When I first started taking bellydance classes, I couldn't learn fast enough. Weekly classes weren't enough to satisfy my appetite, but, as I've stated in earlier posts, I was reluctant to shell out $40 or $50 on videos that may or may not prove to be helpful. So, bookworm that I am, it was off to the area libraries to see what I could find. I couldn't come up with much. No videos, one book about the dance's development in Middle Eastern countries, which I devoured, but which didn't help my dance any, and one how-to - a book from the late '70s or early '80s by the dancer Serena.
When trying to work with this book, however, I soon saw the limitations of trying to learn this way - for one thing, you have to keep picking up the book to read directions and then put it down again to execute the move, then pick it up again. . . The accompanying photos weren't much of a help either for a "newbie" like me - a series of black-and-white images for each move, where the "mirror effect" that I wrote about earlier adds to the confusion - the instructions might say "lift right foot" but the lifted foot in the photo would be on the left, for example. All in all, rather frustrating for a new dancer whose ability to focus isn't the greatest, so, since I had the luxury of live instruction, I decided to just stick with what I was learning in my weekly class.
But I've retained a desire to have books about bellydance, including how-tos, so I began looking for them in used bookstores and managed to find a few over the years. The how-to titles I found, all from the 1970s, are The Compleat Belly Dancer (by Julie Russo Mishkin and Marta Schill), The Art of Belly Dancing (by Dahlena), The Belly Dancer in You (by Ozel Turkbas) and The Secrets of Belly Dancing (by Roman Balladine). The first three, in particular, advertise bellydance as a way to get a more youthful figure and to re-ignite your husband's interest in you (apparently only married women were supposed to learn this dance!). But the books are also written with the assumption that the reader is going to go from an absolute beginner to someone who will be performing in public, and come complete with instructions on costume making, tips for putting on a show, etc.
Considering that back in the '70s, these books were the often the only access a woman had to any kind of bellydance instruction, was anyone actually able to learn how to dance from them? I imagine that if someone were absolutely determined to learn this dance and were willing to spend hours and hours working with these books, one could fumble one's way to a facsimile of bellydance, but without an instructor to provide guidance on proper positioning and movement, one would, at best, have poor technique and, at worst, sustain an injury by doing a move improperly.
So, are these books useful at all? If you are already studying with an instructor, they can provide some useful pointers, provide a few variations on moves you already know, or help you devise a practice routine. And the dance-for-your-sultan kitsch factor is good for some smiles. But overall, when it comes to learning bellydance, books aren't better.
Despite the advent of video instruction, however, there are still how-to books being published (and, of course, I own several of them!) These are somewhat improved over the older books in that the photos are in color and are easier to follow, but, again, I would use them as I described above and not try to learn from scratch from them.
And then there are the books that include a big dollop of history, real or imagined, along with a bit of instruction. I'll look at these in a future post.
