I recently received a copy of Hossam Ramzy’s “Rock the Tabla” CD for review. It arrived in the mail as I was headed out to teach so I popped it in the car CD player for a first listen. From the title (and the artist) I expected a CD of hot drum solos but this CD was quite the surprise! If I had read the notes first, I’d have know that this is a collaboration CD. […]
You can balance a sword or a tray of burning candles on your head – but can you balance your life for the next few weeks? The holiday season is upon us and that means good times, good friends and good cheer, right? Yes, but if you’re a working dancer, it can be a time of overwork and extra stress too. You can be torn between taking advantage of the party performance season and the […]
We talk alot about musicality in bellydance, perhaps because improvisation is such a strong tradition right down to the roots of the style. Like the concept of “stage presence”, musicality can be difficult to define in practical terms. It is interesting to view it through the lens of another dance style, particularly one that is traditionally choreographed. A recent post by one of my new favorite dance bloggers got me thinking. New dancers spend (or should spend) a […]
Here’s a game to use in your belly dance class or even by yourself as part of your practice. The goal of this game is to think analytically about the properties of movement and play with the changes. I suggest using this in an intermediate or higher level class. Any dance movement has a set of properties, for this game we will only be using three: location, shape and plane. Let’s make sure we’re all […]
Let’s do another zill playalong. We’ll play along with the main melody line from “Lylet Hob”. The underlying rhythm is Maqsoum, but by using a “bridge” and a variation at the end of the musical phrase we can make our playing much more musical. Take these concepts – the bridging and phrase-ending variation – and try them out with the melodies of your favorite songs! Lylet Hob Playalong