Transcript
So before we get started, I’d like to talk to you about the basic belly dance posture. Keeping the knees really bent is very, very important in order to be able to do a lot of the belly dance isolations. So, what’s important is keeping the legs right under neat the hip bones, keeping the knees really bent and keeping the weight on the inside of the foot. So if you should shift your weight all the way forward onto the toes now come back all the way back to the heel. Find the center, find the place where you’re in the middle of those two extremes, this is where you want to be in terms of you feet. Keeping the knees bent is very important in terms of isolation for your hips, the lower you are to the ground, the bigger a lot of the hip movements will be. Additionally you want to tuck the tail bone under, keeping the lower abs engage throughout most of the movements. What you want to do is think of contracting about an inch below the belly button and bring the line on your pants and the hip scarf to a horizontal to the floor. So you don’t want to contract to hard where you have absolutely no room to go in anymore but you don’t want to have a full curve in your lover back, so knees bent, tucking under. Next is your chest, take a really deep breath inhale all the way up, allowing the rib cage to float all the way up and now exhale all the way down. Now lift slightly above where you normally are, you should fell a slight engagement between your shoulder blades and the rib cage should be floating a little bit above where you would normally be standing. Once again knees bent, tail bone under, chest lifted, shoulders roll down the back, arms out. You want to have lots of space between the elbow and your waist. You don’t want to be too close but you also don’t want to have your arms straight out. So, there should be a slight bend in the wrist and in the elbow, lots of energy through the finger tips. You might want to drop the middle finger toward the thumb in order to create a more graceful line; additionally you want to keep the chin slightly lifted. And this is what your normal belly dance original position would be. Additionally when you’re practicing all these isolations please be patient with yourself because it takes a long time to develop the range of motion that I’ll be illustrating here.
