Belly dance class #3
Oct. 6th, 2004 11:56 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
thebratqueenOkay, debate stuff out of the way and "crap my boss is coming in later today so let's get the things he would so micromanage if he saw me doing them done done done" out of the way, I now have a sec to talk about last night's belly dance class for thems who've said they wanted updates =)
The big news is that I have finally learned how to shimmy. What the teacher did is take the basic steps from the first two classes (proper body position, and learning how to isolate the right part of the body for the move) and then add to that to break a shimmy down into easy to understand steps.
With regards to the shimmy, for our style of belly dance we do the move from the hips. Breaking the move down into steps starts out with getting your posture right, then basically doing the Twist. This allows you to feel what it's like to just move your hips. We then got a feel for doing that twisting motion while shifting our weight and standing in different poses.
Then we practiced moving our hips in that same way, but instead of doing big movements we broke it down into halfway, then all the way. Doing repeats of half, then all, half, then all allowed us to get a feel for what it's like to control the movement, and to move the muscles in the same way but without doing as big a gesture.
From there it was simply making the movement even smaller, then faster, to get the shimmy.
I'll definitely have to practice this, as it's the sort of thing where it's easy to do so long as you don't think about it. Think about it and suddenly your rhythm is all screwed up and you can't do it anymore.
Once shimmying was done, we then moved on to starting to learn the feel of hip lifts. This one I felt I could have skipped the side-track into "This is what the move feels like in another dance entirely" and simply gone right into the belly dance move. Sometimes, like with Twist=shimmy, the comparisons work because it really is the same move but bigger and easier to understand, but for the dance she used for the hip lift it was just as big a gesture as the lifts themselves will be, except it was using the front hip muscles instead of the back. So I was left sort of wondering why teach us the wrong way to do it instead of leaping ahead to the right? Then again, I don't have a lot of problems using specific muscles in that area, so maybe if I did I would find the way our teacher did it a good baby step. Who knows?
We also did a bit of practice with moving our chests from side to side, and with the right way to hold our weight while moving.
My ego was stroked yet again as the teacher said I was doing well. Also she liked my hip scarf =) (For those who are interested, this is what the scarf looks like, more or less).
And I think that about covers it. =)
The big news is that I have finally learned how to shimmy. What the teacher did is take the basic steps from the first two classes (proper body position, and learning how to isolate the right part of the body for the move) and then add to that to break a shimmy down into easy to understand steps.
With regards to the shimmy, for our style of belly dance we do the move from the hips. Breaking the move down into steps starts out with getting your posture right, then basically doing the Twist. This allows you to feel what it's like to just move your hips. We then got a feel for doing that twisting motion while shifting our weight and standing in different poses.
Then we practiced moving our hips in that same way, but instead of doing big movements we broke it down into halfway, then all the way. Doing repeats of half, then all, half, then all allowed us to get a feel for what it's like to control the movement, and to move the muscles in the same way but without doing as big a gesture.
From there it was simply making the movement even smaller, then faster, to get the shimmy.
I'll definitely have to practice this, as it's the sort of thing where it's easy to do so long as you don't think about it. Think about it and suddenly your rhythm is all screwed up and you can't do it anymore.
Once shimmying was done, we then moved on to starting to learn the feel of hip lifts. This one I felt I could have skipped the side-track into "This is what the move feels like in another dance entirely" and simply gone right into the belly dance move. Sometimes, like with Twist=shimmy, the comparisons work because it really is the same move but bigger and easier to understand, but for the dance she used for the hip lift it was just as big a gesture as the lifts themselves will be, except it was using the front hip muscles instead of the back. So I was left sort of wondering why teach us the wrong way to do it instead of leaping ahead to the right? Then again, I don't have a lot of problems using specific muscles in that area, so maybe if I did I would find the way our teacher did it a good baby step. Who knows?
We also did a bit of practice with moving our chests from side to side, and with the right way to hold our weight while moving.
My ego was stroked yet again as the teacher said I was doing well. Also she liked my hip scarf =) (For those who are interested, this is what the scarf looks like, more or less).
And I think that about covers it. =)
