I always feel super excited when I hold the box of a brand new belly dance DVD in my hands. But perhaps never quite as excited as when I was 3 seconds away from opening the wrapping of Nadira Jamal’s video, Improvisation Toolkit. Not only am I delighted to see a member of my adopted belly dance online group make a DVD, but I’m proud to see Nadira evolve her wonderful podcast, Taktaba, into a full-fledged series of video on a thoroughly challenging subject.

An absolute first
But I’m most proud of Nadira’s because this happens to be the first complete instruction on improvisation in belly dance. Many videos have given tips or featured sections in which you’re encouraged to dance along and try out variations, but nothing on this scale has existed until now. Some dancers say you can’t really teach improvisation because it’s a contradiction in terms. Improvisation is supposed to be spontaneous and it’s supposed to come from within the dancer. About all you can do is show someone how you do it. But in her podcasts and now in this video, Nadira has made sense of the whole improvisation phenomenon in a practical way that a learner dancer can actually use.

This video, Vol 1 of the series and titled Movement Recall, begins with an orientation to improvisation and what the video series will bring. Then there’s a short warm up. I like that a warm up has been included here because you don’t have to stop, pop in another video or stop and work with another piece of music. You just work with this little warm up (enough for the activity level of the video) and carry on without breaking the flow.

Noodling
You warm up the creative side of you with a spot of “noodling” or playing with movement. This section is meant to give you an exercise to drop inhibitions and turn off the critic inside you. 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.

Creativity exercises
Through a series of exploratory exercises and demos, Nadira gets you acquainted with your own movement vocabulary and helps you identify your key moves. With each exercise, you find yourself exploring and playing with your moves in many different ways. The fact they these sessions are guided and timed gets you to actually loosen up and do it instead of thinking – I always knew that! The exercises actually 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’re beginning to get 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 and transitions, weight changes into your improvisation. These are in Taktaba style, for those who are familiar with the podcast.

Playing with categories
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!

Plug and Play Choreography
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. 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.