Morgan Fay

A difficult post but posting anyway because I’m growing as a student! My first improvised solo at Balkanalia!

Improvisation is always a little scary, but I know through dance that with practice, it becomes much more easy, to the point where there’s no nervousness at all.

Thank you to my teacher Rian Holmes for encouraging me to try a solo this year!

Balkanalia is a three day music and dance camp where teachers share material from all over the Balkans. This year I joined two ensembles, the Beginner ensemble and the Modern Romani ensemble, both of which were wonderful! I learned 5 songs total, but will need to practice them a lot more to fully understand them.

The quality of musicians at this camp is incredible and super inspiring. Someday I hope to play even half as well as the amazing musicians there! And the dancing is so special, the community is very welcoming and encourages everyone to dance. In fact, the music teachers say, you’ll never be able to fully understand the music without doing the line dances, and as a dancer that is wonderful to hear!

I had the honor of being the substitute teacher for Elinore Edge ‘s awesome students at Vitalidad Movement Arts Center this week and we worked on a cute combo to Ruby ‘s song “مش مغرورة”.

Thanks to Anastasia and Lurdiana لورديانة for creating this super cute !

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This beautiful song is “Samra ya samra” سمرا يا سمرا and was performed by Takht Tabor , with Kyler Fischer on oud and Kaya on darbuka.

Personally, channeling some of the golden era stars of Egyptian cinema for this improvisation! I love dancing for a good cause! Thank you to Jordan Sun for organizing this beautiful community event, raising donations for The SWANA Rose Culture + Community Center !

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Memories from ! The best part of camp for me is the quality of the music and dance. Every concert and cabaret is full of excellent musicians and dancers who are dedicated to their craft. It’s such an honor to share the stage with artists of amazing talent and hard work!

Musicians featured:
- Voice
- Qanun
- Accordiongeorgiou - Clarinet
- Darbuka
- Riqq

At Middle East Camp this year, I got to dance in the cabaret! It was super fun and the musicians were generous to let me sit in on their rehearsal to let me choose my music and get a feel for it.

It was a pleasure to dance to the lovely singing, on qanun, and on accordion.

Sharing this beautiful taqsim solo from .georgiou , what a stunning musician! 🤩

Dancing to live music is so incredible! The communication between musician and dancer makes magic ✨

is such an amazing opportunity to get to work with truly high class musicians and dancers, and to learn from wonderful instructors!

I share my practice because I think it’s important to show the work. Practice isn’t usually polished or pretty. It’s repetitive and difficult in a good way.

And to get to the beautiful end product, you have to do the messy work first.

This piece is my absolute favorite Taraf de Haidouks song and has a very special place in my heart because I got to dance to it with dear friends and my teacher. We spent hours and hours on this piece for months, waking up for 6 am rehearsals to drill and practice together. Those memories and this song will always be tied together for me.

So now, to be able to attempt to play this song with the help of my teacher is a very important step on my violin student journey. This is *the* piece that I always wanted to work towards from the very beginning.

I had mountains of respect for Taraf de Haidouks before knowing violin and have an infinite amount more respect now that I have a vague understanding of what they are doing.

Please go check out Taraf de Haidouks and Taraf de Caliu’s music. And for fun, you can see me as a baby doing if you look up Datura Project 14 on YouTube.

Just a violin progress update. This is 4 years and 5 months of playing. Right now I’m working on a new song that I’m learning from .

I can tell that I am getting better with consistent practice, which is exciting! There’s always more to work on of course, but I’ve been playing a lot more and going to lots of music jams outside regular lessons.

I go to a few Balkan music jams, which have been wonderful, and I’ve been going to the Portland Middle East Ensemble’s rehearsals, plus all of my regular practices.

Looking forward to how I will sound at the end of this year if I keep up the hard work.

The drama of a beautiful taqsim! One of the reasons I love to dance is because the music is so stunning and interesting and I want to become the physical embodiment of what I am hearing.

The only thing better is if the music is live!

It was an honor to play with the ensemble this weekend at Portland State University! It was the ensemble’s first performance and we’ve been working on a collection of classic tunes.

Thank you to for inviting us to your beautiful evening of cultural celebration! Thanks to .moltke for organizing and taking charge of the ensemble!