Belly Dancing for Fun & Fitness

In this beginner-level doumbek course, Amir Naoum teaches Southwest Asian drum rhythms and doumbek techniques to drummers and dancers.

A collection of 16 classic performances by the most prominent Egyptian belly dancers of the 20th century. The selections are from appearances in movies and other shows over a 30 year period.

Sisters Veena and Neena Bidasha have been bellydancing since their childhood and have travelled around the world learning, refining, performing, and teaching this ancient and erotic dance. Now they have created a series of videos to instruct students in the arm movements, shimmies, and sultry looks of bellydancing. BASIC DANCE begins with a brisk warm-up routine and continues with a step-by-step tutorial isolating the upper and lower body while slowly demonstrating each hip drop, shimmy, and undulation in the full choreographed routine.

Enter our dark labyrinth and meet an exotic array of striking characters and creatures: Souls possessed by an ancient evil spirit; a black-winged fallen angel; an incarnation of Kali and Isis; a leopard-woman from the island of Dr. Moreau; a tormented silent movie vamp; a Gothic “Lolita” in love with Death; a wanderer in spiritual exile; a snake morphing into a human; a seeker violated and redeemed by divine domination; a Siren exercising her lethal charms; a worshipper of a winged serpent; a flame whose deadly habits are all-too-human; a run-away gargoyle; a maiden transforming into a warrior sorceress; a haunting deja vu where victim, violator and avenger merge into one... and more.

Stark...sublime...intense. The phenomenon of Gothic Bellydance or "Raks Gothique" is a multitude of poetic visions born out of the Goth, or Gothic, subculture, music, imagery and fashion, and expressed in the language of Bellydance.