Thread: Four Week Sampler Class

What would you teach? These are baby beginners and I'm just trying to get them interested so I need to keep it light and fun.

Thank you for all suggestions!

A little veil, some basic finger cymbals, shimmies, some traveling steps.

Basic belly dance posture.
Basic exchange of weight
Snake arms
Hip drops
Basic Egyptian (some call this basic Arabic)
Every beginning belly dancer I know wants to learn to do a camel
Basic shimmy
Chest slides
Some circles - small hip circles, horizontal figure eights, horizontal chest circles

And all of these traveling.

{{{HUGS}}}

I'm doing a 4-week session this fall, and I'm teaching my beginners a choreography to Egyptian pop music that has enough repetition to be easy to learn.

i would do fewer moves but still teach technique the same way i would in an 8 week class, i like shira's short choreography idea.

The only thing that bothers me about teaching a choreography is the sense of accomplishment it encourages students to think they have. I understand this is part of the selling point. In an age when people want instant gratification and constant pats on the head, letting students think they have mastered something is often useful, if not outright desirable. If the teacher leans too hard on the idea that in four weeks, they have learned the equivalent of a drop in the ocean, it's too intimidating. In some cases, it might not even be true. There are lots of very good dancers who don't have a large repertoire of moves, and in that sense, maybe in four weeks, you could have covered enough of the mechanics to actually do something useful with them.

On the other hand, teachers need to be careful not to give students the mistaken idea that they've really mastered much of substance. Unless you are coming into the dance with a lot of useful background in other performance disciplines, and particularly if you are not taking the class seriously and practicing at home, four weeks of class aren't going to give you anything much to write home about. What you've learned really is one baby step on a potentially long journey of learning about dance and music and your body, and you're clopping your way through one repetitive, overly simplistic choreography, so don't rush out and buy that costume yet.

To that end, I think it is important that teachers balance the two ideas. Students need to feel they made some sort of progress for their four weeks' time, but they also need the reality check that they're not in any sense qualified to be promoting themselves as examples of a belly dancer after a month of training.

Originally Posted by Tourbeau

To that end, I think it is important that teachers balance the two ideas. Students need to feel they made some sort of progress for their four weeks' time, but they also need the reality check that they're not in any sense qualified to be promoting themselves as examples of a belly dancer after a month of training.

maybe i've just been lucky about the students i've had so far and i do agree with you, but i don't think that it needs to be pushed very much. if you share some info and more importantly examples of really good dance (for example, a youtube clip that illustrates a concept you covered in class) students figure out where they are, seeing themselves in the mirror and the difference. unless they are coming from a different background with a history of looking down on this dance, which is a whole other issue than that of introducing hubris by giving them a finished choreography.