Secrets de pratique de la danse du ventre: 

Comment improviser

La traduction suit bientôt.

When you have learned many belly dance movements,  of course you are looking forward to  connect them in one beautiful dance. And sometimes it is not easy to do it by yourself, if you never learned any choreography. I will give you some tips which can help you to make your own dance.

 First of all we need to learn improvising, or dance  “ on the fly” with familiar music. Then, improvising, we can select the best choises and assemble them together in the choreography. Let’s go through the following 5 steps: 

Step 1.  Move with the rithm on  count  4/4 

    I highly recommend  to  take your improvising on video. Videocamera will help you  to see all the mistakes and  mismatches between your  dance and music, and to remember best combinations.  

    Before you start dancing, try to refresh in your memory about 8 different movements and steps. The more the better, but it can be also less, no problem in the beginning. It will improve after each trial. 

    Decide in which sequence you are going to make those movements.  When you will dance, tune yourself to repeat each movement  2 or  4 or 8 times according to the music.

   Start playing the music. Skip the intro, if it takes too long.  You can use also  tabla rithm. You should know the music very well! Therefore play this music many times with  counting rithm. One, two, three, four, one two, three, four. (4 counts, or 4/4). First ignore the melody and pay attantion only for the rithm. Could you make one movement on each count? If it goes too fast, take the  more slow music.   Together with the rithm  make the first choosen movement  and repeat it exactly 4 or 8 times, remembering the next movement you are going to make. On each count make one movement.  After 4 or 8 repetitions  start the next movement and repeat it  also 4 or 8 times. While repeating second movement try to remember the third movement. And so on, untill the music is over. This exercise will help you to become relaxed with the tempo of the music, to recognise the musical changes and to remember more movements on the fly.

    When you feel that all the movements come easy, so that you don’t get in panic thinking what to do next,  and there are no blank spaces in your dance, you are ready for the next step. 

Step 2. Move two times slower. 

    When you succeed with the step 1, try to dance 2 times more slow. That means to make one movement on each 2 counts.  So, each movement takes two times longer. Complete a whole dance in this way. 

Step 3. Alter two diffeernt tempo’s. 

    Alter movements with both  tempo’s.  Make 2 movements on each count, and then the third movement on two counts. Do it with the same movement, then take another movement and repeat this pattern. 

Step 4. Insert other movements inbetween. 

    Repeating the same movement 4 or 8 times is of course boring, therefore now we should make  dancing more interesting by inserting here and there one or two other movements.  In the beginning you can ignore the music and listen only to the rithm. Example: when you repeat movement 8 times performing step1,  repeat it only 6 times, and the last 2 times make some other movement. This combination we can write down as 6-2.  Do this exercise untill the music is over. Then try other combination of counts, for example  2-2, 3-1,   4-2-2,  4-3-1. Often in classical or traditional oriental music  count can be from 4  till 16 and even 32. 

Step 5. Move with the music. 

    Now you can start to listen to the music, not only to the rithm. Try to  recognise  where you can do travel steps, where you can make accents, where to make supple movements, where you can spin and turn, where do shimmy and so on. Every music has its own rithm and structure, and you can experiment infinite possibilities. Once you learned simple improvising, you can make a nice choreography.