Body Love Conference/Every Body’s Beautiful Revue Recap

Saturday was a crazy busy day for me! I woke up at 7am to get ready for the Body Love Conference. I know it’s a little silly to feel like I needed time to primp and preen, but for me part of loving my body is making it look extra cute, plus I knew there would be picture-taking going on so I wanted a little makeup. And I needed time for my fridge oats and morning tea, because breakfast is the most important meal of the day!

I don’t want to spend a whole lot of time blogging about the conference itself, since this blog is mainly supposed to be about dance, so let me see if I can sum it up quickly: I had an amazing time! Everyone that I met was really nice. I saw a lot of local friends and met nice new people from on-line. There were about 400 women of every shape, size, age and color, and maybe three men? I was really impressed by how smoothly everything ran for a first-year event. Maybe there were issues with other classes, but everything that I went to ran on time, there was plenty of room for everyone, plenty of time to get between panels, a generous lunch break so you actually had time to go someplace and eat, and a wide variety of programming. There were talks, workshops, movement classes, and panels.

Any changes that I would want to see made for future events would be pretty small: I felt like a lot of the presenters were covering very specific issues that didn’t really apply to me, so I would have liked more general body issue/self esteem/feminism/how to be a good ally sort of topics. I’m definitely surprised that no one was doing a presentation or class on belly dance and body love, because the community is SO body positive, so next year I will definitely recommend some dance teachers who should apply to be presenters. I also felt like 50 minutes was way too short for some topics. However, over all I think the event was a huge success, and any changes would just make a great event even greater.

Now let’s talk about the Every Body’s Beautiful Revue, the after party fundraiser variety show held at Plush and organized by Pisa Cake and Crystal Kiss. I was really honored and excited to be a part of this show, and once I realized I was going to be the only belly dancer, I was a little nervous! This was my first time being the only belly dancer at a show and so I felt like the pressure was on to be awesome. I think I rose to the occasion. The audience reaction was incredible, lots of cheering while I danced and an embarrassing amount of sweet compliments afterwards. I’m still glowing, in fact!

I’m very happy that I was able to bring something good to the stage and contribute to what was a very successful show. The venue was PACKED and everyone seemed to be having a great time. The other entertainers all gave excellent performances to, in styles that ranged from burlesque to drag to story telling and more. I’m glad that since I went on stage early, I was able to enjoy almost the entire show from the audience. Oh yes, and special mention needs to be given to the evening’s host, The World Famous Bob, a burlesque star and comedian. That woman OWNS emceeing, she was absolutely hilarious, took the time to introduce herself and speak to each performer before the show, complimented us as we came off stage, kept the crowd excited and engaged, and gave a great performance of her own. A definite joy to work with.

I’m so happy that the body love movement has such exciting things happening right here in Tucson. It was wonderful to spend the entire day surrounded by people who supported each other, who saw the beauty in each other, who were comfortable in their own skin (or trying to be). There were a lot of attendees in from out of town, state and even country, so I hope that they’re able to take what they learned and experienced back home with them and spread the body love around the world.