(Founder and Artistic Director: Susie White)


Saturday 14 March 2015

All Drumming, All Dancing

Start of a new dance season and everyone at Ya Raqs HQ is raring to go. Not so much “All singing, all dancing” but more “All drumming, all dancing”.

Ya Raqs are very pleased to have a new member of the troupe for the 2015 season – Alma – not just because she’s a great person and a fantastic dancer – but boy can she drum!

So we took this opportunity to branch out into something a little different for the new season – we are going to introduce some live drumming to our performances.

After we’d got over the teething problems of exactly who was going to drum which parts, everyone picked up this new found talent really quickly. Before you knew it we were really starting to sound musical!

Alma and Kebi

We’re using two types of drums – Alma and Phoenece were playing the Egyptian “goblet” shaped drum called a tabla. Meroe and Kebi were playing large frame called a duff.

Will it work? Well who knows, but if the first rehearsal is anything to go by it just might. Meroe was literally punching the air for joy by the end of the session – it was just fantastic and so much better than she could possibly have hoped for.

Meroe, Phoenece, Alma and Kebi

So watch out! Not only will we be dancing our socks off, but at most of our future events it looks like we’ll be drumming our hearts out too. We’re going to see how this all goes at our first event of the season, which is at the World Museum in Liverpool the weekend of 28th and 29th March.

This is all pointing towards 2015 being a FAN-TAS-TIC year for Ya Raqs.

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