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.
Why do I talk so much! In one word – fantastic.