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Created by star of classic belly dance, Sarah Skinner, The Celebration Belly Dance Workout is a blend of dance instruction and fitness. It offers a step-by-step instructional section, a 30-minute non-stop dance workout/practice, and a yoga-based muscle conditioning and strengthening workout.
The Celebration Workout features a number of classic belly dance genres and movement styles with the overall theme of celebration, joy, and ritual.
The Circles segment is dedicated to fluid, organic movement following trajectories of circles and infinity loops - a celebration of femininity, curves, and grace. Beautiful, easy-to-follow combinations fall together into a dance sequence designed to release tension and gently activate every muscle group.
The Shimmy and Hipwork section followed by floorwork allow you to practice technique and moves for the Zeffa and Floorwork dance sequences.
Zeffa, a traditional wedding dance, is a medium-paced dance of celebration and ritual. It is often performed with a candelabrum (shemadan) balanced on the belly dancer’s head, and can also be performed while balancing a tray of lit candles. To enable more experienced dancers to practice tray balancing, two of the five dancers in our program perform this segment while balancing a tray of candles.
The Floorwork segment invokes the image of a temple dance ritual - seductive and mysterious. Floorwork is a powerful tool to tone the upper body and abdominal areas, and to infuse your movement with sinuous grace. Since many elements of bellydance floorwork are used to enhance balancing acts such as candle tray or sword dances, you can practice this segment with your own tray or a sword. Two dancers demonstrate the moves balancing candle trays.
The Saidi segment is a high-energy, fast-paced, joyful Arabic dance performed to saidi music from Upper Egypt. Saidi steps are uplifting, rhythmic, girly, and flirty. Traditionally, women dance saidi with a cane, so two of Sarah’s dancers perform this segment as a cane dance. With or without a cane, this segment enables learning and practice of saidi steps and styling.
Sarah Skinner’s Celebration Bellydance Workout also offers a section of stretches and yoga-based strengthening and flexibility exercises.
To give you still more inspiration, and demonstrate how every section of the workout translates into a classic bellydance show, a performance segment demonstrates the dance moves in the workout in full costume and in the context of a stage show.