Feeding your inner self with belly dance!

Feeding your inner self with Belly dance!

By Shetan Noir

Belly dance has been my art form, my love and my life for over 10 years, I have never

grown tired of it or the life it has opened up for me. I have used belly dance to rehabilitate my body from injuries and to feed my soul when I have felt less then content.

There is no one key element of belly dance that holds me to it but there are many reasons why I love it.

The music draws you into moving, the movements captivate your body into dancing and the costumes inspire you to imagine all the possibilities your creativity is capable of imagining.

You tell a story with your dance that you, yourself create and display. Giving the audience tiny gleams into your heart and soul, all the while you are savoring each moment of that dance because this is your dance, your way of interpreting the music and setting the mood and tone of the performance.

Belly dance is also a sisterhood of women all connecting through dance, it's bond bypassing whatever fusion your perform. Once all together on a common ground it does not matter if you are from a tribal

or cabaret background, weather you fuse Gothic or hip-hop into you belly dance. You are simply a belly dancer and a shimmy is a shimmy. You follow the same drumbeats and translate them into body movements..

One of my favorite personal quotes is simply “My hips speak drum” meaning play the music and I will dance however the music moves me.

You let the drumbeats and music flow into you and help you create your dance. This is why drum circles are so enticing to belly dancers. The constant rhythm and beat of drums pulls you in and before you know it you have been dancing for ten minutes or more. Then once the drums stop you crave for it to start again as if the very drum beats themselves strengthen your inner self and drive you on.

Your costumes become a statement of self-expression, You keep adding to each costume until at last you feel it show you own personal creativity. I hand make all of my own costumes and my absolute favorite costume is still a work in progress as I am still adding to it and improving it to my own expectations. This whole process can become a full-filling hobby of it's own but to me it's a labor of love that I do to show my passion for my belly dance.

Then there is also all the belly dance classes and workshops I have taught since 2003, every new class and workshop brings a smile to my face, seeing students who want to learn belly dance and enrich their lives with it. Seeing them learn intricate body movements and self-improve every week. If gives me great pride and joy when I see my students perform at shows and events. Know how hard they have worked to learn movements and choreographies. I get to see them evolve as dancers and blossom.

These are the wonderful things about belly dance that I love and that feed my inner soul.

-Shetan Noir is a Michigan-based belly dancer and pagan. She teaches classes and workshops all over Michigan and is a published author of a belly dance costume making book

“Sequins + Hot glue gun = belly dance costume and a spell book called “Sticks and stones, a book of curious spells and unique information. www.facebook.com/shetannoir