I was looking for something on the hagalla walk (though I do have Zahra Zuhair’s excellent basics video) and chanced upon a lovely treasure trove of instructional video clips on Expert Village.

The instructor is a Johanna Xenobia Kryntzky and she seems to very much know her stuff. She’s from Florida and is director of Hip Expressions Dance Studio. She may be fairly well-known but my belly dance world is really limited to instructional videos so I don’t know of her.  Johanna has a live drummer accompanying her as she teaches. At least I think she’s alive, though I can’t be too sure. There are actually two drummers, different ones for different series.

Johanna has quite a collection of videos up on this site. And good ones too! They’re rather nice for someone who knows their belly dancing but is looking for nuancing to spice it up a bit. What may interest a lot of people is that she has many folkloric and beledi steps here. Egyptian walks, straight twists, hagalla, folkloric travel steps with hop, beledi hip push, belly pop with travel steps including triple step, shoulder drop, jewel step…. it’s quite a list, really!

The video clips are complete, but short. In the absence of much else on folkloric steps taught quickly, they’ll more than do. For me, the videos are jerky so I let them load without watching the first time around and then I replay to watch properly. This is happening on a high speed connection as well.There’s an annoying ad overlaying on each clip but you can get rid of that by clicking it shut each time. Then go to fullscreen for a better experience. If you want to download them and watch them more smoothly, use Real Player. File, Open, paste the URL, click on the prompt to download. The files are only about 6MB each.

Also explore other series from a drop-down menu on the side when you go to the main page for a series like this one. You’ll find Johanna has a lot of other series that are all worth checking out. What’s niceabout these is that there are stylizations of steps. For instance, there’s a whole series on undulation moves such as rocking undulations with turns and sunrise arms, advanced rocking undulations with switching sides, grapevine rocking undulations left-foot rocking undulations.. oh hey! There are too many to list. There are several series on folkloric and beledi steps, walks and shimmies. There’s a great series on Twists, which I have a particular problem with. This one gets into various basic twists over many video clips and then explores traveling twists, advanced traveling transitions, triangle twists, circling twists, hip drop twists, releve twists and more – over 17 video clips for this series.

There’s also a series on sensual dancing tips. In this set, Johanna does some regular moves like hip drops front-side-back but softens out the move.  There’s a forward moving vertical hip circle which is quite nice. It may even be a relative of the hagalla, in fact. She squeezes in a lot of information in each of these little clips. I happen to think these are cool.

I recommend giving these a good whirl!

(Photos here are screenshots)