The downside of bad Spanish

Having a rudimentary grasp of another language isn't all hilarity.  

Living in Xela is often maddeningly frustrating because I just can't communicate like I'd want to. There is nothing to make you feel more like these dogs than staring blankly at another grown human who is telling you something important and you just don't know what it is they're saying (also, just an excuse to include a montage of hilarious dogs). 

And sometimes it's not understanding the bus conductor when he's telling you that you *really* should have gotten off the bus already, and so you just smile and nod politely and end up 20 minutes from where you wanted to/were meant to be. 

And sometimes, you accidentally end up at the local belly-dancing school's end of semester performance, because you thought it was a musical production of Aladdin. 

Allow me to elaborate.

One day, a woman came into my school and put up this flier.

Having read it, I believed that it was a production of the musical Aladdin. And given my enduring love for Disney, and my overwhelming shock at the low-low price of 30Q (about $6 – so I thought it was probably going to be a community group), I was in like Flynn.

After the moderately traumatising experience of trying to buy tickets (involving walking into at least 10 shops and a bank in the same shopping centre to find the one place that actually sold the tickets), I had my ticket in hand, and was ready for a magical night with my favourite Disney songs, en español.

As you probably have guessed, this did not happen.

The performance was a little late to start (40mins, actually), which I attributed to the delicate disposition of community-group thespians. But finally (and after a very unimpressed abuela started 5 rounds of “ok, time to get started now” applause), the lights dimmed, and the opening bars of ‘Arabian Nights’ sounded. 

This was my first hint that maybe this night would be a little different, because the guy (who would later become Jafar) was lip-syncing badly, albeit passionately to the movie recording. But I figured finding good singers is a challenge in every amateur production, so perhaps it was better to lip-sync to the magical voice of Lea Salonga and Robin Williams than to butcher the collective childhood's of everyone in the audience. 

The curtain raised, and the set was thus.

So nothing too alarming. Standard community theatre thriftiness on display. 

And then a harem appeared. And started bellydancing. 

And then kept bellydancing. 

For at least 5 minutes. 

And I remembered from the flier that the production was by the Xela Bellydancing group - and even at this point, I remained politely convinced that this was a theatrical production, and they were just going to really go to down on the dance numbers. And when Aladdin eventually appeared in the harem's routine, I remembered that he does visit a brothel half-way through "One Jump", and was reassured that we would be getting into the musical soon. 

But then Aladdin left and the dancing continued to the end of a Bollywood-sounding song. 

And then another song began. And new bellydancers appeared. 

And then it clicked. 

This is not a musical. This is not a play. This is Aladdin told purely through interpretive bellydancing (sidebar: this also turned out to be incorrect). 

After this number, we had a quick piece of dialogue between Jasmine, Jafar and Aladdin (pronounced "A-la-din") about some kind of marriage, and my hope was restored... I would be able to practice my espanol after all. 

And then another 15 minute dance break resumed and it was only then that the penny dropped. This was the dance-school's performance night. 

It had all the talent of a high school musical (not High School Musical, you standard Aspley State High School production of the shitty 70's-themed rendition of Disco Inferno - which was a plagiarised and butchered version of Wuthering Heights), with all of the charm of your early-teenage theater troupe's angst-filled rendition of Equus with sin the style of physical theatre and Brechtianism (by the way, Mum and Dad, I'm not sure I ever apologised for that... but you can consider this as karmic retribution in spades). 

And my previous thoughts about lip-syncing so as not to butcher beloved childhood classics? Not a chance. Turns out a desire to massacre "A Whole New World" (or "An Ideal World" as the version goes in Spanish) is universal to amateur triple threats. So we got a stirring (read: blood-curdling) rendition of my favourite Disney song, which was both off-key, off-pace, off-beat and simultaneously out-of-this-world fantastic. Because did you know you could do a bellydancing duet? I didn't. I do now. 

So once I decided to just roll with it, the night became amazing.

The clear highlight was the under-8s (sidebar: it is definitely uncomfortable to watch small children gyrate around in boob tubes - especially when the kids are already better at dancing seductively than I will ever be), when the youngest (who would have been about 5) decided that she comprehensively did NOT want to be involved and sat down on stage. And then proceeded to walk around trying to get the other kids to stop dancing.

But when, after 90 minutes of amateur belly dancing, a group number started with at least 20 dancers I haven't seen before miraculously appeared, I decided it was high time to leg it out of there, before the next 4 days of my life were sapped away in a whirl of feather boats, tulle, midriffs and more glitter eye make-up than any self-respecting drag queen would wear.

And that, kids, is how I learned the following important life lesson: when life gives you an Aladdin-themed-bellydancing-performance, make lemonade. And add vodka. Liberally.