![\"Najia](\"http:\/\/www.gildedserpent.com\/art53\/graphics53\/NajiaClub.jpg\")
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Epiphanies can be so rare! Yet, rarefied insights in teaching and coaching still happen. They prompt the most artistic and thrilling of all the learning that can take place in a dance studio. When it comes to any of the arts, it is in these small moments that the nature of dance (or other art) reforms, stretches, and changes to meet needs.\u00a0 <\/p>\n
Last week, while I was working with a dancer new to my coaching client\u00e8le, I enjoyed another little epiphany as she gave me an explanation of what it was that she wanted to accomplish in her dance for her next spurt of growth. It felt as if a heavy, dark door had opened for me with a sickeningly loud squeak of protest. <\/p>\n
Through her clear description of what she wanted to learn, I was able to look inside our recent dance evolution and see what we dance teachers in the west have done to change Bellydance here in the U.S., how we have changed and modified it into something it never was in the lands of its origins. <\/p>\n
Perhaps what my new student wanted to know would never have been a question in a dancer’s mind even thirty years ago. She said she couldn’t figure out how to dance with out repeating moves \u201cover and over again.\u201d \u201cI bore even myself,\u201d she added.<\/p>\n
To explain what I learned in that moment, I will have to start back at my entry into the world of Bellydance in Berkeley and Sausalito, California, at the start of the \u201870s.\u00a0 <\/p>\n
Back then, all of the lessons available concentrated on what we called \u201cTBDM\u201d (typical Bellydance movement) and most people assumed that those who studied Bellydance were looking for something exotic to fill our newly-awakened feminist yearnings for adventure.\u00a0 <\/p>\n
Probably, they were. Most of the dancers of the time were also dabbling in macram\u00e9 lessons, Hatha Yoga, musical forays into foreign music classes and other artistic oddities, and it was rare that much information would be available to study\u2014anywhere. I had poked through the stacks of the large libraries in Berkeley at the University of California where I had been studying Library Science (librarianship) and found some fascinating old descriptions of early dancers in the works of writers such as Flaubert<\/strong>, but not much was written about Middle Eastern dancing or dancers. With the exceptions of Serena Wilson<\/strong><\/a>‘s<\/strong> book of Bellydance instruction and a paperback I found written by Princess Nayeela,<\/strong> a Turkish Bellydancer in Las Vegas, written accounts simply did not exist back in the late \u201860s. By 1970, still, I had never seen a Bellydancer except in paintings and tapestries. <\/p>\n\n
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