Belly Dance HOW TO secrets:
Mastering Oriental Culture of Belly Dance
Oriental Culture of dancing is what your audience
can enjoy on another level than just looking. It has extra dimension, it
goes deeper, it stays longer in the hearts of audience.
In order to perform belly dance in oriental way, we should know certain oriental secrets. Western people have ”western” perception which naturally skips important oriental details, and oriental dance experts do not share easily these details with western population. But the more we watch oriental performances, the more we start to understand principles, which make a big difference between Western belly dance and the Oriental one.
Tips which i learned from some of my oriental teachers,observed in many oriental performances and discovered through my own practice:
a)
Don’t hurry up, learn to dance slowly and
feel comfortable with it.
b)
Consider every movement you make as something
very precious. Don’t overload audience with too many movements so that they
don't lose their value. Make movements being aware of
every detail.
c)
Start being simple. Complicated movements may
impress, and western audience would probably appreciate it. However,
the goal of oriental dance is not to impress, but to rich to the heart.
Being simple, you will first of all create space for creative flow in you,
and then more complicated movements will come to you by itself. This is the
right inner state for dancing, you become full of
love and interaction with audience.
It will save your energy and even charge you up, and you will be able to
dance long time, as they do in the oriental traditions.
e)
Listen to the music beyond melody and rythm.
Oriental classical and traditional music is full of emotions, which are like
hidden melody, not obvious. In
western culture we follow obvious melody or rithm. But to make real oriental
dance, try to hear that hidden melody, which is usually much more slow than
the obvious melody. It is like in a poem:
you may say a sentence of many words which has rithm, but it
expresses just one wave of emotions. And then there will be next wave in the
next sentence. These waves of emotions are also present in oriental music
and it is beautiful to hear them and to follow them.
f) In western culture the more excitement, the stronger emotions are there, the more intense and passionate movement dancer makes to express it. In oriental dance it is not like that: when you are full of passion, don’t splash it out, but continue to feel inner move. This energy of passion transforms into something which is felt like inner pressure, and then this pressure penetrates your movements, making your body "speaking".