One of my dance goals for this year has been to study the Rachel Brice and Colette Todorov classes on Datura Online to deepen my knowledge of Datura Style and its predecessor, Fat Chance Belly Dance Style (formerly known as American Tribal Style). I'm thinking of applying for the 8 Elements Phase 1: Initiation scholarship. I really want to train with Rachel Brice - she was the reason I started to study bellydance, and seeing a woman become successful on a global scale in her thirties as a dancer was a huge inspiration to me. Also, my best friend lives in Portland, Oregon, and I would like to have a reason to visit him regularly. It would be nice to train at an advanced level and connect with and perform with fellow dancers from across the world.
I decided to get back to the basics and start with the Intro to Fusion Belly Dance program. I worked with Datura Style Class 1 today. It began with a short introduction by Rachel Brice about the various influences on her style, Jamila and Suhaila Salimpour, John Compton, Masha Archer, Carolena Nericcio, and Mardi Love. There was a brief section on the anatomy of hipwork on the up, which went over my head - I really wish I had actually gone to the bellydance anatomy workshop Ashley Lopez gave in Vancouver in January 2020, which I had signed up for but skipped because of the torrential downpour that day.
Rachel started the actual class with a brief standing warmup including several forward folds, which she likes to do a lot in her classes. The first movement she taught was hip bumps. She taught them with a specific stance, upper body facing front and lower body to the diagonal. It was tricky to coordinate the hip lifts with pressing the foot down and then releasing the foot when the hip came down, especially because she was wearing big pants that concealed her feet. But I'm getting there. She taught arm circles with the hip bumps, first in and out and then out and in.
Next was the taxim, or hip figure eight down to up. She justified the name by saying it was a movement that really went well with taxim music ( solo improvisational sections in SWANA music). This is a movement that comes easily to me, so it felt like she was over-explaining, although it's always good to learn fundamentals again. I have struggled in the past with doing hip figure eights with my feet on the floor, but today I was able to for the most part. I was able to do the open arms "puppet master style", as she explained, with my elbows moving with the hips as though they were attached by strings.
The final movements were swings and glute locks. Rachel said one of her concerns when teaching swings was to make sure people didn't swing their hips incorrectly. The glute lock is kind of like a mini-combo where the hips move with glute contractions up, up, down, and then with oblique contractions up, down, up. It's combined with arms reaching together to the side with the glute contractions and then arms reaching upwards with the oblique contractions.
I've done this class before, but it was good to do it again. I was able to keep my knees bent in bellydance posture without feeling any strain, which is a good sign that the work I've been doing on knee conditioning has been helping.