Tribal Belly Dancing with Ameena Ahava Profile on TribeNet: http://people.tribe.net/ameenaahava Message Board and Photo Album on TribeNet: http://tribes.tribe.net/AmeenaAhava E-mail: ameenaahava@yahoo.com
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Welcome to Tribal Belly Dancing with Ameena Ahava! The essence of Tribal Belly Dance is women dancing together as a group (tribe) for their own enjoyment. The dance itself is largely improvisational. The movements are a combination of traditional feminine dance forms from the Middle East, North Africa, India, and Spain. It is a dance form that embraces women of all ages, shapes, and sizes, creating a beautiful unified tapestry. This not only benefits each dancer physically, but emotionally as well.

What does Tribal Belly Dancing look like? Performance videos taken of the original American Tribal Style Troupe-FatChanceBellyDance: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f_qi_My1yIU http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U3JTRn7Q0UE http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wbgjJ5ty49I http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cHliBrA2fsA More videos of other tribal style troupes dancing the movements and formations taught in the Tribal Basics series: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DyetM5PLiVQ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8nWHfsGMjZI For a history of American Tribal Style Bellydance, visit: http://www.fcbd.com/about/history_rr.shtml

In Tribal Style belly dance we learn a repertory of isolated and layered movements; we come to share a rich vocabulary of movement. Practicing these movements, we become attuned to one another on many levels. Our practice is rich in its content and generous with its outcome. After regular practice, we can talk in this shared vocabulary, moving absolutely in perfect harmony in any moment by reading the subtlest cues of weight change, energy change, intention, or physical hints. Our conversation is our unified movement, completely improvisational, a success of unanimous flow. We move seamlessly from one woman to the other, leading and following, trusting the commitment of the others to the well being of the group above all. We train ourselves to dance in unison without a planned choreography and in so doing learn how to align with the human community in everyday life. We practice trusting the commitment of the group to the well being of all, we voluntarily set aside the need-or want-to stand above, separate, as our primary motivation. We learn to act toward a purpose that serves all in an unknown situation; we habituate ourselves to care about the group. In this experience, in this moment, we dance the perfect adaptation for a perfectly unknowable reality-life. As we practice this sacred and tribal dance together as women, we learn to eradicate a deeply ingrained proclivity for exclusive and hierarchical social structuring. We do not have to recreate everything on our own, do not have to always make it to the top, stand alone, or compete with our sisters. The primary quality that defines this dance is the practice of moving harmoniously within a group identity; we align and affiliate with a circle of dancers. We meet with this circle of women each week-financially strapped student, newly divorced wife, post-partum mother, commuting executive, recovering addicts, survivors, healers, teachers, social butterflies, or yogis-and we do our inner work, together. We sweat, we cry, we laugh, we hope, we release; we discipline our bodies, open our minds and discover our spirits. We come together diverse and leave feeling unified, hopeful, in communal mind together, all because we take this ancient movement and we are able to touch back with a silver thread connecting every mother, daughter, grandmother, sister, auntie and the collective wisdom gathered there. --paraphrased from the writings of Palika Benton of Heavy Hips