Belly Dance Classes
August 16, 2009 § 5 Comments
At the beginning of the summer I started a new Beginning American Tribal Style class in a new, more popular time slot. I’ve gained a lot of new students. It’s been a lot of fun. I’ve designed it around the very basic ATS movements and the standard triplet zill pattern. It takes 6 weeks to cycle back through so everything gets reviewed every month and a half.
The students are great. Very excited, and very supportive of each other. I try to bestow upon them the little gems of knowledge I’ve collected and find the most useful. Planting seeds.
Starting in the fall, I will have an ATS Beginning II class following my Beginning class that will focus on beginning combo moves and specialty moves with a couple specialty zill patterns. I’m planning on also designing this class on a 6 week cycle.
I love having a bigger class and new students who I can really help develop a safe and strong technique. I feel newly inspired by my students each week. I always leave class rejuvenated and energized.
The only downside to the new class schedule is there’s no official time now for my Intermediate students from my troupe who have been dancing with me the last 2 years. The Intermediate class has been tacked onto the end of troupe rehearsal since we are the performance level dancers. Unfortunately, our time usually gets swallowed by other parts of rehearsal. Must find some way to remedy this….
Oh yeah, check out this short clip taken by an audience member of me and my Performance students performing some slow ATS at Panoply a couple months ago.
JadeDancer.com 
Very nice. Always good to see other ATS troupes.
Are you dancing to a CD, or did you actually find a good mizmar player there?
Well done, you all looked great.
Thank you! That is actually our live band playing. We’re very grateful to have them.
Awesome.
We are looking for oud, mizmar, and nar players here in our area to join us. So far it seems like there are either studio level professionals, or nothing.
Your musicians sounded great. Do you have any longer clips on another site?
At any rate, if you think you will be posting more regularly I am happy to add you into my blogroll. Let me know, and thanks again.
Good luck with your search. We actually have a good little group of middle eastern music enthusiasts in the area. The melody you’re hearing on that clip is being played by someone who is actually also a dancer.
There’s a couple longer videos in my video widget in my sidebar. We also have a few clips up on youtube. You can find some here or if you search for Lumani (the name of our troupe), you might find a couple more. We’re not an all ATS troupe. It’s really just a smaller group of us within the troupe who do a lot of it. We generally describe ourselves as a “World Fusion” troupe, doing a bit of everything. There are some ATS clips up, though.
I’m definitely going to make an effort to post more. I can’t promise anything, but I’m hoping to post regularly. Where is your blog located?
My blog is here: http://threewinds.wordpress.com/
Most of the dancers we play for are also fusion, but a couple of groups are purely ATS. So far the most fun we have had was playing for an ATS Hafla, where there were 60 or so dancers. It was pretty awesome.
I would love to find some non-drummer musicians, but out here everyone seems to be strictly professional, or very shy.
Talk to you soon I am sure, and I hope that you and yours find my blog interesting and useful.
Thanks!
-Threewinds