by Gill Eardley

A dancer’s response can be easily stifled by choreography, limited movement vocabulary, poor posture, lack of confidence – the dance becoming merely outer technique and form.

In addition to teaching Arabic dance movements, a variety of innovative techniques outside the Arabic form are used which aim towards the discovery of a balance between outer technique and a deep inner response. This then can be taken back into Arabic dance with a heightened quality of confidence, expression and delight.

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By Dorothy Ragosine

I always said that I would write an article that began with the sure fire, eye catching sentence: “It all started with Bellydancing…..” so here it is.

It all started for me with Bellydancing except that it did not begin with Bellydancing at all. It all started when I was born, and born a woman, forty years ago in these United States of America into what could be called a good, white, middle class family. It also happened to be a family which was dominated by large, competent women who all have large breasts. I was one of those women as it later developed – if you forgive the pun.

Ever since the Pope or somebody reasonable said that brevity was the soul of wit, we have been editing marvelously heart rending dramas down into neat, cleaver magazine articles, but to be brief:

It all started with Bellydancing and that was three years ago. At forty, overweight and at a loss for dreams, I would probably have described myself publicly then as a regular middle class housewife and mother of three kids with a “good” marriage. While privately, in a clandestine journal, I wrote, “Although I am a clown, a comic person, overlarge, ridiculously trying to hold my bulk in balance, I cry too much.I wail inside.I cry ultimately, for no reason or reasons that I can piece together……”

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Here is a more useful way to approach the pleasant discipline we call learning to dance. Instead of picturing the classes you take as a linear sequence, say Belly Dance basics: Beginning, Advanced Beginning, Intermediate I, Intermediate II, Advanced/Performer – imagine yourself in an evolutionary process called the learning cycle, four distinct stages through which all human beings progress whenever they learn anything new.

First is Unconscious Incompetence. In this stage, you have had little experience of skill. In fact, it’s likely you’re quite bad, but because you don’t know how truly bad you are, you don’t feel bad and your self esteem isn’t crippled. Yet.

True damage to self esteem and the false confidence that coexists with the bliss of ignorance, often occurs in the second stage of learning – Conscious Incompetence. As your awareness evolves into this stage, you begin to realize how little you know.

Perhaps you notice how impossible it seems for you to do much of anything smoothly. You certainly convince yourself that practically everybody at every class is so talented that you’d never think of dancing for the public. At least not any time soon.

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