You are about to embark on a fabulous, exotic journey. Your guides along this path are movement and music that have been shared among dancing women and men throughout time and across continents. The purposes of belly dancing are as varied as the women that practice it. Certain forms have been used in ritual or temple dancing, for child birthing practice, community celebrations, intimate celebrations of women in seclusion, for public entertainments, to build a stronger physical body, to explore feminine artistic expression, for the sheer joy of moving through space to ancient rhythms.

Contemporary American Belly Dance is a hybrid of Egyptian, Turkish, Arabic, North African, even Flamenco, Polynesian and East Asian dance forms. Ours is a "global village" and we are free to gather to us the forms we find most pleasing. We make up our own moves. This is a great strength of American belly dance.

Despite American cultural bias, there is no ideal age or body type for belly dance. Life experiences (both joy and sorrow) add depth and soul to movement. We combine in our dance training for posture, body strength, balance grace in movement, brilliant costuming and the fun and fellowship of our sister and brother dancers.

"The dream was always running ahead of one," Anais Nin confessed.
"To catch up, to live for a moment in union with it, that was the miracle."

Isn't that that story of finding the dancer in you?

My first belly dance lesson was a bewildering 60 minutes in the company of my first teacher, Dunia, who had the grace of a cat, unlimited strength, flawless rhythm, and a sparkling smile. It was torture seeing myself in the mirror next to her--how can I achieve those moves, that confidence?

The early part of training is not particularly glamorous, the drills show you in each measure how far you have to go --the gap between teacher and student can seem so huge. Well, anyway for many of us it is so. After that first class, I decided to stay and watch the next intermediate group --Hint: this is my first tip for you, I wanted a glimpse of a possible future. The vision of those women whirling in their full skirts, coin belts, zils ringing, wordlessly traveling through space in unison like beautiful birds soaring in the sky. That vision sustained me during the six years that I wasn't able to continue my studies. But the seeds of the dream were planted that night.