Belly Dance Aesthetics 101 with youtube.com

Fifi Abdou:

I promised to cut through the youtube crap and bring you the good stuff; well here it is. What better place to start than Fifi Abdou, one of the most famous and widely known Egyptian dancers! Fifi (together with Sohair Zaki and Lucy) are probably the living Egyptian dancers that are most beloved by the Egyptian people.

Fifi exemplifies the very lifted, fluid, and open upper body posture generally found in Egyptian dancers (as opposed to the lifted and closed posture of ballet, or the slumped and closed posture of the average American non-dancer); her chest pulses up and down with the rhythm of the music no matter what moves or steps she is doing. Also, note that she either lifts on each downbeat of the music, or on the 1 and the 3 downbeats of each measure. This is in direct opposition to our tendencies in western dance genres. It is this posture and use of the music that differentiates eastern and western body language.

Belly dance students generally focus all their energies on their hips, when in fact it is largely this strong energetic upper body posture that gives the dancer an authentic Arabic feeling. Also notice the degree of emotion (joy) and personality that Fifi exhibits. She is one of my favorite dancers in the whole world!!!!

Enjoy her Egyptian figure eights (the "up, over, in, weight change one -- and notice what her upper body does). Also in these clips she does big hip circles, side to side hip snaps with the musical accents, some hip lifts combined with "step touch", and steps with undulation ("camels" in American terminolog).

If you take my continuing class you will be learning (or futher polishing) these movements.

The first two clips are older clips of a younger Fifi. Fifi is now mostly retired, but continued to perform into her 50's. The third is a more recent clip when she was probably in her late 40's early 50's.