Belly Dance Posture

Diana: Hi! My name is Diana, and I am a Middle Eastern belly dancer in the Northern Virginia area, and I am going to go, all about the correct posture for this dance. It's important that you have the posture, so that you can move your hips, and oscillate the body, in the correct manner. So, first off, you want to have your feet slightly, apart, and you want your knees slightly bent, you want to tuck your pelvis under. You don't want to have your bottom sticking out; you gently pull like you are pulling on a skirt or something. You are trying to wiggle into a skirt, so your bottoms are tuned on this side, so your bottom is just tucked under, and that will give you the freedom to move your hips. So, make sure they are tucked under, and over this area, this whole two side section is all held nice and strong, and then we lift our chest, and we pull it back, so, we are all in a nice line, we roll our shoulders back, and then we lift our head, and imagine a pole going right through you, great, and that way, you are nice, your body is in alignment, you are free to dance. So, next, we are going to move on, to our arm movements, great. So, first we will do some wrist rotations. And this comes from our wrist. We just rotate our wrists around each other, right, go one way, and then we are going to go the other way, down, lovely. Now, we'll start moving onto snake arms. You imagine you have a big beach ball under here, you lift your arm, and you flip it down. Do the other side, and flip it down, flip it up, and flip it down, flip it up, and flip it down. Now, we do one side, and then we do the other side, one side, the other side, lovely, one side, and the other side, and these are called snake arms. Now, turn to this side, keep your hands like this, these are hand flips, and we are just going to flip, flip, flip, flip, flip, great. You want to keep your fingers nice and strong and pretty, a couple of more of those, lovely, good. Now, the other one we are going to do is, I call it a face crease. We are going to bring our arms around our face, and just, imagine your wiping the side of your face, and this will help you get this movement. Its a little tricky to get at first, great. This is called a face crease, lovely, and well do the those arm flips, bring it out to the side, do some rotations of your wrist, and then we are going to bring it down in front of us, and criss-cross it down in front. In front, and then back, front and back, and then bring it down, and up, cross it in front, cross it in front and the back, and the front and the back, and then bring it up. Good, one more time, and snake arms, then up and front, and that concludes this section on belly dance arm movement, very good.