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.
Good review. I’ve always thought of arms and hands as layering because layering is hardest for me to do. I can kinda layer if I go real slow
I loved this video, and the material on it is *gorgeous* but I really wish she had broken down the arms for the combinations. I thought those were the most important and useful part of the video, but the instruction was entirely follow-the-bouncing-butt (-bicep?). I was able to figure it out, but I imagine a lot of people would get frustrated and give up.
Even if she just marked-through the combination and talked us through the arms (or described them in voice-over as we did the combos) would have gone a long way to reinforce them.
That said, if you’re willing to push through, I think you can learn a lot from this video.
Yes, I’m most surprised that she didn’t call out the arm moves specially as she makes little changes to them through the footwork patterns.
I’m excited to see what I get out of it as I continue working with it.
Aziza should have more videos out, for sure.
I heard she will have 2 more this year. At least they’re in the making – something like Practice companion 2 and still another one. choreography for HMC? I forgot.
beautiful review Mala!!
and dancing little these days for sitting in front of the computer all day).
I will start working with dvds more after this Friday (something important will be decided on Friday – am working up to it
I agree with you Nadira. That’s why I put working with the dvd on hold. I’ll have to memorize the darn thing to work with it. It would be REALLY NICE if you and Michelle teamed up to do that arm dvd we all envisioned and asked for on yahoo.
I was a little surprised in that gap in her instruction since she is…Aziza.
Dina, thanks for the info on more Aziza videos. A choreography would be fun!
Helen, why are you putting working with the DVD on hold? Working with the first combo, I found it quite easy after all because the combinations really aren’t very long. The first one involves this grapevine and a step back and pivot. Then a step forward and back and a maya or two. That’s it.
So the thing to do is watch her through the repetitions and see the slightly different things she does with her arms each time. Sometimes she’ll use a arms up and push down with the pivot and at other times she’ll use that for the the maya. She takes a bunch of things and shuffles them around. And it’s a great idea to do the foot pattern a few times with no arms.
Mala, because my arms are graceless. I want to follow her pattern, move my feet, and attempt grace. Too many things at once. Voice over would have been great. A static run through would have allowed me to repeat, repeat, repeat. Having all those other things in the mix frustrates me. I’ll have to memorize it for grace. Once I get it down–with grace, then I have no problem winging it or changing up.
And mine are graceful, Helen, but they don’t know what to do with themselves. Ha.
Helen: we’ll see about the arms video. I did some outlining back when we discussed it on the Yahoo group, but I have three more Toolkit videos to make, and I promised myself that I’d get another podcast episode out before I release vol. 3.
That said: there will be some arms stuff on Toolkit volume 3, but they’ll be more focused on transitioning between arm positions than on arm technique or layering armwork & hipwork.
Don’t give up on Aziza’s video, though. What I did was follow along with just the footwork first, then add the hips, then try to follow along with the arms. You could probably leave the hipwork out entirely, if you wanted. I found that getting the footwork nice and secure made all the difference.
If you wanted to go really overboard, you could rip the DVD, record your own voice-over instructions for the arms & reburn it.
I was thinking about what creates grace in armwork. For me, it’s been:
1. A small percentage of already-there. I was obsessed with being “delicate” in my young and foolish days and must have tried my best to make my hands all ladylike. Ow.
2. “Lift” in the arms, which in turn comes from strength and conditioning, specially a touch of ballet, but also pilates and light weights which means my arms don’t get tired being held with elbows lifted and up.
3. Knowing the path the arms and hands are to take. A nice repertoire of pretty moves. This is where I’d like to build up.
4. Focusing specially on the arms just for practice. For eg, many dancers just give you the hand and arm moves separately and you can dance along ignoring the other stuff for a while. Blanca does this in her Sensual Bellydance.
5. Dancing in my shadow.
The missing links are knowing enough arms patterns and how they go with other moves and multi-tasking. If I focus on the arms, I lose the move. If I focus on the moves, I’m too busy to worry about the arms.
What are others’ missing links?
The things that really made a difference for me (at various stages of my dance education) have been:
- not hunching my shoulders
- finding the right amount of fluidity in the hands. I have developed a lot of flexibility in my wrists, so what feels fluid often looks floppy.
- understanding that your arms don’t have to move in phase with your hips. i.e., when you change yoru arm position to go with a new hip move, your arms don’t have to snap into the new position right when your hips change. It’s better to take your time and let your arms settle into place. It looks more polished and relaxed.
- not blocking your body
This is still a challenge.
I think videotaping yourself is the very best thing you can do for your arms. Working in front of a mirror helps, but when you have visual feedback, you don’t learn how the way your arms feel corresponds to the way they look. And they’re usually very different.
By not blocking your body do you mean not ending hiding your moves with your arms and hands?