Henna Body Art Day at Raspberry Moon in Greenville, SC

I am offering henna body art in Greenville, SC at Raspberry Moon Salon on Tuesday, Aug 16th.

Raspberry Moon Salon is a skin care salon, so we request that you make an appointment and plan to have a meditative session (ie, please turn your cell phone on silent and keep the noise to a minimum to avoid disturbing the other clients)

Pricing:

Prices for henna body art vary based on the size and intricacy of the design. Very detailed designs and thick tribal or silhouette pieces that require a large amount of henna will cost more . 
The following can be used as a general guide to prices:

Small designs (1 - 3 Inches): 5-15$

Medium designs (3 - 5 Inches): 10-20$

Large designs (5-7 inches) 15- 30$

Anything larger than 7 inches will be custom priced starting at 30$

Please call or email jaidra_art@yahoo.com for an appointment.

I will also have some hand painted silks and hand made jewelry available for perusal and sale.

Thee Inner Cirkus Meets Elby Brass Band

Self Henna - Hip Flowers

Thee Inner Cirkus went a-traveling far far away to a land filled with soft fluffy cat, massive amounts of pasta, spectacular coffee, and gnomes. Let's call it Fredricksburg, Virginia.

I have had the opportunity over the last year or so to do some work with a talented group of freaks from Greenville SC who call themselves Thee Inner Cirkus. Most of the gigs we have had thus far have been in the upstate of South Carolina, so the 8 hour road trip came as a bit of a surprise, but I was super excited to get on the road.

Kenny Phoenix All Sparkly

As always, one of my favorite aspects of performing is the opportunity to practice multiple arts. For this gig, I chose to do some self henna. All of my pieces for this gig were belly dance and fire dance, so I kept the henna classic and discovered exactly what kind of contortions I have to do in order to decorate my own side.

Shinola and Pasta

Pre-show with Thee Inner Cirkus

We got on the road Friday around mid day. The most pertinent discovery of the ride was the fact that North Carolina has nicer rest areas than Virginia...and as always, traffic on I-95 sucks. I was ecstatic to reach our destination. In order to thank our host, I proceeded to cover his patio in glitter. This way, he'll think of Thee Inner Cirkus every time the light hits and the ground sparkles. I have discovered that as both a body artist and a bellydancer, that I almost exude glitter....it happens.

We had a lot of spaghetti. We had some rum, and some beer....some vegan chocolate and plenty of boiled peanuts. We did silly magic tricks and counted each others fingers. Then we had our pre-show meeting, planned a set list, set up our music, and said good night.

Relaxing in the Parlor

Saturday dawned bright, beautiful, and Freakin' hot!

Fredricksburg is a fabulous little town - not at all what I expected, but filled with antique stores and cute little niches, one way streets, and historic buildings. We spent some time downtown before we met up at the Silk Mill and walked through the show. The venue was fabulous - a renovated mill with concrete floors and super high ceilings. Misters and fans were set up to beat the heat, but the heat fought back.

Thee Inner Cirkus pre show meeting

Luckily, the kind owners of the bed and breakfast opposite the concert venue allowed us into their parlor, so we had a place to cool off, sit and relax, drink water, and escape too.


After checking out the town and the venue and getting ice cream (because you can't cirkus without ice cream - well, I can...but I'm in the minority on this one), we returned to gnome headquarters and got ready. Costumes and make up and last minute plans....and then it was time to got back to the venue for the last time. 6:30 show time.

Mr Greenleaf and Fire Dart (the socks make it)

We set up our fueling area and started strolling. Mr Greenleaf and SparrowCat entertained the crowd with some fire eating and contact outside while Dei-adis, Shinola, and I hooped, veil poi-ed, and danced around the inside of the venue while people were trickling in.

Official performance started with a short set. We couldn't forget the reason we were there, so Thee Inner Cirkus serenaded Seth with a fantastically cackophonous happy birthday remix led by our MC, the amazing Bella Bonsai.

Bella Bonsai and a hoop

I opened our set with fire fans, followed by Dei-adis with LED hoop. Mr Greenleaf surprised us all by taking his pants off and performing fire dart in sparkly hot pants (Hot in so many ways!)

Dancing to Elby Brass

Thee Inner Cirkus pumped the crowd up, but everyone was there to see Elby Brass Band, and oh how did they rock! An absolutely fabulous mix of irreverence and musical talent, Elby Brass brought the crowd up and kept them there. They finished out their set with Virginia Creeper and invited me onstage to dance with them. I thoroughly enjoyed myself!

Jaidra Solo to Virginia Creeper

We followed Elby Brass's first set with an hour long Thee Inner Cirkus extravaganza! SparrowCat and Mr Greenleaf ate some fire and then Bella Bonsai entertained everyone by attaching beaver traps and mouse traps to herself and lying on a bed of nails. The fantastic Kenny Phoenix awed everyone with his contact juggling, SparrowCat fascinated with her fantabulous Fire Staff. Mr Greenleaf got back up and stuck a screwdriver in his face, Dei-adis spun fire hoop, I danced with fire palms and my sword, and our lovely Glow Poi spinner, Psyryn did a beautiful  performance with glow poi to Dude Looks Like a Lady. Shinola closed out our set as she let the crowd staple money to her beautiful body....and Thee Inner Cirkus was done!

Mr Greenleaf and Shinola dance the night away

But our work is never done. We returned to the stage while Elby Brass played and continued to have a grand ole time!


SethFest XXX was a rousing success. We probably had as much fun as the crowd did! Now we have a new home away from home....and there are gnomes there!

Introducing Jaidra's Bellydance Calendar

The more computer literate I become (and I started at negative 0 - I swear), the more I come to appreciate google and all of the wonderful free gadgets and products that they have to make my life easier.

I am really enjoying my belly dance classes, but as I add more classes, I face the difficulty of disseminating all of this information to the public. I have facebook event invitations running and have sent out emails, but since I am using my blog as my major web presence right now, I was having difficulty trying to figure out how to add that information in here. I found the "gadgets" for calendars in the design section of blogger, but I couldn't find what I was looking for - a customizable calendar.

Da-da-da-daaaa....Google to the rescue. Once again, I find the answer in the simplest of places. Create a google calendar and paste the html right into my blog. So, without further ado - if you're looking for more information (including times, places, and descriptions) about my bellydance classes and/or any events where I will be performing, you can find a link to my calendar on the right side of this blog.

I will never forgive you Practice Video

Recently, I have had the opportunity to work with an extremely talented group of musicians in Greenville, SC by the name of "Wasted Wine." In addition to jamming and improv work, I've gotten to go on the road with this group and am really looking forward to where this new avenue of artistry may go in the future. Above is a video from practice before our Knoxville, TN show with me performing a sword dance to "I will never forgive you"

Hopefully I will have more pictures and videos to share soon - because this is just TOO MUCH FUN!

Introducing Bellydance Fitness and Fun at Equilibrium Zen Gym

I am very excited to announce that my new class, Bellydance Fitness and Fun, is starting TONIGHT at Equilibrium Zen Gym. If you've never been there before, it is a beautiful space in Greenville on the corner of Augusta Rd and Faris Rd behind Alpine Ski and Firehouse subs - look for the red door.
This class will run from 7:30 until 8:30 every Wednesday. In celebration, I am continuing my BUY one, GET one deal for your first class until the end of July, so if you know anyone who may be interested, get them hooked with this deal :)

Bellydance Fitness and Fun Class Description:

Come try bellydance in this fantastic, upbeat, low pressure environment.  Jaidra will introduce simple bellydance isolations and traveling moves and then combine them into easy to follow combinations so that you’ll be dancing by the end of class!

Each class will open with a brief warm up and strengthening workout followed by instruction in basic bellydance technique and moves. Then, once you’ve learned how, we’ll shimmy and hip bump all our blues away!

This class is perfect for the beginner dancer and anyone who has ever searched for a workout that they actually enjoy!

Classes cost 15$ per class OR 10 per class with the purchase of a 6/8/or12 class card. Class cards are good for any of my classes.

Bellydance Basics continues on Thursday at Taal School of Dance on Butler Rd followed by Advanced Topics : Sword Dance.

Drop in students are welcome in Bellydance Basics and Bellydance Fitness and Fun. Advanced Topics require instructor permission.

Dance and Love Collide on Silk

Two of One silk Painting before background paint

I've been writing a lot lately about dance. I am happier when I dance than at any other moment, except for maybe when I'm floating in the arms of creative inspiration and creating a piece like this one. I began with the desire to continue on with the abstract figure idea but create a male and female figure that were merging - the idea being that in dance and in love, two become one...or if you want to get truly spiritual and over the top emotional (or just Hedwig and the Angry Inch about it) one whole with two parts.

As happens so often in my work, when I actually went from paper to silk, this piece changed. I may revisit the idea of two bodies merging, but for this one, the merging occurred only at the top of the piece - as if the energy that they are creating in dance is not only spiraling about them, but also streaming from their crown chakras to entertwine.

Two of One Silk Painting before steaming

I had a hard time on the background for this one. I considered greys, but after some time and helpful critic, I went soft with a mix of washes in yellow, magenta, brown, and red in the base fading into washes of blue up top. I did consider darkening the male figure to create a deeper contrast with the background, but ended up deciding that I liked him how he was. Once the piece is steamed and washed, the lines around the figures will be white, so I think that will be strong enough to keep him separated from the background.


I really love this piece - it is dance, and love, and as always, the love of dance.

Sword Dance Workshop Follow Up

Balance Practice: Shifting your weight with Swords

Sunday's sword workshop in Williamston, SC was a ton of fun!

I spent hours working on my handout for the workshop, and what was supposed to be 3 pages ended up as 5, but no one seemed to mind. Luckily, I planned a day of placing the sword on the head, taking it off, and then putting it back. 3 hours is a bit long to keep a sword on your head (ouch!).

Sword dance: Angling the body

I began the workshop with a brief discussion on what to look for when choosing a sword for sword dance, sword dance history, sword care, and sword dance safety. We moved from there onto balanced body posture, exercises for balancing, and balancing the sword on your head. With the sword on our heads, we practiced shifting our weight from one foot to the other, onto the balls of our feet, and from there to walking.

Flat rotations with the sword balanced on the palm

New sword dancers are often surprised by the weight of the sword on their head, so we took the swords off our heads and spent some time discussion body angles, framing the body with the sword, and dancing with the sword before we place it on our heads.

The sword is an extremely dynamic prop  for dancing so we spent an hour swinging the sword around, dancing to and away from the sword, isolating parts of our body while we used the sword to frame our moves, and putting all of these concepts into dance combinations. I taught some of my favorite sword dance combos with coloful names such as "shave the gypsy" and "I'm gonna wash that sword right out of my hair."

Sword Dance

Personally, I am a huge fan of spinning and turning with my sword, so I spent a good amount of time teaching spins and turns as well as some combinations of rotations with the sword balanced on the palm of the hand mixed with turns, swings, and catches to round out this section of the class. After turning with the sword in our hands, we put the sword back on our heads and did some more spinning.

I love swords for a lot of reasons. I also love dance...and I love science. In spinning with a sword on your head, I got the opportunity to have all of my loves collide and give a brief physics lecture (really brief, I know not everyone is as big a nerd as I am).  So, we spent some time learning to start spinning, and a whole lot more time learning ways to stop spinning.

So many options on where to balance a sword!

 When I first planned the workshop, I also planned a time table for everything, and amazingly enough, I stuck to it, so we had time for 30 minutes of floorwork. I started out by teaching a variety of exercises that will help strengthen and tone the muscles that are required for safe floorwork, and then we spent a little time practicing hip circles and round the worlds with the swords on our heads.

I finished off the day with a short demonstration of some of the other places where you can balance your sword (and my caveat that utilizing too many of these in one routine gets a bit kitchy) and some strong poses.

Sword Dance Poses

We stretched, happy to have the swords off of our heads. I was extremely proud of everyone who came out and worked so hard to learn the basics of sword dance - everyone did great!

Thank you to everyone in Pelzer/Williamston, for being so welcoming. Thanks to everyone else, for driving out and spending your Sunday with me. Big super duper thanks to Kim Alexander for having me. Hopefully everyone now has the tools to embrace sword dance safely and with joy!


If you want to learn sword dance, my intermediate/advanced level topics class will be starting soon in Greenville, and the first topic I will cover is sword dance!

Doors, windows, and escape hatches

This post is mostly off-topic ramblings created by my coffee soaked Sunday morning brain, but it speaks to where I am in my life. If you're here for art and dance...check back later, I'm sure I'll update following my sword workshop this afternoon.

I've written before about my mother and father's turns of phrase. They are such colorful people, and I am lucky to have them in my life. Today I am musing on one of my mom's catch phrases: "When God closes a door, He opens a window." My mother is very religious person and though we had disagreements about her faith versus mine often when I was younger, I have come to deeply respect my mother's faith. Though I do not share all of her beliefs, we have a much wider overlap than I once thought, and I have to give her major thumbs up-edness for her conviction and dedication to both her principles and faith.

That being said, I still like to rephrase my mother's saying in my own head to: "When the universe locks all the doors, it will provide an escape hatch (even if the hatch happens to be under a heavy rock in the less used corner of your personal metaphysical space)"

My mom's phrase is SO much more succinct, don't you think.

Yet, both mean the same thing. There are always opportunities and possibilities in your life. You always have more options than you think you do. Just because a choice is difficult, scary, or new to you doesn't mean that you can't make it.

We all get stuck in ruts, look at our lives, and feel like we just can't get out or can't change. Example: I could never move to X place because I have all of this heavy furniture that would just be so difficult to get there. Solution: get rid of everything and start over in X place. Yes, it's a super scary idea for us modern folks, but think about it. Once upon a time whole families consolidated all of their belongings down to what they could carry and journeyed across the sea, mountains, desert, etc to find a new life and they did it all without bank accounts, cars, bottled water, restaurants, air conditioning, etc. It wasn't easy, but they did it...and you can overhaul your life too if you so choose. You just have to make the choice.

Most of the time, we are faced with issues much less dramatic than above, but that doesn't mean that facing a new direction in our lives isn't just as frightening as the idea of giving up everything and starting over, because many times that is exactly what we feel like we are doing. Starting a new job or leaving an old, moving to a new home, ending or beginning a relationship - are all the emotional equivalent to starting completely from scratch...and making the choice to do any of these things can be terrifying because once you chose, you have dedicated yourself to that path and must make it work at all costs...wrong. There's an escape hatch somewhere, even if you have to look under the metaphysical rug to find it.

I have recently been inspired to get up, shake the dust off of my brain, and make some frightening decisions. The results are still coming in, but I've got one dance class set and ready to go starting in July on Wednesdays at Equilibrium Zen Gym and two more in the works, hopefully starting in two weeks. I'm waiting to hear back from a group of artists that I may be sharing studio space with downtown, my work is going into a gallery in Columbia at the end of July, and I'm looking for a new place to live. It took a lot of emotional preparation to get here, and I'm terrified of failing, but I'm going for it anyway. And I know that if it doesn't work out, somewhere in my metaphysical room, the universe will stick an escape hatch, even if I have to conjure an invisible ladder to get to it.

Finding Inspiration in the Storm

Storm Goddess on Silk

I've been doing a lot of figure work lately, and had begun moving towards more representational work as opposed to the very abstract pieces that I started with. This one is a move back towards my abstract pieces, drawing on inspiration from nature and movement - she's a storm goddess, whether conjured up by a storm or creating the wind, I will leave it to the viewer to decide. I used 7 different washes of blue for the figure and a range of greys, greens, browns and water to paint the background. The leaves blowing by introduce just a hint of color. I'm in a tumultuous place spiritually right now, and the intense weather that so many of us have been seeing recently really lent the inspiration for this piece. I can't wait to steam set and iron this one to see how she turns out.

Freedom Weekend Aloft Artists' Showcase

Roberto Cortez

The decision to hold an artists showcase at Freedom Weekend Aloft was apparently a last minute one, but they couldn't have found a more eclectic and fabulous group of people to showcase!

Nichole Madonna

When I arrived at the venue for the pre-set up meeting, I immediately met Roberto Cortez and his wife (some of my new favorite people - by the way). Transplanted to Greenville from California, they are an amazing couple. Roberto's art work is full of color and life, and his abstract paintings really draw the eye. I am still debating between five or six pieces to try and figure out which is my favorite.

We set up ahead of time, on Thursday, and I met my booth neighbor, Nichole Madonna (no relation to Madonna Madonna - just in case you were concerned - as some have been). Another transplant to the area (this time from Pennsylvania), Nichole does really fascinating pieces that have an organic feel to them. I've enjoyed chatting with Nichole and her fella throughout the course of the weekend.

Lexique Studios

When I arrived Saturday for the first day of the showcase, I was early - I'm always early, but it's better than always being late! I met Stephanie, the force behind Lexique Studios, a jeweler and another kindred and kind soul.

Once we got started, I met my other booth neighbor, Mel Rivera. Mel is possibly one of the best pencil portrait artists that I have had the pleasure of meeting, and he's a joy to share space with - though he lost his cellphone on day one and has had all kind of problems trying to access the WiFi, Mel has been upbeat and pleasant the entire time, and people love his drawings!

Mel Rivera

Stephanie of Steph-n-Annie and Elizabeth of Elizabeth studios are sharing a booth across from us where they display Stephanie's whimsical mosaic work and Elizabeth's gorgeous photography. Stephanie and Elizabeth are tons of fun to chat with, and I really wish I had lots of money so that I could buy pieces from them both! Behind them, Dan Taylor spent the past two days both selling and making stained glass. His leaf inspired pieces are absolutely stunning.

Stephanie and Elizabeth

Rounding out the art, Laura Nance reminds me of the mother that loves everyone. Her watercolors reflect a soul that is full of joy and kindness. She paints flowers, and they are amazing! Bossy Mossy Beads have a great display right by the front door, and Jocelyn Davis' paintings make me want to go run around in the mountains somewhere until I find a beautiful view and then sit...and enjoy.

 hot air balloons and me

Around 7 pm, someone noticed that all of the hot air balloons were taking off, and we ran outside to see them floating away. It was a beautiful sight. I rounded out the day watching the Wailers play some of my favorite reggae tunes while the sun set over the trees.

It's been an incredible two days, and I can't wait to see what tomorrow brings!