Yallah Raqs

Making Practice Your Own with Victoria Teel

Today we chat with Victoria Teel, who is such a goldmine of information on practicing. She’s really taken the step back to consider not only what works for her, but how she can encourage others to find what works for them.

Her addition to the bundle this year are two classes designed to make your practice simpler and easier to get into.

Practice Makes Perfect & Bellydance Drills Workout Program

We talk about different struggles she sees when people are working to get into their practice and some easy solutions that you can put into practice today.

Mad About Maud with Dawn Devine

Practice doesn’t ALWAYS mean putting your butt on the dancefloor.

Sometimes the thing that will help your dance the most. The thing that your practice time is best served with is study.

And that’s part of what this year’s lecture bundle is about. All of these other elements that there are to this dance outside of the dance itself.

Today’s guest, Dawn Devine, will be giving a lecture as part of the lecture bundle this year called Mad about Maud: Salomania and the Birth of Bedlah.

If you’re unfamiliar with the story of Salome, here’s the relevant part to set the scene.

Salome supposedly lived in the first century of the common era and was the stepdaughter of Herod Antipas, the ruler appointed by Rome to a region in Palestine. In biblical literature she is remembered for her dance at the birthday celebration of her stepfather, who had John the Baptist beheaded at her request. She’s inspired a lot of art, literature and music over the centuries including a play by Oscar Wilde's simply called Salome in 1891. She has become a face of the archetypal femme fatal through the retellings of stories featuring her.

Now with that information, let’s dive into what Salomania was and how Maud Allen played a part not only in that, but in the creation and inspiration for some the costuming you see even today.

Delicate Details with Zana

Today we have the host of the Advance Your Bellydance Podcast, Žana, here with us on Yallah Raqs!

Today’s conversation is SO important, and has been mirroring what we’ve been talking about lately on Instagram.

I don’t even want to ruin it for you, I want you to hear it as it comes up! We start of chatting about the details of our dance, and how we move in our everyday as these are so important and can have such an influence on your dance, but the conversation veers off when Žana brings up a topic that I’m so super passionate about I couldn’t resist pursing that line of the conversation.

If you’re familiar with me and the podcast, it’ll come as no surprise.

Join us as we chat delicate details and more in today’s episode!

Emotion & Dance - Sahira

Sahira joins me today to talk about adding emotion to your dance.

Any dance.

Including Drum Solos! Just like her course in this year's bundle.

Learning to add emotion to our dance can feel both entirely natural and entirely strange, all at the same time. Many of us aren't taught this skill till much later in our journies, which often makes it hard to go back and see how that emotion affects every. single. part of our dance. 

Sahira gives a bit of her background in theater here to inform what she's telling you, and we get into some great ways (including today's challenge) that can get you adding emotion into your dance and working on this skill with a bit more confidence

Show notes: www.TheBellydanceBundle.com/37

Video Art with Aubre Hill

Today Aubre Hill joins me to talk about performance in the new age. How do we utilize our video recordings to portray our dance art?

Obviously, video performances are completely different, both in impact and energy from in-person performances. But how can we use those differences to expand our artform?

Especially in this age of digital haflas and the pandemic, but even past that just into the realm of Instagram and other social media platforms?

Video is here to stay with the bellydance world, so lets start figuring out how to use and leverage it as best we can!

Taqasim with Alia Thabit

Alia Thabit is such an emotive and expressive dancer, I can't get enough of her. She reaches into you and really brings the soul back to the dance.⁠ ⁠ Today we talk about one of the cornerstones of middle-eastern music, the Taqsim. She shares how dancing to a taqsim takes us beyond the technique and the remembered steps and the percussive beat and puts us in tune with the music in a way that's so important to our dance practice.⁠ ⁠ We're here to bring joy with our dance, and that starts with us finding the joy ourselves.⁠ ⁠ This talk is so full of amazing takeaways around improvisation, emotion, feeling the music and more, and if you want an UNdrill to go with it, make sure to check out today's Instagram challenge, linked on the shownotes page:

www.TheBellydanceBundle.com/35

Nabaweya Mustafa with Shining

If you've done some study of the Golden Era then you're familiar with some of the stars from the era. Soheir Zaki and Taheyya Karioka to name a few! But did you ever study Nabaweya Mustafa?

Today Shining joins us to talk about Nabaweya and why Shining was drawn to create a course that broke down the unique style she brought to the golden era of Egyptian cinema.

We also get into some really great talk about being yourself. It's an excellent episode and I can't wait for you to jump in!

Show notes at: www.TheBellydanceBundle.com/34

Community & Practice Tracking with Aziza

In our new world, with people apart, but dancing together how do we recapture some of that community feeling that is so intrinsic to why so many of us dance? Aziza shares how she does this within her community with us today!

In addition, we dive deep on how Aziza sets up her own practice tracking in a way that we can use as a base to start our own experimentation!

Show notes: www.TheBellydanceBundle.com/33

Injury Prevention with Siobhan Camille

As dancers we need to make sure we're taking care of our bodies so they can show up for us when we need them. And we ask a lot of them!

Today I'm joined by Siobhan Camille, an exercise scientist and conditioning coach turned bellydancer to talk about her research on bellydance injuries and what we can do to strengthen our bodies!

Starting, Restarting, and Kickstarting Your Teaching with Sara Shrapnell

The pandemic has really thrown the bellydance world for a loop. It's upended the way we did things and has forced all of us to accept the internet and online teaching at a rate that would have been unprecedented before.

As part of the Bundle this year Sara Shrapnell from The Bellydance Business Academy will be giving a talk on how you can prep yourself to head back to the studio so today we talk about the state of the dance world, and what our "new norma" might look like.