How To Do a Belly Dance

Nothing warms the heart and soothes the soul more than a belly dance. Many people have a mistaken idea of belly dance. Belly dance is a dance form that is about women and for women. Traditionally women would do a belly dance to pass information on to children of the community. Middle Eastern cultures celebrate womanhood with dance. Rites of passage into womanhood and marriage are celebrated through dance and regalia.

If you are going to do a belly dance, you will want to begin with a few basics. It is not necessary to have a costume, but it does help to get you in the mood. On the subject of costume, keep in mind that there are different forms of costume for belly dance. The heavily beaded bra and skimpy skirt is closely associated with cabaret belly dance. On the other hand, long skirts, harem pants, and hip wraps are associated more with the heavier tribal dances which covers much of the body with clothing, coins and jewels. Some dancers prefer to do a belly dance using a gypsy fusion method. Traditionally, all belly dance is performed with bare feet.

Begin to do a belly dance by using a few basic moves. Hip work is the easiest place to begin.

* Try a few figure eight moves with the hips. To do this, keep the knees slightly bent and begin to sway the hips to and fro, and then begin to make a figure eight by moving the right hip forward and shifting your weight so the left hip then moves forward while the right hip moves back. Repeat.

* You will want to do this while keeping time with the music. Try to keep your upper body in place as you move your lower body.
* Another move you will want to use is a basic shimmy. Shimmies are small, subtle shaking moves of the shoulders or hips. You may use a shimmy to do a belly dance either alone or as a layered part of hip work.
* A basic chest move to perform is a circle. Think of pointing your chest (without moving your hips or neck) first to the right, then center, then to the left, then back as a square. After you are used to that motion you may simply round it out. You may also do this as an up, side, down, side motion to form a vertical circle.

There is much more to the dance than this, but if you want to do a belly dance and have nowhere to go for training, this should give you enough of a basic set to entertain that someone special.

Source: TimMach.com