Egyptian Dance OFFERINGS
Egyptian Dance :: رقص بلدي
Monica brings over three decades of movement, music, percussion, and language experience to her raqs sharqi and raqs baladi performance and education offerings. She is a recognized and respected member of the cultural, dance, music, and art communities she works within.
Her performances are audience-focused and joy-bringing experiences, always tailored to the event, and can include live or recorded music.
Her dance instruction is rooted in respect for the dancers and respect for the forms, and her classes are musically driven, with an additional focus on cultural, political, and artistic context aiming to deepen what we know as globalized "belly dance" and keep it connected to its cultural homes.
Classes :: Workshops :: Events
Monica's weekly Egyptian style belly dance classes are on hiatus in 2025. Workshops and 1:1 lessons are still happening.
Past long term instructor positions include Alonzo King Lines Dance Center (teaching faculty 2003 - 2024), Ruth Asawa School of the Arts (teaching artist-in-residence), Marin School of the Arts (teaching artist-in-residence), Belly Dance! studio (teaching faculty and curriculum development), and the Women's Cancer Resource Center (teaching faculty).
Upcoming workshops and events can be found on the calendar.
Interested in hiring Monica for a workshop? My current topics and offerings can be found here.
Coaching :: Mentorship
Monica offers private Egyptian dance classes and coaching in person in San Francisco or online anywhere in the world. She has worked one-on-one for many years with dancers, duets, troupes, and small groups of collaborators who are creating or polishing a piece, looking for inspiration, or need a critical but supportive eye on their work, progression, or style.
Rates start at $90 per hour, plus studio rent, if any. Private lessons can also take place on Zoom.
Please contact Monica for a questionnaire and initial email consultation so we can make sure that lessons are focused and on point for your needs.
Need choreography? Reach out to Monica for current rates, references, and details of how it all works.
Sometimes 1:1 work leads to more of a mentorship. That is a conversation best had in person.
Collaborate :: Hire :: Keep in Touch
Please subscribe to our seasonal newsletter for upcoming classes and events and a curious-minded curation of inspiring artists and thinkers and writings and videos.
Upcoming events and workshops can be found on the calendar.
Interested in hiring Monica to teach a workshop? My current topics and offerings can be found here.
Interested in a dance and/or music performance? Let's talk.
Reach out if you are interested in dance or music bookings, classes, lectures, or collaborations. If it isn't in my wheelhouse or area, I can usually refer you to someone who is well-suited to the gig.
I also play percussion in an Arab orchestra.
Photo by Carl Sermon
Southern Italian Dance Offerings
Southern Italian Dance :: Danze Popolari
Monica is a social practitioner and ongoing heritage learner of pizzica, tammurriata, and other regional tarantelle from Southern Italy. Piecing together childhood memories with lots of new learning and re-learning over the last ten years, her focus plays with defossilizing diasporic dance and music expressions while exploring and respecting how they got that way.
Skillshares :: Dance Alongs :: Events
Monica is not a teacher of this style outside of her own community, family, and social circle.
She does weekly online Pizzica practice and social dance sessions, and occasional in-person study and skillshare groups in San Francisco, where she is slowly but surely putting together un collettivo di danza - an Italian dance and drum movement, percussion, and culture skill share and arts collective.
Collaborate :: Keep in Touch
In the bay area and interested in collaborating musically or with dance or tamburello or as part of the nascent collettivo? Please reach out!
I share upcoming events of interest and my own offerings in my seasonal newsletter.
I share my fumbles, successes, learnings, and thoughts on all the things at my blog.
Upcoming events can be found on the calendar.
I also play tamburello with a local Italian group .
Photo taken at the Museo Civico Pietro Cavoti in Galatina by Heather Serginia
Experimental Folkloric :: Pan-Mediterranean
Take a dancer trained in several deeply rooted cultural styles, who holds deep reverence and respect for their combination of clear and chaotic vernacular, their 'know it when you see it'-ness, their required regionality combined with an often superficial global appeal that sometimes makes longtime practitioners weep, and their ability to look simple from the outside but hold unknown depths when you are in them. She loves the land, people, and traditions that develop(ed) and foster(ed) them. She is recognized as maybe knowing something by peers, community keepers, and elders. She has committed decades of her life to them.
What is that dancer to do to scratch an artistic itch, to use her lifetime of dancing to try new things while not pretending it is anything but authentic to her own experiences, loves, losses, joys, laughs, tears, friendships, body, and interests? When she has to dance it to find out what it means? When cultural integrity is a standard she uses for her dance work? When her own mixed and not-so-distant roots are tangled and alive and loudly beckoning? When she isn't doing it for fame or fortune? When she knows there are connections and paths and doors and bliss and change to be made with this expression? When she wants to work with others in her communities who are also figuring it out as they go?
Spoiler alert / switch to first person: It me. I'm figuring it out. Like all things worth doing, it is sometimes awesome and sometimes embarrassing, it's all about collaborating with fellow weirdos, and it's probably about the process more than any particular destination.
So far this looks like finding experimental musical artists from beloved source cultures and interpreting and working with them to see what happens. Please never let me be a context-free artist. None of this happens in a vacuum or a tower or alone. It looks like doing and performing the rooted work I've been trained and raised in, and then also adding a piece that pushes me, and maybe the form, and maybe the audience, and maybe the work, while keeping it connected and growing in a way that is also rooted in and recognizable to lineage. It's about never claiming to 'preserve' anything that isn't really mine, while recognizing I have roots that need tending, honoring, attention, love, and time.
We shall see. Here for the conversations and here for the lavoro.
Photo of Monica in Napoli in front of a church built on an effigy to the siren Parthenope, which was itself built on a spot Antinous, lover of the emperor Hadrian, was worshipped.
Photo Gallery + Triptychs
Photos by Carl Sermon
Photos by Jeff K. at Salon Hala
Photos by Carl Sermon
