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Belly Dance workshop with Ozlem Green,
Sunday February 4th West Malvern Village Hall
Reviewed by Jane Claridge

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Ozlem was young and pretty and was dressed traditionally in a purple bedlah and double layered skirt. It was clear  from the onset that Ozlem was a very fluid, and graceful dancer. Only criticism here is that we didn’t do a warm up, and were not asked to stand in lines for any of the drills. Space was a bit of an issue during the traveling moves as a result. Ozlem explained everything in detail before asking the class to join in, and we began with an upward Fig 8 with an added lift to give a bigger movement. Next came Kashemar with hits, lovely hand movements, much bolder than my usual style, and I noticed that the palms of the hand were at times facing outwards whilst the levels of the arms alternated. Interesting. We were shown a very precise and almost foolproof way of performing the perfect snake arms, which looked really lovely. The latter combined with a very slinky panther walk made for a tricky combination. The class were soon very warm and heaters were turned off!
Ozlem demonstrated the upwards Fig 8 again with a lift, but added dropping the hip in sharply to give a more dramatic variation on the move. I confess to struggling a bit with this one. Ozlem made it look very easy! We traveled with double hits alternating hips and arm positions. Ozlem showed us some really lovely fluid hand and arms movements whilst performing a knee shimmy and a back bend. All the moves were linked together to form a short routine which we thoroughly enjoyed performing several times. The workshop ended with Ozlem dancing a short solo for us to the same music. Whilst the more experienced dancer amongst us handled this workshop with relative ease, it was interesting to note that familiar moves are actually more Turkish than realized! A very enjoyable mini workshop, and much better for me than lying in bed on a Sunday morning!
 

Taqasim      
Britain's oldest middle eastern dance magazine