance.  As I head into my last treatment of chemo and with surgery just a few weeks away, I know this dance, this community, will continue to be a source of strength.  I also feel a renewed commitment to stick with it. Twenty years of belly dance isn’t enough – I want 20, 40, maybe even 60 more.   There are so many reasons that I love being a belly dancer.  Here’s one:

My four-year-old son, Carter, is obsessed with Princess Elsa from Disney’s Frozen.  I’ve caught him having conversations with posters of her and we’ve played “Let It Go” oh, about fifty million times in the car.  I asked him, “Do you like Princess Elsa?” “Yes, I like her a lot.”  “Do you think she’s pretty?” “Yes, but she doesn’t belly dance.”  So, this heiress to the throne of Arendelle with the power to make whole palaces of ice and plunge her kingdom into eternal winter falls short of amazing because she doesn’t belly dance. Sorry, Elsa, guess you’re not as cool as Carter’s mom.

For more information about Sadie, please visit her website.

If you’d like to buy a T-shirt to support the construction of a Healing Garden at St. Pete’s Hospital, follow this link: https://www.booster.com/joyfullycrabby1.  My very kind father-in-law designed the T-shirt in my honor and it includes the crab that is now tattooed on the back of my neck to help me fight cancer, known fondly as “Hildegard.”  Thank you for your support!