When I was a new student, I was absolutely rabid for any new information on bellydance. I was always digging around for new details about the styles I was studying, the classes I was taking, and the teachers I was studying with (or hoped to one day study with). I know a lot of you reading this blog are the same way--you just love reading about the dance, and learning all you can in your time both in and outside of class!

It was in this spirit that I started my FAQ section on my website. I knew other dancers are just like me, and are eager to read up on various topics having to do with the dance. There is a lot to cover, but I tried to focus my questions and answers on the same questions I had when I was first learning. It makes for a long FAQ, though, and it can be hard to find time to dig through it all. So I am going to occasionally post a blog entry featuring one of the FAQ topics I think you may enjoy reading. I welcome any thoughts or feedback on these topics--I am still that same eager student who loves to study and discuss all the angles of this incredible dance form!

Our first featured topic is:

Once I have progressed to the next level in class, why would I want to continue taking the previous level class?

You can read the full FAQ response by clicking the link (the question) above. Sandi of FCBD put it in excellent perspective:

"For me, its kind of like going to yoga classes for a long time. You do the same poses and hear the same words, but you're always able to get better at the poses each time through that verbal guidance. That's what happens with constant practice too. I find that I'm not always successful doing yoga at home on my own because I don't have the guidance and the energy of the other students around me to push me to do it correctly or motivate me to keep the pose for longer.

With ATS, I would always go into a class to not only understand what the teacher is saying, but to get into my body more and try to work on my problem areas."

Right on, Sandi! Have a gander at the FAQ, and please feel free to share any further thoughts you may have!

On Shira's tribe over on tribe.net (no, tribe isn't dead!), she referenced an article on Gilded Serpent in which another dancer wrote with a fair amount of disdain about those who rally behind the idea of retaining historical and cultural elements of bellydance (what is often termed "The Bellydance Police"). You can see the discussion, and link to the article, HERE. Shira follows it up with a great analogy, which I thought would be nice to share over here. So without further ado, I give you Shira's take:

"Let's say I write a 17-line poem with each line containing somewhere between 8 and 34 syllables and call it haiku. Now, the "poetry police" killjoys would tell you that such a poem does not conform to the properties of haiku (3 lines in length, with 5 syllables in line 1, 7 syllables in line 2, 5 syllables in line 3) and therefore is not haiku. Now, this poem may well convey my vision, my passion, my joy, and a completeness in my quest for beauty. These things would certainly qualify it as "poetry", but they don't qualify it as haiku.

But if I enter that poem in a haiku writing contest, should I expect to win? Should I expect journals that specialize in haiku to publish it, simply because I have chosen to declare that it is haiku, even though it does not contain the properties that people well-versed in the form would recognize as haiku?

If I start teaching classes in how to write haiku, should it be okay that I encourage my students to write any poem of any structure they please, all in the name of their vision, their passion, their joy, and a completeness in their quest for beauty while still calling the end result haiku? 

I would argue that no, it may all still be POETRY, and it all may all be worthy of being read, but there is a certain basic set of properties that must be met before you identify it as a specific genre of poetry. It still deserves to be written, and shared if the poet wishes to share it, but ultimately there should be truth in labeling."

Q.

"I took ATS from another local teacher for 6 months, and have been taking cabaret for about 2.5 years from Teacher X and Teacher Y, and also had workshops with Zoe, Rachel Brice, Ariellah, Suhaila Salimpour, and Caroleena (sic) in San Francisco. Though you would not believe it from watching me. I took a hiatus since feeling that I wasn't where I should be after 3 years. But I love bellydance, so I have turned to you because I have always been wowed by your troupes performances and thought it would be so great to be a part of that."

A. With regard to your frustrations with where you think you should be at any given time in your dance, we all hit plateaus in our dance life, and maybe you have been stuck at one for a time. Shaking things up can help push us through those barriers. If I may offer some perspective from my experiences? Truthfully, focusing on one style that really resonates with you can be a big help in seeing marked improvement over time. I love Teacher X, and hear great things about Teacher Y, and you are blessed to be taking from them surely! But their styles are very very different approaches to movement and musical interpretation than you get with group improvisation. It can be difficult to expect our bodies to build the muscle memory necessary to push things to the next level when we are constantly switching gears back and forth between different skill-sets. (I address this in my FAQ Here ) I know my students who split their studies between multiple styles are often the ones who get stuck the most often and for the longest time, unable to really ramp up their skills in group improvisation as they should or could if they were 100% focused on one style.

Now I am not saying that dancers should isolate themselves and limit their studies to only one single style for all time, forever and ever amen. But I do run across the "Jack of all trades, master of none" syndrome quite a lot in the bellydance world, particularly in fusion and tribal circles. Where we are just taking in too much at once, hopping from style to style, concept to concept, and we never really let our minds and our muscle memory latch onto and develop a solid set of cohesive skills over time. Imagine if you were studying history, for instance. And you had chapters on each decade of even just American history. And you were constantly skipping around, reading a paragraph about the 1930's, then reading a paragraph about the 90's, then jumped back to the 20's, then into the 60's, and so on. How well do you think you would really retain useful information and a true understanding of any given period of history, and how much of it would just end up being trivial facts useful only for the 200-level Jeopardy questions?

Something to think about as you move forward: What style really resonates with you? What do you see yourself performing in the years ahead, if performing is your goal? Think not only of costuming and music, but of what movement really gets your creative juices flowing and gets you excited about coming to class every week (or multiple times a week!). One of my favorite all-time dance quotes is the following:

"The most essential thing in dance discipline is devotion, the steadfast and willing devotion to the labor that makes the classwork not a gymnastic hour and a half, or at the lowest level, a daily drudgery, but a devotion that allows the classroom discipline to become moments of dancing too..." *Merce Cunningham*

To what dance, what style, what teacher, what classroom, what discipline can you really see yourself devoted to? Chew on that for a little bit and see what solution percolates to the top.

"The truth is that our finest moments are most likely to occur when we are feeling deeply uncomfortable, unhappy, or unfulfilled. For it is only in such moments, propelled by our discomfort, that we are likely to step out of our ruts and start searching for different ways or truer answers."
~M. Scott Peck, author, The Road Less Traveled

I often get e-mails from friends and colleagues who seek advice on various dance-life situations. Some have issues with their teachers or classroom environment that isn't feeling right--from lacking support to lacking information, from difficult fellow students and classroom relationships to downright abrasive teachers. Some have troupe issues where the dynamics seem to be running contrary to what they had hoped. Some are teachers in their own right and have issues with trouble students or disrespectful troupe members. Ultimately, they all have one thing in common: they all feel stuck in the middle of something they want to get out of or move past, and they are seeking a nudge to find a better path.

Is there some part of your dance life you feel stuck on or trapped in? Is there a situation or environment you feel powerless to move beyond? Or do you simply feel in a creative rut and find yourself asking, "How am I ever going to be *that good*/do *that skill*?"

What do you think you could or should be doing to move on to a happier place?

Whenever I get to feeling stuck, in any part of life, I ask myself, "If I were my own best friend, and I was hearing me tell me this issue, what would I advise her to do?" By stepping outside myself and passing on a little loving guidance, it is amazing how clear the solution can sometimes become. Then it is just a matter of going out and doing it!

Remember, “If you do what you've always done, you'll get what you've always gotten.”