Nowadays BellyDancers perform without understanding what they are doing, is like they learned a banch of movements without a basement on them, only showing their techniques, and most of the times incorrect techniques.
I am the type of teacher who like to teach correcly and very clear to my students from the first lesson, so they can get it properly and not develop the incorrect movements techniques in the future. Proper basement techniques means therapy over our own bodies, looking elegant to the audience and with them you can achieve movements that other dancers can´t achieve.
Once you know the correct techniques, then you can learn infinitive movements, in my case during the BBDC, I teach around 200 movements, which are all the different variations we can extract from tradition. This does not mean that you have to perform doing all of them, only means that you can do them.
When the time to perform traditionally comes, there are different movements to do for each type of music. That´s is why my course has levels.
- First level is to learn to do the more than 200 traditional and therapeutical movements
- Second level is to use those movements, not all, to dance traditionaly to the music by improvisation
- Third level is to create choreographies from what you learned in previous levels
- Profesional Level is to get bravos from your public, win in BellyDance competitions, and how to be a teacher to open your school.
Many students who come to me as they are already recognised by the schools where they learned as professionals, they found out they had many errors, even starting by their basement movements, that´s why they couldn´t achieve the ´´difficult´´ movements, as they call them. Also these students didn´t know how to dance accordingly to tradition, most will move their legs, most will do preatty well a solo tabla, but when it comes to use the veil or move in the space with melodic music or perform to quickly rythms, they are lost.
This is the prove that they didn´t achieve a professional level, and they figure out during the course that they didn´t learn form anyone else this, because makority of teachers do not know it, as simple as that.
This happens because they learned some movements from other teachers that taught them just movements, and they learned choreographies done by others who create them, but not by themselfs accordingly to tradition as should be, plus traditional bellydancers dance majority of the time by impprovisation, some did choreographies for the movies, but normally they will perform by improvisation.
Like for example, Soher Zaki will normally perform by improvisation following the rules of tradition and Nagwa Fouad will perform normally by choreography, there is one video of both of them together dancing with cane assaya, and for the video was done a choreography.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SqLeyXN8imA
The choreographies also help film makers, specially western ones, to produce creative videos, otherwise they are kind of lost when the dancers improvise, do not know where to focus the camera.
Nowadays BellyDancers do not know how to fit the movements accordingly to tradition, so what I have seen is that most of them do many movements in each part of the music, so when they perform for 5 minutes they have aready done most of the ones they know. This is incorrect, and tired to see for the audience. It becomes a baroque without meaning performance. Also I see many who are limited to few movements, as if they only knew how to hit and how to move legs, or hips not the rest of the body.
BellyDance is a Cultural Dance, you can not be on the limits, etiher dance with tradition to traditional music, or better go back to school and learn from those who are willing to teach you. Because not all the teachers teach correctly also, no matter how much you pay them, many who dance traditional do not know how to teach what they learned grwoing with it.
Western BellyDance teachers teach with 1234,5678,.... with numbers, yes is possible to devide it for western students to learn it, but best way to teach it correctly is by teaching your students to understand why is it done in this way and why is not correct in the other way, not by numbers. Is like learning to ski telling the student by numbers how to do things, the student needs to know why has to be tight the shue, otherwise will come out during the skiing and have an accident.
The same with dance, the student needs to understand how to move, or how to listen and differ the music types, and instruments, how to improvise to them according to tradition, or how to choreography, not by learning step by step with numbers.
More about Amora https://amorashams.com
Contact for dancing at a wedding AmoraDance@gmail.com
Contact for teaching BecomeBellyDancer@gmail.com
About my formation course and students talking about it https://becomebellydancer.com/
If you want to contact Amora direcly for any enquiries, send a private message to instagram link https://www.instagram.com/amorashams.official/
While I don´t teach a course face to face, I am normally travelling, so I share on instagram by adventures in the History section, so if I don´t reply quickly don´t worry I am the most probably away from mobile coverage, I will reply as soon I am in a wifi.
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