Belly Dance Teacher

Shahina
Evaluating a Prospective Belly Dance Teacher

by Shahina

My opinion regarding what I think is an excellent article about finding an instructor.

Any instructor that meets the criteria suggested in the article will certainly not be lacking in artistry as well. The article did not suggest a certain body type or other limiting factors, but rather suggested ways of discerning a dance professional from someone who is "faking it".

With the increased popularity of belly dance everyone wants to cash in. The health clubs all want to offer belly dance classes, as well as the park districts, ballet studios and others. They are hiring teachers without being at all familiar themselves with belly dance, therefore not knowing what to ask or look for, and they are sometimes hiring people who have had very minimal belly dance training. Worse yet, some of them send an aerobics instructor to one workshop of a few hours duration and then have her teach it to others.

I actually had someone contact me asking how to get started teaching. She was losing her job and needed a way to make money quick. She had taken one session of classes with a local instructor and she thought she was ready to teach beginners. While I encourage entrepreneurship there are foundations of good dancing that need to be built from the beginning. Bad habits are hard to break once they are made.

I often hear comments from Middle Easterners about American dancers, and most of them have their root in the fact that American dancers do not understand the music and do not feel the "soul" of the dance. They say we dance whatever steps we want to whatever music we want with no respect for the origins of either. We do cane dances to flute taqsims and toss veils around to balady. How would it look to you if you went to see the Nutcracker and they were square dancing? That's how our dancing looks to them.

We think the dance is about "us". We dance for ourselves and internalize the music. We get too dramatic and too glamorous and we alienate the audience. We dance to show off, in high gear all the time without ever pulling back. We stomp on the solos and dance through the pauses.

We cannot correct these infractions by learning from unqualified teachers. Perhaps this is okay if we only want to dance for ourselves, Americans and other American belly dancers. If we want to dance for Middle Easterners we must understand that they are there for the music, and the dancer is minor in their enjoyment, after the band and after the singer.

The philosophy I subscribe to with respect to belly dance is that the dancer is a channel for the music. Her job is to translate the music into a visual language; so that a person who is deaf could look at her and know what the music sounds like. She lets the music flow through her body and presents it as a gift to the audience.

This does not mean that there is only one way to dance a piece of music, because the dancer is an interpreter. The music is so complex and has so many different levels. She must be able to listen and interact with the orchestra and the audience. She hears something in the music and with her dance she says to the audience, "I love this part of the music! Can you hear it? Oh, but wait, listen to that taqsim! This is what the taqsim looks like! Do you like it too?" And she can go back to the orchestra and with her dance she tells them "You play that so beautifully! Won't you please do that part again for me?"

She needs to let others be noticed too. When the singer is breaking down the scales an expressing gut wrenching emotion, she needs to pull back to some soft shimmies and Egyptian classics, and not try to upstage the singer. The building and softening is what makes a good dancer so entrancing. All high or all low key is boring in a very short time.

This is all stuff that needs to be taught from the beginning. If we just want to dance for empowerment or emotional healing, that is valid too, but then we should not be performing it for others and calling it Middle Eastern dance or belly dance.

On the other hand, there are teachers who are wonderful dancers and have all the understanding and knowledge to teach, but who are emotionally handicapped, who don't really want to pass on their knowledge, but rather feel threatened when a student begins to show promise or wants to take classes from other teachers.

These just want to be the queen of the harem with their adoring subjects showering them with praise and making them look more lovely by comparison. No doubt one can learn from them, but students must be very careful not to get sucked into the dysfunction and become trapped in an unhealthy relationship.

Bless you all in your quests, whatever they may be!

Related Links
Bellydance lessons with Shahina
Shahina's resume
Shahina's photo album
More of Shahina's opinions

Copyright © 2005 by Shahina All rights reserved.


Teacher and Instructor of Belly dance

Henna Modeled by Shahina