This beginner course is for everyone who wants to learn clean, beautiful, star-quality belly dance, getting it right the first time, right from the very start. The course is appropriate for new beginners, or for dancers with some previous experience who need a firmer foundation, or those who are looking for a fresh start in an organized graded curriculum. There is no skill or physical fitness prerequisite for this course, so in some ways you will find the material to be approachable and easy, but the class is designed for serious students who want to explore their potential and find out how far they can go with belly dance as a performance art. Along the way we'll get some exercise and have some fun, but our focus here is dance rather than fitness or recreation. So although we'll be working with beginner moves, we'll be looking at beginner moves from a master-level perspective, as the foundation vocabulary that provides savvy dancers with a shortcut to mastery. Whether or not you do become an elite performer, this training program will comprehensively prepare you with the basic skills you need to go from here to anywhere. My own belly dance training began with course-format education, and I strongly believe that this is the most efficient most effective modality to get good and to get good fast.

Each week we'll review, and then move forward, with each new skill we acquire providing a foundation to support increasingly complex material. My format for each class includes a warmup leading into a technique flow, and then I'll guide you step-by-step through new vocabulary and concepts. We'll sequence our old and new skills and moves together into combinations, and then at the end of every class we'll practice putting technique into context, as dance, building a short choreography that uses the movements we have learned. I close each class with a quick summary, so that you can keep track of your progress and have a clear plan for how you will practice during the week.

Your results will depend on your investment, but with time and careful practice, at the end of this course you will have acquired a sizeable collection of foundation vocabulary, including isolations, armwork, and footwork. We will cover side to side hips, double side to side, double side to side and travel, bent-knee shimmy, unweighted lifts side, pelvic drop, tilting hip circle, released pushes—in place, and travelling, samba shimmy, hip lift front, horizontal slides, flat circles, both in the center, and off-center,in... and out...; figure eight to the back, and figure eight to the front; shoulder circles; and shoulder accents. In addition to these isolations, I'll teach you all the supporting skills you need to make them look their best: clean alignment for the body, how to transition confidently from one move to the next, and how to frame your isolations with clean graceful arm carriage. We'll look in detail both at arm positioning and pathways, flowing from one arm position to the next. For the feet, and to create traveling variations of our isolations, the course includes basic time-marking step, ball-change, step-ball-change, step-touch and step-lift, and three-count turns. And finally, because dance is more than technique, we'll begin to look at musicality and stagecraft: understanding the instrumentation and conventions of middle eastern music, elements of music interpretation including sequencing, timing and phrasing; and emotional expression, and stage presence.

I don't know where belly dance will take you, but I will tell you, with no exageration and no hyperbole, that right now it is possible that the next click you make might change your life. So, if I were you, I'd buy the ticket and take the ride. I'll see you on the other side, and we will see where your belly dance journey leads