Thread: Looking for video critique

I’m always looking to improve, so one way is to get others to look at your dance with an objective eye. So I’m putting my video here for hundreds of dancers to see and let me know where I can improve in there own opinion. Thanks for the help!

[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3cYqOQU_afk]YouTube - Toria bellydancer restaurant[/ame]

First off, beautiful clip! Your technique and stage presence are very good - I really enjoyed it!

To start, I'd have either put in a short entrance piece (perhaps with veil) to get you where you want to be for that song (starting on stage isn't a great idea in my humble opinion), or come in when the maqsoum starts at about 0:30. The music really tells me to travel there, so I don't feel the stationary movement (while beautiful) matches the song. The transition to the floor for your Zar could have been smoother.

The biggest thing though was that I felt you were too much in your head and not in your heart. Linger, and feeeel the music.

These are just tiny things and my own personal opinion - I hope you don't feel anything less than proud for posting this clip. You are a beautiful dancer.

BTW, kudos for posting this. I think we all learn a lot from these posts! The last time I did this, I got some fabulous feedback.

This is a very enjoyable routine! Since you asked for opinions on where you could improve, here are some things I noticed:

I'm guessing you are aiming for an Egyptian stylization, so when you are doing your chest/upper body accents at the beginning of the first song, make sure they stay very neat and controlled. I thought when you used similar moves in the drum solo portion, they came off much more Egyptian looking than when you did them earlier. In particular, the sequence at 0:30-0:40 seems bigger, looser, and more American looking to me than in other places.

You didn't say whether this was your choreography or someone else's, and I realize that you're constrained by the size of the stage, but would you be interested in varying the arabesques starting around 3:50? This choreography would be beautiful on a larger stage where you could fill the space with a traveling sequence, but on that little sliver of a performance area, it's an awful lot of back and forth. I'm thinking maybe a turn or something to break it up some?

Make sure you keep your arm movements strong and full of energy in the drum solo, particularly when you change arm positions. I don't mean you should be snapping to a salute or looking like you are doing semaphore without the flags, but there were a couple of places where I thought your arms looked disproportionately softer than your hips. Your arm work is quite fluid and graceful in the more melodic parts of the routine, but a drum solo calls for more power everywhere, not just the hips.

Finally, I couldn't tell at the beginning if you were cuing someone offstage to start the music or looking around to see why the music hadn't started yet, but it made the intro look very tentative. I struggle to make a bold impression myself when the music isn't playing, but I notice that this is one area of stage presence that really tends to set the pros apart from the amateurs. The pros aren't afraid to stand there and soak up the moment, even if the moment is one where the sound guy is screwing up.

Hope this helps. It really is a lovely performance, and there wasn't much I thought needed to be pointed out.

Thanks for the replies so far I just want to point out that this is not a restaurant set. This is a hafla I preformed in, so my short routine was part of a show with many different acts in it. So that’s why the intro was really bad. Also this is not a chorography, I do improvisation only, and even the drum solo mostly is improvisation. To be clear I do spot chorography kinda, here and there I might have an idea of what I want to do. I wish I had the mind to chorography but for some reason nothing ever sticks! Each time I hear the music I feel some thing different, its crazy I know

Also the sound is completely off, i don't what happen

Originally Posted by toria_dances

Thanks for the replies so far I just want to point out that this is not a restaurant set. This is a hafla I preformed in, so my short routine was part of a show with many different acts in it. So that’s why the intro was really bad. Also this is not a chorography, I do improvisation only, and even the drum solo mostly is improvisation. To be clear I do spot chorography kinda, here and there I might have an idea of what I want to do. I wish I had the mind to chorography but for some reason nothing ever sticks! Each time I hear the music I feel some thing different, its crazy I know

Also the sound is completely off, i don't what happen

Oops--sorry, then. Without the background info, I couldn't tell whether you were doing a canned routine or not. (I'd still think of it as a "choreography" either way, though. Even if it wasn't totally mapped out in advance, it's still not an accidental dance, you know?)

At any rate, I don't think it's crazy--I think you're on the right track. Planning out a skeleton of moves for a piece of music is closer to the intention of the art form than nailing down every little movement anyway. It's one thing if you are doing a group number where you have to keep things organized or it's too distracting for an audience to watch, but when you are doing a solo, you have the freedom to interpret the music spontaneously. A performance is supposed to be dynamic and unique and alive. It's unfortunate that most dancers never have the opportunity to perform with live music, because that's what this is supposed to be all about.

(I did notice that the sound seemed out of sync with the video. It's obvious from the rest of your performance that you were too good to be that "off" on the accents!)

You're costume is beautiful, you are beautiful. However, at first I was not sure whether it was due to buffering problems with You Tube, until I realised that the applause kicked in at the right moment, at which point I realised that you were not actually dancing within the music, but skimming over the top of it and around it. I personally would not choose such a piece for restaurant work, it's too 'classical'. You have good technique, and lovely hip work, but you are not connecting with the music. For me, you might have been dancing to anything. You could have dubbed another piece over it, and it would have looked the same. This all sounds very negative, but I'm being honest, and this is how I'm perceiving your dance.

A good dancer will pick up the nuances of minutiae within the music and express with her body accordingly. This comes with practice. A good dancer really has to be IN the music, not outside it. It's like her body is merely a channel for the music to flow through.

I think you have lots of potential.

Positives - Great looking girl, good body, classy costuming, good technique, graceful and good posture. Good audience interaction.

Negatives - Not with the music, a bit too wriggly and uncoordinated at times, movements a little too big - more subtlety needed.


Hope this helps.

It is hard to address your musicality with the music being off.

My eye for watching your videos and watching yourself in practice is to be more aware of your own hands. You've got good instincts and your arm work is good, but sometimes your hands weaken the lines that you're making. At those moemnts the lovely line of your arms seems to end at the wrist, and occasionally the elbow.

Make sure that your hands serve a purpose. If you go to push the air with your hand as an accent, go all the way and really feel the weight of the air. If your arms are framing your body or moving away from the body, make sure that that lovely line doesn't end with limp wrist or fingers together like a bird beak. If you're putting a hand on your waist, do so, don't let it rest limply against your waist. If you are going to put your hands behind your head, do it so that you don't look like you're mimicing touching your hair...

Hands are hard, often when we think about them they go stiff, and when we don't they go limp or come to rest in an odd way, so it takes a while.

Originally Posted by kharis_UK

You're costume is beautiful, you are beautiful. However, at first I was not sure whether it was due to buffering problems with You Tube, until I realised that the applause kicked in at the right moment, at which point I realised that you were not actually dancing within the music, but skimming over the top of it and around it.
Hope this helps.

I think unfortunately for Toria the music was out of synch exactly one or 2 beats during the drum solo so the audience clapping still appeared to be synched. YouTube seems to mess up the sound on all videos you upload, although windows video format and some MPEGS seem to fare better than avi files in my experience.

Z