Since I decided to call my new workshop series “Raqs to Infinity”, I wanted to elaborate on some of the concepts from the first workshop, and talk more about the concept of infinity and why it’s relevant to dance.
The chances are, when I say “infinity” you think of something huge. Infinite distance. The vast depths of outer space. Infinite time. The end of the universe. Things too huge to contemplate!
Well that is one kind of infinity. The big, showy, impressive kind. But Raqs Sharqi isn’t a big showy dance, and our infinities aren’t the big showy kind of infinity either. There’s another sort, and you meet it every day…
How many numbers are there? If you kept counting forever, how many numbers would there be? Obviously the answer is infinity. That is the big infinity, the “end of the universe” infinity. But what if I asked you how many numbers there are in between 0 and 1? The answer is also infinity. And this is the infinity we can explore in dance.
Why are there infinite numbers in between 0 and 1, and not none, since 1 is the next number after 0? Well, in between 0 and 1 there’s 1/2. And there’s 1/3, and 2/3, and 1/4, and 3/4, and 1/5, 2/5, 3/5, 4/5… And you can go on forever, deeper and deeper, dividing that little space up smaller and smaller. And there’s another infinity between 1 and 2, and between 2 and 3… Some infinities are bigger than others, and these little ones are everywhere, hiding in plain sight. There are an infinite number of points in even the tiniest space, and an infinite number of moments in the shortest blink of an eyelid.
But what does this maths stuff this have to do with bellydance, I hear you ask?
Well, consider these questions. How many ways are there to do a hip drop? How many different movements are there that are somewhere in between a figure of 8 and an undulation? How many paths can your arms move through to get from one position to another? It’s that little “in between 0 and 1” infinity, every time.
Almost every movement in bellydance exists on a continuum – that is, a sort of sliding scale, with infinite different points on it. In fact, usually it will belong to many of these sliding scales at once. To illustrate, here’s a graph I made in MS Paint:
I chose hip drops because they are a move that seems ‘simple’ – a move that every beginner learns in their first few classes. And yet… How many points are there on that graph? There are infinite gradations of strength or softness in between the softest and hardest hip drops you can possibly do, and there are infinite gradations of size in between the tiniest and most enormous. Put those together and you get… An even bigger infinity!
And of course, that isn’t the only way you can vary a hip drop – if I kept thinking about it I could come up with tens or even hundreds of these sliding scales, even for this very simple little movement, and I could draw many similar graphs for “all the hip drops” with different things written on the axes. How is your hip positioned relative to your upper body? How bent are your knees? Does your hip stop suddenly or rebound, and how much? Where are your arms? Is there a change of level, and if so how much? The possibilities are limitless, even within what seems like a very limited range – just one move, just an ‘easy’ move everyone knows.
The same is true of every one of your ‘basic’ movements, of course. Each one contains ranges of infinite possibility like this, if you have the skill to access them.
But that’s not all…
I just mentioned ‘basic movements’, and you may be used to thinking of bellydance moves as a set list of shapes (circle, eight, undulation…), which you can trace out with different parts of your body. That’s how this dance is usually taught. That’s how I would probably still teach new beginners.
But that’s a very simplified view. It’s the kind of simplification that’s very useful when you first learn and need a way to make sense of things, but limiting later on, if you can’t move beyond it. What we really have isn’t a neat list of moves, but rather, an infinite variety of paths that our hips, torsos and spines, and our limbs, can trace through space. But that’s kind of overwhelming to contemplate. Where do you even start?
That’s where the “basic shapes” are useful. They are our starting points.
Exploring the landscape of movement
It helps if we think of the infinity of ways we can move our bodies within the style of movement that’s recognisable as “bellydance” as a map. Our archetypal, classic moves are the most important landmarks on that map – the cities and towns. They are our bases to start exploring. There are some obvious paths between them, our “A roads” if you like, and there are also many less obvious routes – our little country lanes, bridleways, and wildly circuitous scenic routes… And a whole lot of landscape that’s off the beaten track, perhaps because it’s physically kind of difficult, but still nice to visit occasionally.
The basic moves aren’t just arbitrary choices, of course. They are the classic defining movements of this dance style for a reason. In this infinite map of movements, they are the ones that align with the natural planes of our bodies, and which are symmetrical. But once we understand this, we can expand each into a whole huge family of movements by starting to deviate slightly from those planes, and to slightly disrupt the symmetry…
Think of this, in our map analogy, as exploring the suburbs of the cities, and the countryside just outside. We’ll find a lot of interesting places and beautiful sights outside of the city limits.
If we wander too far though, we may find that we’re no longer in the same town at all – we may, imperceptibly have entered the outskirts of another as our 8 becomes more undulatey and eventually looks more like a slightly twisty undulation, or our shifting hip circle has begun to tilt and to shrink until it has imperceptibly turned into an interior pelvic circle. We have, as it were, started out exploring around Manchester but eventually ended up in Liverpool… And that, dear readers, is one of the secrets of seamless “transitions”. What is a transition, after all, but a path through our infintely detailed landscape of movements, whether it’s quick and efficient, or roundabout with lots of stops along the way to enjoy the journey?
Well, I think that’s quite enough for one blog post. I hope it gives you some ideas to explore in your dance practice, and if you are near Manchester and would like to get into this kind of thing in more depth, please do check out my “Raqs to Infinity” workshops 🙂
Bellydance by Rachael 