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You've decided you would like to learn how to belly dance. Now, all you need is a teacher. But when you checked into it, you couldn't find anyone in your community. What can you do to start learning without a teacher, and how do you become part of the belly dancing community? Or, what if you found a local teacher but she's barely more than a beginner herself? You can still start learning how to belly dance, even if you can't find a local teacher. It's more difficult this way, but it can be done if you want to learn badly enough. Or, if you have a local teacher who doesn't offer enough growth to satisfy you, there are ways you can supplement your classroom experience by turning to additional sources of learning. Survey reflects responses since October 26, 2002. |
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Before you give up on finding a local teacher, you may want to take a moment to look just a little more. Maybe you didn't look in the right place! Belly dancing teachers don't always advertise themselves in the Yellow Pages or other places where you may have looked. If you haven't already done so, read the article Learning To Belly Dance: Where To Find Instruction elsewhere on this web site. Maybe it will give you the lead you need to find that elusive local teacher! If you've tried everything suggested above and still can't find a teacher, then the suggestions in this article will help you. However, about once every 6 months or so, make another attempt to check the sources described in Learning To Belly Dance: Where To Find Instruction, because you never can tell when an existing teacher will start to advertise, or when a new teacher will move to your area. |
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In other parts of this article, I'll talk about videos, web sites, and books that may help you. But the first thing you need to do if you'll be trying to learn without a teacher is to give yourself a structure for learning what you can at home. Belly dancing classes typically meet once a week, for one hour at a time. If you can't find a class to attend, try to carve out one hour on a consistent night per week for yourself to use for your home study. If you can do more, you'll learn even faster! See my article elsewhere on this web site titled How to Structure a Belly Dance Study/Practice Session at Home for suggestions on how to get the most out of the time you have allocated. |
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Most instructional videos focus on movement: they offer movements you can do, sometimes with advice on posture and proper technique. The best ones also talk about how to make transitions from one movement to another, and include a sample performance by the teacher to illustrate how the movements look in the context of a real dance. They usually don't offer any cultural insights or background about the dance. Purchase one or more instructional videos that teach belly dancing and work with them in the privacy of your own home. Better yet, try to persuade your local library to purchase one or more instructional belly dance videos so you can check them out! When learning from a video, it's important to pace yourself. Give yourself enough time practicing each move to feel really confident with it. In a single hour-long learning session, try to divide up the time this way:
The above article talks generically about studying and practicing at home. For more details on how you can use videos in particular for home study, including the titles of some videos that I think are good, see Learning to Belly Dance from Videos elsewhere on this web site. Unfortunately, there are also some videos available in the market that are disappointing. You have only so much money available to spend on dance videos, so be sure to check whether I've reviewed the video you're considering before making a buying decision. If I haven't reviewed it, check whether it is reviewed on Amazon.com, or post a message asking for opinions about the video in one of the online belly dancing discussion areas. |
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If you can't find a local teacher, but you can find a teacher within a 2-3 hour drive of you, maybe you can arrange to take a 2-hour private lesson once every 3-4 months. Spending some time in person with a teacher is the best way to get feedback on what you're doing right and what you're doing wrong. It can also eliminate some of the sense of isolation you may feel in studying the dance with videos in your living room. And of course, in a private lesson you have the opportunity to ask all your pent-up questions. A good teacher can steer you to good music to use for practicing that suits your style, help you find vendors who sell the supplies you need, offer you insights into the history and cultural context of the dance, and learn how to develop performance opportunities for yourself in your local community. |
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If you know of several additional people in your community who would love to learn how to belly dance, consider sponsoring a local workshop in which you bring in a teacher from another city. This may be particularly feasible if there used to be a teacher in your community who has left town, but those of you who were her students still get together regularly to practice and exchange knowledge. The price you'll need to pay that visiting teacher will depend heavily on local pay scales for workshop instructors. In the United States, the going rate for the top-of-the-line instructors who have a national or international reputation is $150 per hour. If you choose a teacher who is less well-known, you may be able to get a lower rate--maybe $100 per hour. Shop around. The price may also vary depending on how far the instructor needs to travel to come to your community--if an airplane ticket is required, it'll probably be your responsibility as the sponsor to pay for it. If she has to drive several hours to get to your community, you should plan to pay for mileage in addition to her fee. Also be prepared to provide overnight accommodations. Consider hiring her for a 4-5 hour workshop on Saturday, an evening show Saturday night, and a 4-5 hour workshop on Sunday. For the evening show, give some of the workshop participants a chance to perform, too. Ask in advance if you may videotape the class so that you can privately review what you learned after the fact--some instructors allow it, but others don't. If you know of other dancers in communities that are a 4-5 hour drive away or closer, be sure to invite them to come to the workshop. You may get some additional attendees who will help pay the bills. |
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There are lots of special belly dance workshops, seminars, and retreats available. They provide opportunities to take master classes from prominent belly dance instructors. There may even be such an event within a few hours' drive of you that you could attend on a Saturday or Sunday. The weeklong seminars are particularly great if you can afford to spend the time and money because they offer a chance to get to know your fellow attendees and feel connected to a dance community at the same time you're getting in-depth instruction. One annual weeklong workshop series worth considering is Rakkasah. A week of classes with world-famous instructors is followed by a major weekend festival is the largest belly dancing festival in the world. The classes offer more than 10 different instructors over the course of the week, teaching a variety of different dance styles. You won't be able to learn any one style in depth in these workshops, but you can broaden your dance knowledge by getting tastes of several different things. After exposing yourself to these many different forms, you'll learn enough from the samples to decide which to focus on in the future. This event occurs every March in the vicinity of Oakland, California. For details, contact Shukriya at (+1) (510) 724-0214. The weekend Rakkasah festival features continuous dance performances on Friday evening, all day Saturday, and all day Sunday. It also offers row upon row of vendors selling belly dance supplies.
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Subscribe to all the belly dance magazines you can afford. Although there's a limit to how much you can learn about movement from a printed medium, they will offer you useful advice, historical background about the dance, costuming ideas, advertisements for vendors, reviews of videos, announcements about upcoming workshops and festivals that may be in your area, and more. Even if you have a great local teacher, magazines will broaden your horizons when it comes to learning more than just how to move. Here is contact information for some to get you started:
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If you have access to electronic mail, you can join the "Med-Dance List" on the Internet. The Med-Dance List employs an Internet technology known as a "listserver" that lets you exchange e-mail messages regarding Middle Eastern dance with hundreds of other people who share your interest. The way it works is that any subscriber can send in an e-mail message containing a question, opinion, response to something someone else posted, or other message. A moderator reviews every message, and forwards all those that are suitable for the list's topic of Middle Eastern Dance. Thanks to her efforts, "The List" is free of commercial solicitations (known as spam) and other messages that are unrelated to the topic of Middle Eastern Dance. You receive all the messages in your e-mail box, to process at your convenience. People on Med-Dance discuss just about every topic of interest to belly dancers, and it's a gold mine of resource information about the history of the dance, current trends, costuming, performance tips, upcoming belly dance events, and many other dance topics. You can either "lurk" (read the messages without posting any of your own) or take an active role yourself in posting messages, as you see fit. In fact, you can ask The List whether any members know of teachers who are local to you. There are usually 30-40 messages per day. There is no cost to subscribe. Just send a message to majordomo@world.std.com in which the ONLY text appearing in the message is: subscribe med-dance You'll get a message back asking you to confirm whether you want to be on the list. Follow the instructions in it. Then you'll be wired and talking to the rest of us! |
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There are several web sites that can help you expand your knowledge of dance. They probably won't help you much with movement, but they can offer you advice, historical and cultural information about the dance, vendor suggestions, and other useful information. These are the ones that will help you the most:
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I'm aware of only a couple of books currently in print that describe how to execute belly dancing movements. There were several published in the 1970's and 1980's, but the majority are out of print now. Besides, I'm not convinced the printed word can provide useful information on how to learn to dance unless you already know how the move should look and you just need a clear explanation on how to produce it. Still, if you'd like to try using a book to help you learn how to belly dance, one of the older books that's still in print is Belly Dancing for Health and Relaxation, which I have reviewed elsewhere on my web site. I do still refer back to this and some of the out-of-print ones in my collection when I'm looking for ideas on what words to use to explain a move to my students. So if you find that the explanation on one of your videos isn't helpful, you might try referring to a book to see whether the words chosen by the author make it clearer for you. There are also a number of books available in the marketplace that talk about the history of the dance, Middle Eastern culture, costuming advice, and other topics. Admittedly, they won't teach you to dance, but they offer related information you may enjoy! See Shira's Reading List For Dancers, another article on this web site that provides a list of more than 20 books for suggested reading. Shira's reviews for many of them appear right here on this web site. |
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