Classes Start Tonight!

Hello Dancers!

We had a very successful first class of virtual Beginning Belly Dance on Monday night. I’m continually amazed at how much my students are able to learn in the virtual format and how much fun we have dancing together in the only way we can right now. I wish so much that we could all be together in person but we will have a great Fall Term online.

Intermediate/Advanced Belly Dance class starts up tonight. There is sill time to register for either class via the South San Francisco Parks and Rec online system. Click the Virtual Classes tab once you are there you can choose your class. You can always contact me with questions.

I am working on some really neat blog content for future weeks, including a project that is very dear to my heart that I cannot wait to share with everyone. Please consider following me on Instagram @alisabellydance or signing up for my newsletter (or both!) to stay in touch.

In the meantime, I’ve got one more performance video to share from my vast archive :). This is from the Fabulous Fall Festival and like so much else, I will really miss it this year!

Belly Dancer Alisa Greer performs at BABDAMA's Fabulous Fall Festival in 2015.

Have a great week, everyone!

Registration Is Open!

Dear Dancers,

I just want to remind everyone that registration is now open for all for Fall 2020 Virtual Belly Dance Classes through the South San Francisco Parks and Rec.

You can register directly online through the SSF Parks and Rec website. Once there, click on the Virtual Classes tab and then you can select the belly dance class of your choice. I’m so happy we are able to offer both the Beginning and the Intermediate/Advanced class this term.

Classes start next week!

Please share this information if you have any friends or family who might be interested in trying belly dance.

I’ll close today with another one of the many performances that I have been slowly posting online during this period of enforced down time. This was another live music performance (my favorite kind!) from the Bay Area Belly Belly Dancing Festival. Here I am performing with local band Tahneen. If you are reading this on email, you actually have to click through to see the performance. Please also consider subscribing to my YouTube Channel.

That’s all for this week. I am really looking forward to seeing everyone back in class next week.

Fall 2020 Virtual Classes

Hello Dancers,

Well, we’re still sheltering in place here in California, so let’s keep belly dancing from our homes.

My Fall teaching schedule is up now on my Classes page. Registration for the classes through the SSF Parks and Rec starts on 9/4 for SSF Residents and 9/8 for everyone else. And the one bright side of virtual classes is that you can take them from anywhere, so please feel free to join us.

You can register for the Parks and Rec classes directly on their website. I hope to see you in class.

In addition to teaching, have also been using this shelter in place time to go through years of performance footage. I have always lacked the confidence to share my dancing on social media and so I neglected this part of being a dancer. It’s been nice to go through them all now and I will start sharing some here. I am working on my YouTube channel and I hope you will consider subscribing.

Here is one of the performances I posted there. It’s a lovely American Cabaret style performance from 2014 featuring live music by local belly dance favorites Meridian Band. I hope you enjoy it.

Thank you all for reading and I will look forward to seeing you in class.

August Virtual Belly Dance Classes

Hello Dancers,

Virtual belly dance classes continue in August. You can join us anytime during the month. I’m offering Beginning, Intermediate and Mixed-Level Mornings this month, and a couple of the classes are free thanks to special funding from Kaiser Permanente. You do not have to be able to come to every class, just join us when you can. Complete details are on my Classes page.

This photo shows my teaching backdrop. The sparkly curtain puts me in a good mood every time I see it :). It’s the little things right?

Happy Dancing!!

Belly Dance History

Last week Bay Area Belly Dance Legend Sausan, owner of Al-Masri Egyptian Restaurant in San Francisco and Master Belly Dance Teacher, shared an article about the history of belly dance and I wanted to share it here as well for my students. This article is from January 2020 and is a nice historical sketch of our beautiful art form from its mysterious beginnings to its present day difficulties in Egypt.

The entire article is worth reading. It’s long but it’s short for the material it covers, if that makes sense. I will share a few important points here.

The article describes the roots of the dance as performance:

“Like many Egyptian authors on the issue, Bigad Salama, the author of a recent volume on the history of belly dancing, argues that it was in the 1920s in Egypt that belly dancing saw the beginning of an evolution that took it straight to its golden years in Cairo in the 1940s and 1950s.

Throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, Egypt, particularly Cairo, saw several types of belly-dancing performers. These were essentially the ghawzi and the awalem. There are distinctions that dance anthropologists often make between the two groups, with the second being seen as more upscale and professional in its movements.

Neither group had a particular choreography to adhere to or clear concepts of the movements involved. However, the second group, Salama argues, was more set to dancing to the rhythms of the music and could also sing. While the ghawzi danced in public, essentially in moulids (religious festivals), the awalem danced in private, often for segregated audiences.

At a time when Egypt was part of a wider empire that saw the emigration of many ethnic groups, the dancers were also never strictly Egyptian. They were also Armenian, Greek, Jewish, and southern and eastern European.”

— Ahram Online, The Twists and Turns of Belly Dance

The article describes the growth of the nightclub scene in Cairo starting in the 1920s and the dance’s place in the movies as well, and the ups and downs it takes to reach the modern era. I liked this quote about the vital importance of improvisation in belly dance by Pierre Haddad, a dance instructor in Raquia Hassan’s school:

“The learning process of a truly professional dancer is not about memorising a set of moves, but rather is about learning where the moves come from so that she can decide her moves according to the music,” [Haddad] says.”

— Ahram Online, The Twists and Turns of Belly Dance

Later, the article describes how Egyptian society starting becoming increasingly conservative and how this has negatively impacted the dance, both because there are fewer places to perform and because fewer Egyptian women want to become dancers, leaving the dance to foreign women who may not have the same cultural feeling or understanding. The article mentions Dina, who has brought the dance into the modern era and who is one of its most passionate advocates both within Egypt and worldwide.

If you understand French, this YouTube video report from France, which was shared on Samrah’s page last week, goes into even more detail about the difficulties faced by the dance today. It’s a nice compliment to the article. It shows the working life of a dancer in the Cairo cabarets and it also tells the story of a controversial university professor who was fired from her job when a video of her dancing was posted online.

La danse du ventre est un pilier de la culture égyptienne, aussi populaire que les pyramides. Certains font remonter la danse orientale au temps des pharaons...

I think the important thing for us as students to realize is that the dance holds a very complicated place culturally. It can be hard for us as foreigners to understand so we really have to make an effort if we love the dance. I will keep trying to share cultural information here as it is now hard to have these conversations in class since we are virtual.

On a happy note, let’s end with some classic Dina.

Classes continue online. The most current information is always on my Classes page. Thank you for visiting!