I attended my first workshop with Morocco and her protege, Tarik Sultan. Morocco taught a drum solo choreography, a choreography to Boss Ba'ah by Shereen, and Tarik taught a sha'abi choreography to a Sa'ad El Soghayer song.

First, bring food and get ready to sweat. This was one of the most strenuous workshops I've attended, aside from Suhaila's. I didn't feel like I was working that hard, but after about 2 and a half hours I would start to lose steam and really needed a substantial energy boost to continue (one powerbar wasn't going to cut it).

Morocco teaches with a unique method, that can become a little repetitive and boring but you never forget the choreography. She teaches the section, repeats it three times. Then you go onto the next section, then repeat the whole thing up to that three times. And so on and so forth for 12 sections. So it's a lot of constant dancing, not a lot of standing around. She starts the workshop with a stretch and a warmup using techniques that will be used later in the choreography. On the first day of the 2 day series, she spent more time on her theory of dance, which can be quite different from other teachers. She has a lot of opinions - you may not agree with them all. And I'll say that even though she sounds quite opinionated as a teacher, as an audience member, she was a delight - enjoying the show, and not letting any differences of opinion affect her enjoyment of a dancer.

For me, her technique took some getting used to. I found myself "translating" it into my own style. It was hard to tell in her sandals at times whether she was on her toes or not. I am used to doing a lot on releve, and I translated the movements into the movement vocabulary I have been trained in. Overall, her choreography was very easy to follow and remember. it followed the music and made sense. My own personal opinion was that her arms and other small details were a bit sloppy when demonstrating the choreography, even though they were good in her show performance. The only problem with this is that the students copy everything the teacher does. She would make a point though of correcting people who were letting their hands flop about.

Tarik is a great teacher as well. He teaches the segments consecutively and then you practice the whole thing up to the latest section once or twice. He spends more time on technique in the middle of the choreography, rather than covering it upfront. Tarik would pick out smaller details of technique and work on them with people, but some people said he only did this for the front row. He spent a lot of time correcting arms & hands, and I agree with this. He also would talk about the nuances of each movement. I was familiar with his dance vocabulary as it is similar to one of my teachers, who also teaches a sha'abi influenced style. It was pretty easy for me to follow this workshop - the big difference was putting on the more 'tough guy/girl' attitude for this particular song, but the basic movement vocabulary was the same. You could see some evidence of Tito in his dancing, and indeed, there was a section of deep knee bends with hip articulations. He did say that people should only go as low as they are comfortable, and that in practice, doing something over & over, you shouldn't wear out your knees, but just do a slight level change to "mark" the choreography. Besides verbal teaching, he also used pointing during the dancing of the choreography - to show a student where to make a correction, he would point at his own hip. This worked great for the front row anyway. Tarik didn't use counts in his choreography, he just follows the phrase of the music. That made it easy for me -t hat's what I do as well. But for people who use counts, it was probably difficult to know how many of each thing to do.

Both Morocco and Tarik were very educated and knowledgeable, and I think everyone learned something from this workshop - choreography aside, they probably learned some Arabic, some cultural tidbits about the culture our dance comes from, different styles of music, etc. I like that both Tarik and Morocco explained the lyrics of the songs, emphasized the importance of following and feeling the music, and used movements that echoed the words of the song.