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Most of us, as new students, want to learn the right way to dance. We often want to know what the correct name for a move is, and how it is done. New dancers can get confused or frustrated when hearing different names of the same move, or will label one way of doing something wrong if it doesn't match up with they way our teacher does it.* We may even long for a standardized curriculum, especially if we grew up with more codified Euro-American dance styles, like ballet or square dancing. I know it's frustrating to not have a single answer, but for this dance, it is very important to resist the urge to standardize it!
Not long after I started learning to bellydance, I developed intrusive thought OCD. Under the direction of a psychologist, I had to undergo Exposure and Response Prevention Therapy, or ERPT for short. The gist of this therapy, which is also used to help people overcome debilitating fears, is to expose yourself to an anxiety inducing stimulus and, instead of allowing yourself to respond with your anxiety reducing compulsion, riding out the anxiety so that you retrain your brain, though experience, to recognize that the anxiety response is not necessary. Over time, you gradually increase how long you resist performing the compulsion, or increase the magnitude of the stimulus (meaning, if you're doing ERPT to overcome a fear of snakes, you might start out with worms, then move onto small garden snakes, then just look at a big snake, then touch one, and eventually work up to holding a medium sized milk snake, for example).
I promise this is a post about bellydance!  In Tibetan Buddhism, there is a ritual where monks spend weeks creating mandalas out of sand. Then the artwork is swept away and poured into running water. The point is to remember the impermanence of all things. Dance is like this, no matter how detailed your choreography or how canned your music, each performance will be different.
"...the core of bellydance resides in the lived, felt, courageous truths it can tell." ~ Andrea Dragon
Most folks joining a bellydance class in the US start out learning isolations, steps, and movements. We may be lucky enough to have a teacher who makes us aware of different rhythms, or even luckier to have a teacher who grew up in MENAHT culture and shares this context. But at the introductory level, most classes in the US focus on coordination and combinations, and frustratingly few areas of the country have MENAHT teachers offering classes.
Why we should explore all of the other bellydance styles and regional folk dances, and why you do not need to study European dances to be a good bellydancer.
Post 11 of 11.
It can seem like an overly intellectualizing exercise to differentiate between many different styles of bellydance, and there are a lot of contentious discussions about what makes a style of dance and when something ceases to be bellydance anymore. While it is understandable why one would want to avoid that kind of conversation, there are many reasons for learning about the different styles of bellydance. Selfish reasons, practical reasons, and socially conscientious reasons. The other day, I picked up some pink paint swatches. I'm considering repainting my bedroom (currently a light green) in a color that I spent years "hating"; or, more accurately, not allowing myself to like. Femme folks (girls, trans-women, cis-women, femme-presenting non-binary folks, and other shades of lady-like), and really everyone else too, have all gotten plenty of messages throughout our lives that "girly" things are bad. I think this quote from the intro to a Madonna song sums up society's attitude well.
If you've taken my classes, you've heard me talk about how raqs is traditionally improvised, about the cultural value of the feeling in the moment, and probably about how impossible it is to do choreography in a restaurant or birthday party-type gig.
Over-dancing is something like that awkward stage of adolescence, a development stage that most intermediate dance students go through. We know a lot of what to do, but that lack of experience leaves a certain immaturity to how we do it.
Now, I don't mean levels in terms of how skilled a dancer is, this post is about how zoomed in, or out, on the music you are. Each level of musicality corresponds to different skills you can practice. You've probably taken classes or workshops around these levels. Maybe you're about to sign up for workshops at a festival and are trying to pick from different topics, or maybe you are looking back a smattering of learning and wondering how it all fits together. Hopefully (and if you're in my class, I've sent this to you as part of your level 2 information) you're reading this ahead of time, so you can see how the things we're doing in class build into a whole.
I'm writing this in early June of 2020. Quarantine for Covid-19 is still in effect here (and cases are rising in places that have broken theirs early) and protests are going on over the murder of African Americans by police who too often face no consequences for their actions. Some folks dealt with the uncertainty at the beginning of Covid by stockpiling toilet paper, lots of people have been having trouble adjusting to being home so much. It's got me thinking, how can we handle uncertainty in dance? Can bellydancing help us be more resilient to uncertainty?
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AuthorLisa Lumina is the primary author of student readings. Guest authors are indicated on their posts. Archives
August 2025
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