There are some videos dancers use to death. They rely on them over time practically swear by them, and recommend them passionately to others. Dancer’s Library is an attempt to list these.The list can include proven-over-time items and ones with high potential to be in this category.
A Dancer’s Library DVD should have, potentially or provenly, these:
Good structure
Comprehensive content
Long shelf life or ‘replay value’
Use across different learning levels
Dancer’s Library begins – in no particular order:
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Aziza’s Ultimate Practice Companion
In an informal too-crowded class setting, a constantly lively Aziza takes her students through a warm up and arms segment to move on to a grueling set of drills. This video could have been better produced but that doesn’t stop it from being a permanent favorite of belly dancers. The content a workshop like structure and is, years after its release, still unusual. Accessible to learners of all levels but anyone finds it tough to go through the whole lot at one go.
Instant Belly Dancer
Every belly dancer will be familiar with this vision of Neon flowing out of a teacup. The groundbreaking Instant Bellydancer, in a set of two volumes, Curves and Hipwork, still has no exact parallel in the dance DVD world. Graphic overlays and detailed instruction take the learner through all the basic moves – and then some. There are also combos and in the remake, practice sessions. Even if your style is different, this is keepable and referable for precision and technique.
We typically don’t think of arm and hand moves as layering, but when you think of it, that’s precisely what it is. You have to do your intricate repertoire of belly dance moves and do something creative and beautiful with your hands and arms at the same time. That’s the big challenge. So: any arms instructional should look not just at pathways and poses, but show you how to combine them with the other moves.
In her DVD, Aziza does try to do just that – work at your muscle memory. Has she done a brilliant job? No, I wouldn’t say so. But is her DVD worth working with? Yes, I definitely thought so.
Aziza starts with a welcome and advice and goes straight into a gentle short warm up. Although the warm up doesn’t have a lot of arm moves, that’s really okay because the drills that follow ease into exercises.
The drills involve two sequences that take you through various positions. One of these is balletic and the other oriental. But instead of just standing there and going through the positions, Aziza has you doing hip pushes and then circles and finally staggered hip pushes – side center side center. This is a useful method because you obviously start to learn how to multi-task, a skill without which you may as well forget about belly dancing. The drills also involve lots of wrist isolations and hand undulations. And Lotus hands. I was happy to find I already knew Lotus hands from god knows where, and do just fine with wrist isolations to begin with. But the multi-tasking drills were a challenge.
Now, oddly enough, we move on to a set of two foot patterns. That’s just another way of saying combination, really. In this section, Aziza first teaches the footwork and then repeats for practice several times, now adding the arms. There’s no discussion of the arm moves here. All I can is that her arm work here is natural, has variety within a move, and is easy enough. It’s useful to do this if you’re just learning arm work because again, it means doing a complex foot pattern, hip moves, and using your arms. But this is what you’ll get with most combinations taught in any case. Unless the instructor is keeping her arm movement to a static minimum for some reason, any combination will involve similar foot, hips and arm work. In fact, I’d say that my arm anxiety has mostly reduced from working with lots of combinations and choreographies. So all in all I’m a little baffled by this conceptualization.
Aziza’s next big teaching segment involves poses. Not static ones, but poses within combinations. Now this one makes more sense because it involves much more intense arm work. There’s no time, in fact, when they’re just held still at the sides. This section reminds me of Sarah Skinner’s video, Opulent Motion, where she takes you through shorter but more of these moving poses. I haven’t got to this segment of the video yet, but it looks as if it’ll be good to work with.
The combinations get a little more difficult, though there are only three short ones in all. They’re smooth and involve transition smoothly and repeating them a lot should very much help a learning dancer be less inhibited and stuck with her arm work. Aziza gives you some tips on breathing during transitions that are helpful. Rushing it really ruins arm work.
All too quickly you move into a cool down which echoes the warm up.
Aziza is feminine, sweet and likeable on video. She’s entirely comfortable doing what she’s doing and it shows. She constantly tells you to “be amazed” to bring some emotion into your moves. While this is nice, I think that arm work can be very eloquent and some tips on how to bring in richer emotion into it would have been appropriate.
At the end of all the instruction, Aziza weaves the combinations and poses and everything together into a whole dance. This is beautifully done and when you’ve worked with the instruction enough, you can dance along and pick up many more arm moves and nuances.
The special section on this DVD, for a change, has lots of interesting stuff. A performance, an old performance, a set of beautiful photos of Aziza that make you want to see many more, and an interview with Aziza. She has a beautiful smile.
The set or studio for this video is lovely and looks like a palace.
So, all said and done, this video would, I think, do two important things: Make you use your arms naturally and uninhibitedly, and it will help you multi-task to do arm work while doing other moves, including complex footwork. I wouldn’t recommend it as a first choice for beginners who could consider some of the others including Aruna’s Dancer’s Arms, Fahteim’s Beautiful Arms and Hands or just stick with some of the videos that include arm work in addition to other stuff. It’s more suited to advanced beginners and intermediate dancers who can immediately begin working with it without worrying over how to do the basic dance moves.
The series Hard Candy joined its sister videos, Luscious and Love Potion, in my collection, a couple of weeks ago.
I love so many things about this series as a whole! First, a thorough welcome or preview tells you exactly what the instruction contains and will do for you. No false promises. Having worked with many fitness videos, I’m very grateful when an instructor takes the trouble to tell you what to focus on and what to expect rather than getting into that awful cheerleading mode that is so common.
The second thing I love is that there is a complete beginner’s guide or tutorial to belly dance basics on each of the three videos. There are subtle differences and I know that many dancers have found these tutorials great to work with, even for those who’ve been dancing a while. The tutorials are led by Neon, whose brainchild this series happens to be. Teaching absolute basics is her specialty. You can access each set of basic movements separately. There is nothing rushed about these tutorials. There’s detailed logical explanation, suggestions for replacement moves if you’re a beginner, and friendly tips delivered in Neon’s own gentle manner.
A practice flow segment adds practice basics and the combinations from the workout to music. There’s also a music-only option.
The thing I love most about this series however is that there are just hundreds of small combinations, a whole treasure trove you can dip into any time. The moves are short enough for you to drill and get into your muscle memory. And yet, there’s such a variety you can be sure you’ll use them easily when you improvise.
Luscious, my favoritest of the three because I’ve worked with it the most so far, is the easiest. It involves doing beautiful moves with the bare basics, but maintaining good form so that there is much beauty in simplicity. Love Potion steps up the footwork and gets more dancy. And finally, Hard Candy has a lot of more intermediate moves such as the Arabic hip walk, pelvic tilts layered on footwork, lots of level changes with undulations and chest circles, etc. People with knee or back problems should probably stick with the previous two, while others who want to go to the net level should not miss out on Hard Candy.
Hard Candy
In the first segment of Hard Candy, led by Elisheva, you’ll work with well-defined chest slides, pelvic tilts, hip pushes, hip downs and step touches. Anyone familiar with the previous two videos will see immediately that this involves more muscle work and is a bit tougher. It can even be a bit tiring if you’re a beginner or don’t dance very regularly. Elisheva has great range of motion and isolations show on her body perfectly. I’m personally not very fond of upper body moves, perhaps because too many chest moves won’t fit in my culture too much, but it’s quite a workout. In fact it has a more drilly feel than the counterpart first sections on the other two DVDs.
Neon leads the second segment and starts somewhat as she does in Love Potion. But again – tougher. There are arabesques with hip pushes and more footwork. You have deep lunges with chest circles on the wa up. There’s a variety of moves in this segment – too many to list, actually. Lots of accents and footwork and building on some of the moves from the first segment. You can see she’s not letting you off easy. There are also softer and sweeter moves though. The moves change much faster, so working with the flow and tutorial is highly recommended, no mater what level you’re at.
And it’s back to Elisheva for some sharp hip diamonds, and then some fast combinations that involve the hip diamond, pelvic tilts with chest ups and downs. Then there are more gooey fluid moves using undulations and pelvic circles. There are arabesques with level changes and undulations to follow. Phew. Neon is right when she says Hard Candy is both hard and sweet. This section moves really fast and speaking for myself, it will take me quite a while to keep up with it.
Sarah starts with some a fast combination of chest lifts and hip lifts with step touches. She goes on to a rich variety of sways, hip lifts and drops, figure eights and half figure eights. This segment is set to one of my favorite pieces of music, Zen Arabica. This is actually the section most reminiscent of Luscious – or it would be if it didn’t have so many moves packed into it. Perhaps it can be thought of as Luscious on steroids.
Neon’s second section begins with medium paced sharp hip work and slightly less footwork. And again, before you think you’re getting Luscious-like, you find yourself doing combinations with Arabic hip walks and alternating hip lifts and rolls.
Sarah introduces shimmies in her segment. Not from the basics up though. In fact, you do some layering of the shimmy on basic moves and combine with chest shimmies. She also does some gooey moves before going back to shimmies. Reduced footwork here as well, so that the focus is wholly on the shimmy.
The seventh segment of the workout is iled by Elisheva again and she takes you through a challenging combination of deep pelvic circles and undulations with expansive chest circles. More work with reverse undulations, pelvic circles, chest circles and eights.
The eighth segment here in which Neon goes back to some of the moves already taught. She uses a refrain which you repeat every so often. More combinations done at quite a pace.
Hard Candy is much more difficult than Luscious and Love Potion because
A greater variety of moves is used
There some layering and level changes
There are big range upper body movements
There’s faster hip work
The whole workout is faster
The setting and costumes are similar to the previous videos although they’re most luscious on the Luscious DVD. The format is similar but Hard Candy is missing the themes used in the previous ones. This is all movement. The practice flow is specially good and much needed before you attempt the workout, unless you’re advanced.
The music on Hard Candy is absolutely beautiful. Even the songs I already have and am very familiar with sound more beautiful on this video.
If you don’t have the previous videos and are just starting out, I recommend you work with Luscious first. These three videos really are in increasing order of difficulty. You could, of course, choose to work with parts of any of the three, specially if you’re otherwise taking classes and would like to pick out what you want at any given time.
A lovely series altogether, and quite topped off with Hard Candy.
I’m sure most of us are ready to believe that the dog is man’s best friend. But did we know that they actually seem to understand us even better than our closest relatives (no, not those ones) the chimpanzee? Oh yes, they do. And we understand them right back.
Studies of the eye movements of dogs when they look at us show that they do so in exactly the same way as humans do with each other – they look slightly more at the left side of the face. They respond easily to our instructions, emotions and needs. When they recorded different barks and played them back to people, there was remarkable unanimity on what those barks meant; for example, give me the ball, who’s this stranger on the other side of the fence, untie me, etc. But how did dogs get to be so tuned in to human beings? Is it that they’re socialized wolves and foxes? In fact, would wolves behave the same if they’re kept as pets?
This BBC Horizon documentary takes a good long look at dogs and us. Not only is it really nice to watch because you see so many dogs but also because of the interesting facts and studies that would add to your understanding of these lovely companions.
The name of the film is of course all wrong, but I’ve become used to every second documentary from the top channels being secret this and secret that. If you get a chance to see this documentary – or should I say, dogumentary – catch it. Oh wait a minute, here it is on youtube.
In this brilliant one-and-a-half-hour show, BBC host Robert Winston examines common sleep problems. To help him, there are six volunteers and various sleep experts and health professionals.
Although the show is Britain-focused, the advice and tips apply to anyone anywhere who has sleep problems. BBC has a bunch of documentaries about sleep and dreaming, but this one is unique because it’s designed to be a practical guide. Very well done and very watchable right through.
Over the show, they put volunteers through several tests, determining what kind of sleepers they are and what levels their executive skills (concentration, attention, reaction time etc) are. Everyone also goes through sleep profiling – including us viewers. The volunteers get customized advice and try and act on it by making changes to their environment, routine or pattern of sleeping. And finally everyone goes through the tests again to compare. Everyone showed improvement except for one person who was disqualified because he changed his situation halfway through by quitting his night job.
Among the problems taken up were snoring loud enough to wake your family, neighbors and yourself up, not being able to get to sleep because the baby is crying all night, being completely zombied from tough night shifts, being under so much stress you can’t sleep etc. \
One volunteer had such a busy jam-packed room it was impossible to relax in it. Only she didn’t realize it and felt she must have all her worldly possessions around her within reach. There was, of course, a space constraint to begin with. So what was she to do? An expert visited her apartment and found it was more like a cell than a sanctuary. They helped her reorganize her room, leaving one side of it for storage and one for rest. And a lot of her things were put out of sight. Also, they had her change the colors of things like the bed linen, which was also very busy. The room was redesigned for rest. She loved it. Clean and spacious looking, ivory sheets, a soft light – she was finally able to sleep. Makes me want to get rid of all the bright orange stuff I have in my own bedroom!
If you can’t get hold of this show, visit the BBC’s site on sleep at http://bbc.co.uk/sleep and profile your sleep to figure out whether you’re a night or day person, whether your work interferes with your sleep etc. Also browse the guidelines and tips on the site.
“If only I could say, it’s over, you only die once…”.
The words of 14-year-old Rutka Laskier living in Bedzin, Poland as the Nazi noose became tighter and tighter around her family and the Jewish people.
If all were well with this world, this beautiful child should have been worrying her head about little more than whether it’s a good idea to let her school friend Yanek kiss her or not. Instead, she spent whatever time she could get chronicling the incomprehensible blood chilling events taking place around her. In a little notebook later hidden carefully under the double flooring of the staircase, Rutka wrote of life in the ghetto in Bedzin. Just three months of it. After that, Rutka and her family were deported to Auschwitz.
Rutka’s diary is reminiscent of Anne Frank’s, but unlike Anne, she had experiences that are far more horrific before she was finally sent to the concentration camp. In the ghetto, each day became a struggle for good and survival. She knew, without a doubt, that she would have to die. “I’m turning into an animal, waiting to die”, she wrote.
Her 60-page notebook was published relatively recently, in 2007. The story of the diary itself is remarkable. Rutka’s friend later went back to the house and retrieved it and kept it with her for 63 years, not showing it to anyone. The Center of Jewish Culture eventually heard of it and weas able to get a photocopy and have it published as the historical document Rutka had meant it to be.
The other remarkable fact is that Rutka was “discovered” by her half sister, Zahava. The only person who survived from the Laskier family was Rutka’s father and he later remarried and had children. Zahava saw a photograph of Rutka and began to wonder who this was and how she looked so very much like her. Her father would not tell her much but finally admitted she was her half sister. Zahava went to Poland to try and retrace the little girl’s life and death. She later named her own daughter Ruth.
This story of Rutka Laskier and her diary was told in a BBC documentary called The Secret Diary of the Holocaust. The documentary is in parts on Youtube.
The Luscious and Love Potion experience continues through one more delicious bellydance feast, Hard Candy. The preview explains it all in detail, as always. “Two candies in one wrapper”, Neon calls it. Fitness and bellydance. The music is particularly lovely and sounds quite inseparable from the dancing. I totally look forward to it.
I’m thinking back to when Combino-graphy was first announced, long ago. Without meaning to, I formed a set of expectations about what it should contain. What I wanted to see was instruction and ideas on how to take combinations and come up with my own variations on them – choreographing combinations. The concept of Combino-graphy, on completion, actually turns out to be broader. It also turns out to be remarkably like the Improvisation Toolkit, created by Nadira Jamal, earlier. Meanwhile, videos with lots of smaller combinations, like Luscious and Love Potion, go some way to showing me how to create variations on a theme.
A few minutes into Combino-graphy, I found myself wondering if this was a remake of Improvisation Toolkit. Further into the video, It turns out it wasn’t; but there still are many descriptions, phrases and exercise formats we saw first on Improvisation Toolkit.
Bahaia’s starts Combino-graphy with a set of tips and tricks. She tells you how to enter the stage, how to loosen up and relax – specially your face. She also explains body line, and how to prepare for transition rather than letting it take you by surprise. Bahaia also talks about how to make your dance your expressive art. These are very small sections, making up the overall Tips and Tricks segment and probably don’t need separate menu access, in my opinion. Each separate thought or piece of advice, once done with, is unlikely to be accessed again and again separately. Next, for example, is a menu item titled “WOW step”. In less than 60 seconds, Bahaia gives advices on how to use your best steps.
The Improvisation Toolkit begins with very logical and scientific and comprehensive advice on how to learn the art of improvisation. Nadira then prepares to lead you into exercises on improvisation with a longish warm up. This leads into her exercise on “noodling” which has you completely letting go and doing whatever movements you like to the music – no inhibition, no judging yourself.
Bahaia winds up her Tips and Tricks section with a sectionlet on increasing your repertoire. And here’s where the Toolkit deja vu comes back. She asks you to make a list of all the steps you know. She devides them differently from Nadira to include filler and embellishment steps. She then gets you to explore floor patterns. This is a really useful little section. So, the approach is different from Nadira’s but it does seem to use the same concepts and analysis method.
Bahaia moves on with exercises that explore intensity of movement, arm movements and poses and the feeling that powers them, and awareness in movement. The awareness exercise is an interesting one and shows you how to figure where you are at each point in the dance. I really like this one. These sections are unqiue to Combino-graphy.
Knowing a set of dance walks or traveling steps is essential to being able to improvise and pace your dance, observe your space and seeing what you can do with it. Without that, you could get quite stuck. In a sizeable section, Bahaia introduces several walks and gets you to practice with free form exercises.This too is a very useful exercise.
Meanwhile, on the Improvisaiton Toolkit Nadira continues to take the “noodling” exercises into deeper territory, from plain movement to dance movement. She also has you list all the moves you know or think of as single entities. From these you pick out three to use as safety moves and noodle (or pre-improvise, really) with them. You work with varying floor patterns, timings, level changes and other parameters, playing with the safety moves. Great exercise that all beginners should try out everyday in their dance practice. As you practice along for a good long segment, we switch between demonstrations of the concept and a quiet screen with just a picture to give ou an opportunity to try your own variations with vocal cues from Nadira. You’re cued to explore arm moves, use different stage orientations, timing, etc The exercise segments span an entire song, so the whole session is quite nice and long. On this video, we move into a section on preparing for transitions with a not-to-be-missed exercises on using your safety moves and varying timing to become comfortable with transitions – something that bothers most beginners. I must remember to come back to this section and try it out with a selection of moves.
On Combino-graphy, Bahaia goes on to explore her selection of concepts for improvisation. So, first, we play with poses. I’m afraid I didn’t like any of Bahaia’s in this section. Or the fact that they’re all similar and repeated. I’m also not sure how this exercise related to improvisation. In short, there isn’t a clear actionable. Weight transfer is taken up next with an exercise to heighten your weight awareness. Useful, but the connection to improvisation is not drawn. At least not yet. Bahaia now takes the concept of safety steps and recommends you call it a signature step, to take a more positive spin. She demonstrates with a basic arabic rocking step and adds parameters to it to vary it. You do an exercise by choosing one of your signature steps and vary it on Bahaia’s voice cues as a quiet screen goes on. It’s a rather short exercise.
Bahaia takes up how to use repetition to your advantage and how to listen for repetition in the music. There’s a great explanation of how this works in music. She also shows you the A-A-B-A or A-A-A-B type of pattern with moves and timing that you can use and how you can vary it. All of this will remind learners of the Improvisation Toolkit and the earlier Takhtaba podcasts exploring repetition and variation. You try this out with a frew exercises and variations. For some reason, this set of exercises end up becoming a little boring.
But we go on to something more interesting now combinations. Bahaia takes up rather nice combinations and applies some of the concepts taken up earlier. The first three combinations are entrance pieces. Combination Four, which I thoroughly dislike, explores floor patterns and body line. Five takes up unexpected direction change. The sixth and last is a complex combination with a variety of steps in it.
Combino-graphy now ends with two performances, one with very interesting commentary – from Secrets of the Stage 2. I have to admit to not being a fan of Bahaia’s dancing though.
Back on Toolkit, Nadira takes up the 16, 8 and 4 count variations to explore transitions further. We go through some transition drills. And then she moves on to increase the movement vocabulary. We work with the earlier list of movements and sort them into categories like smooth movements, traveling movements, accents, expansive, upward, inward, etc. You do some more full-song exercises here, this time combining safety moves with moves drawn from the categories. Finally, there’s a “plug and play” choreography. For a fuller description see the review for this video. There are also some bonus exercises on Nadira’s website.
I hope, from this overly long (and unedited) review those who wanted a comparison can understand both videos standalone as well as in relation to each other. For some of us DVD-addicts, buying decisions are not either/or. We just get most of what there is out there. But of course, there are those who might like to choose between videos and need details to be able to do so. If you’re up to acquiring both these videos, you will find enough that’s different on both. After all, every basics video covers much the same thing and many of us still buy them in cartloads. Both have lots of tips and cued exercises to “un-stuck” you if you just stop dead when it comes to improvising. If I were asked to choose between the two, I think I would choose Improvisation Toolkit because I find Nadira’s analystical, logical style completely actionable. You can’t miss. You don’t have to connect the dots. It’s all laid out and you’re led into it with her exercises. The production for Combino-graphy is undoubtedly better and smoother. Both instructors relate to the leaener, with Nadira’s style bing more personal and learner-oriented. However, if I were not asked to choose, I think that while Improvisation Toolkit started it all, Combino-graphy gives you additional advice and material to play with.
As you work with one or both of these videos or indeed some of the others out there that indirectly help your improvisation, remember that this skill also develops as a result of lots of practice, varied practice, and drilling to make a lot of movements auto pilot.
It’s been almost a year since this video was released. In my mind, it will always be the very first instructional to focus exclusively on improvisation. When she announced its release, dancer and teacher Nadira Jamal said she thought this was the “year of improvisation”. She was probably right because the year saw many videos that opened up the secrets of how it is belly dancers just dance spontaneously to any music. Two that come to mind are Ranya Renee’s Baladi set and Sarah Skinner’s (to a lesser extent) Opulent Motion.
I had reviewed Nadira’s video in December last year and am echoing that review here, in preparation for a review of a similar video, Combinography, led by Bahaia.
Belly dancing is essentially an improvised dance. Certainly you have choreographies, and wonderful ones at that, but what is most remarkable about the dance is that the dancer can come up with skillful moves entirely spontaneously. And she matches the music perfectly while doing so! That’s why anyone who’s interested enough in this dance wants to be able to interpret the music and really really dance to it with self-expression, emotion and enjoyment. But how on earth do you teach creativity? It’s a tough one; which is why most belly dance videos focus wholly on muscle work and combinations and choreographies – but they’re at a loss how to figure out teaching improvisation. Some teachers say it can’t be taught whatsoever and tell the learner to “just do it” or “listen to the music!”
Until now. Nadira Jamal’s video, the first on this subject, actually does tackle the challenging area of improvisation. In this first of a three-DVD series, Nadira focuses on Movement Recall, which is what gives most people “dancer’s block”.
This video begins with an orientation to improvisation and what the video series will bring. I like that a warm up has been included here because you don’t have to stop and turn to another activity. The warm up is adequate for the activity on the video.
After you physically warm up, it’s time to get the creative side of you going with a session of “noodling” or playing with movement. Noodling is a nice fun concept meant to loosen you up and disinhibit you. The exercises Nadira puts you through while noodling make you turn off your inner critic and have fun with movements. Nadira explains the concept in detail, gives its rationale and logic, and demos how she would do it. Then you have a whirl yourself. This isn’t just an ice breaker but also leads on to the next set of explanations and exercises.
Through a series of exploratory exercises and demos, Nadira next gets you acquainted with your own movement vocabulary and helps you identify your key moves. With each exercise on this video, you find yourself exploring your moves in different ways. The exercises stop you from over-thinking and getting stuck in complex territory. What’s really nice is that relatively early beginners can use the few belly dance movements they’ve learnt and use these exercises to start being creative. The exercises are an excellent way of getting concepts into your head because you’re doing something rather than just listening to explanations of what improvisation means, conceptually.
More exercises help you take into account timing, transitions, weight changes into your improvisation.
The next chunk of exercises is most innovative. It involves arranging your moves into lots of categories. I’m not getting into more detail on this as it would take the fun out of the video. Or sort of spoil the surprise, anyway. Broadly I’d say that instead of creating with individual movements you’re now using categories. Now you’ve moved from fooling around with the alphabets into guided chunks of improvisation! You may, like me, find yourself smiling at this point because the penny has dropped. This is probably the point where you’ll be yelling – hey! I’m doin it! And did I forget to say.. it’s fun!
But the funnest of all exercises is the final one: choreographing the song, Layla. Something I’ve always wanted to do, by the way. What Nadira does here is to give you different levels of help choreographing this song. She starts backwards – and that’s a great tip I’m going to use often – and shows you how to end the song. But moving further back along the song, she leaves chunks out for you to fill in. You work your way right to the beginning of the song. With several repetitions – there you have it! It’s really too delightful.
Through these exercises, all of which use music from the CD Bellydance for Fortune and Fame by the Mogador Band, pretty scenes fill the screen at points where you have to do stuff on your own with voice cues. The whole video has a wonderful flow and is sort of butter smooth from one end to the other.
As it weren’t a wonderful enough video already, Nadira leaves you with some thoughts on what else to do – and even more exercises on her Taktaba website. Taktaba, by the way, is thename of Nadira’s podcasts. How she’s managed to make such easy work of such a difficult subject, I totally don’t know.
Thanks to Joy for this new DVD alert. I have this piece of music! It’s an interesting piece and I think at one time it was a free download from Amazon.
