Belly Dancing

Ok... I know inquiring minds wanna know - and no... there will be no pictures, but yes, the class was this evening and it was fun! The teeny tiny lady who was the instructor was calm and patient. There are eight of us in the class.

There was soft Middle Eastern music and we shared a few coin skirts between us, ours haven't arrived yet but should be here next week. We were told to be barefoot and she had us stretch out some, limber us up and then she started with the hands - she taught us how to hold our hands while we danced. Then we did a shoulder roll and we practiced it for a while, making sure we used our shoulders more than our arms. Then, once she felt we had the hang of that, we did snake arms... that was a little harder, I could do the right side really well but my left, well it sorta had a mind of its own... not sure why I felt like I needed to do more of a swimming motion than a snake motion. After we practiced each side separately she had us to them one after the other... that, my friends was a little harder - sorta like patting your head and rubbing your tummy at the same time. It took just a little while to figure out how to put them both in synch. Then we moved onto the shimmy. The trick in doing this was to bend the knees, one and then the other, to make the very front of stomach shimmy, and not your hips or butt. Wearing the coin skirt helped with this - gave motivation for getting it right, the more correctly you moved the more sound you made!

She ended the class by giving us a demonstration of a dance she did. It was fascinating. I'm looking forward to learning more - to putting it all together. But first, she said our homework was to practice those things we learned tonight - perfect them for the next class. I will tell you, I can already feel how sore I'm going to be - holding the arms up while doing that shoulder roll thing was like some kind of torture experience... but I'll be back next week. What can it hurt, right? Well besides physically? lol!