Belly Dance HOW TO secrets:
How to become professional belly
dancer:
Building up physical condition and feminine
strenght.
Do you remember yourself watching performance of some top belly dancer and thinking:
“ If I would start belly
dance in my childhood, I also would be able to dance like this now“?
Indeed, in childhood our body is very flexible. We have
naturally straight posture. We can move our body very easy.
When we train at early age, our body gets into habit
to hold straight deportment,
it keeps obtained
flexibility and coordination for many years, and general ability to dance
becomes build in. When we learn dancing in our childhood, we learn a right
culture of dance movements, which
stays in the memory of our body for many years after.
Now let’s have a quick look at what we are doing when we
start our first belly dance lessons at some oriental school: we learn
techniques and choreographies, sometimes expressions.
And then we look at our performance
and… we see something different than we wish to see, is’t it?
If you do it for fun, probably you will be happy with it anyway. Because the main purpose is joy, being in the flow of happiness, express your self as you are. But what if you are full of ambitions to become really professional, not worse than top dancers, but you did not do belly dance in your childhood?
Every top belly dancer was performing already since early age. Or at least she already had
a profound physical training in some other sport or dance before she came to
Belly Dance. And she will even confess that she still visits fitness club
and follows another kind of
dance classes.
That gives us an answer: apart
from learning techniques and choreographies we need to build up a very good
physical condition, which would be there if we would train since our
childhood.
Therefore if we started to learn belly dance without
having such a background, it
will be obvious in our performance, no matter how good we have learned
bellydance movements and choreography, how
good and sexy costume we wear. Particularly you can see it in lost
deportment, wrong posture, some heaviness,
weak arms and shoulders, lack of fluency, and unliterate movements.
Good physical condition is very important factor of professionalism in Belly Dance!
So, to build up professional condition we need to improve our deportment if it is lost, and build up some muscles.
And even if you did not build up this condition since your
early age, it is still possible to develop it and get to quite a
professional level . You may
start to visit fitness club, and include the following points:
1.
Deportment (straight back).
From the first look at the deportment of a dancer one can see wether
this dancer is professional .
To improve deportment you may need to go to a specialist
(orthoped, ostheopath, physiotherpist, mensendiek etc). Because everybody has his own
specific issues, I can’t give here a common advice for everybody.
2.
Posture. Belly dance movements look clear and beautiful
only when done with proper posture of a whole body:
keep your breast a bit up and move your pelvice a bit forward at the
same time.
3.
Arms and hands. The way arms and hands are set and moved, immediately
shows level of the dancer. There are two aspects which can be paid attention
for:
a)
Physical condition of back, arms and
shoulders: when is not developed, arms are impossible to hold in proper
position for long time. Arms condition can
be achieved by doing exercises with elastic body band.
b)
Obedient, flexible and sensitive hands. Try
my DVD “Oriental arms and upper body
technique”.
4.
Feminine
strenght. When you train in
fitness club you develop muscles in the same way as men do.
Therefore it develops kind of a men’s power in the body. And in order
to develop feminine strenght, we should train our muscles in feminine way,
which is represented in belly dance movements itself.
When you repeat belly dance movements many times, it becomes
Bellydance –Fitness, which builds up feminine condition. It will
give you fluency in all the body movements, refined techniques and very good
body shape.
Read more
about Bellydance – Fitness course.