Intermediate Belly Dancing

Cover

Title Intermediate Belly Dancing

Author Vicki Corona

ISBN 1-58513-024-9

Publisher Earth Dance International Publishing Company

Category Nonfiction: How To Belly Dance

Shira's Rating

<== Buy from Amazon.com in the U.S. (Prices quoted in U.S. dollars, shipped from U.S. warehouse.) Not available from Amazon.co.uk in the U.K.

What It's About

When my copy of this book arrived in the mail and I opened the box, my first reaction was, "I paid $14.95 plus shipping for that????" This isn't a book, it's a booklet. We're talking 8 pieces of paper (one of which is the cover) folded down the middle with 3 staples as the "spine." The "cover" is a piece of colored paper that's the same weight as the pages. I read the whole thing in less than 2 hours from beginning to end, and that included time for me to stop and try doing some of the moves described.

This book offers how-to information on belly dancing. It provides a little bit of cultural information about Saudi Arabia, explains how to do 18 intermediate-level dance moves, has two pages on how to dance with a veil, offers 2 1/2 pages of finger cymbal rhythms, and how to dance for an audience. It then describes how to put the moves described in this book together into an intermediate-level dance. It finishes with a recipe for tabbouleh, which is an Arabic salad.

Its Good Points

I found the advice on doing performances to be reasonably good. It matched with my own experience in doing bellygrams and other shows. This section is what prompted me to give the book two stars instead of only one.

The section describing how to do various movements was illustrated with appropriate diagrams illustrating what the text was trying to say. Although it's very, very hard to learn movements from written text, I felt this writer did a good job of articulating the instructions.

This book did an excellent job with spelling, grammar, and clear expression of ideas. That was a nice surprise--many self-published books are filled with spelling and grammatical errors because they don't have a professional editor to make corrections.

On The Negative Side....

I thought it was peculiar that the "culture lesson" part of this book focused primarily on Saudi Arabia with a brief mention of United Arab Emirates. Belly dancing is not performed publicly at all in Saudi Arabia, and this book didn't even mention that fact. I got the distinct impression that those three pages of the book encompassed everything this author knew about Saudi Arabia. It would have been much more appropriate to focus the culture lesson on either Egypt, Turkey, or Lebanon, because these countries do have opportunities for those of us who love the dance to see it performed.

The layout of the book was sloppy. There was no table of contents, and no clear structure of chapters. It needed more section headings than it had. The fonts used for the various headings were inconsistent with each other in both size and typeface. The "Introduction" section flowed from introductory comments into a description of Saudi Arabia, and from there suddenly started describing how to do chest snaps. Huh?

The artwork sprinkled throughout the book was appealing, but seemed to be a mish-mash of different artists' styles. Consistency would have been better. There was absolutely no attribution of who drew the artwork, which disappointed me. Artists deserve to have their contributions recognized.