This week I'm an event organiser.....

A lot of my time lately has been taken up with preparing for a belly dance camp I will be hosting in May this year, and I thought it was about time the blog saw a bit more of my life as a belly dancer!

In 2009, as a fledgling teacher, my friend Sharon and I hosted our first ever Night Bazaar.  It was held in the gardens of the local nursing home and we had dance groups from all around come and put on a wonderful, colourful show for the locals.  We had a number of stalls and people came to pinic on the lawn, enjoy the show and shop. We were thrilled with the success.

Some of my students at our first ever Night Bazaar.

In 2011, we hosted another Night Bazaar, but this time, went out on a limb and combined it with a camp.  We expected about 20 of our closest dance buddies to show up, we hoped another teacher might teach a dance workshop and we thought we would put on a little show too.  Well, the camp was a massive success!  We sold out, had to put on an extra set of workshops (and still had more teacher's asking to teach), had a fabulous show, lots of stalls and people standing outside the venue just to see in!  We were, again, blown away!

Me as a student in a "ballet for bellydancers" workshop at the 2011 camp

Some of the fabulous performers at the 2011 Night Bazaar

We were immediately asked when the next camp would be.  It was tempting at the time to make it for the next year, but we knew that most of our supporters are mothers, without a massive amount of disposable income and that perhaps doing it every year would make the event stale, so we scheduled another for 2013.

Last October, I started advertising the camp.  By Christmas time, I had sold 40 of the 50 camp places, had 3 fabulous teachers from Adelaide, Melbourne and Geelong in place to teach workshops (I'll also be teaching), was set to be the Victorian host of the ShimmySkirt project and well on the way to preparing for camp.

Our logo for 2013.  Copyright Meenkeel Gypsies, Koroit Belly Dance and Elissa Taylor 2013

This week, I have only a few places left to sell, and have been busy allocating people rooms, checking payments, sending letters to all of our campers, planning workshops, planning menus (yes, we feed them too!), liaising with screen printers and our designer for tshirts and sorting out the performance.  In the next few weeks, I will have to speak with the venue and work out how many tickets I can sell to non-campers for the performance night and have a meeting with my fellow committee members to move along the preparations for food, stalls and a fundraising raffle.

Its an awful lot of work - voluntary work that I'm not trained for.  But I love it!  I love the organising and planning and the fiddling around with the fine details.  But most of all, I love that I am able to put on a wonderful weekend that people look forward to.  A weekend full of feminine joy, friendships, giggles, makeup and dressing up with friends, performing, teaching and learning, and community spirit.  I can't wait!