So one of the most difficult things about belly dance is layering. You need to do the grapevine, while doing snake arms and shimmy (don’t forget to smile). The key to good layering is the dreaded word “practice” and its true. You need to practice, practice, practice. You need to build up muscle memory.

What is muscle memory? When you learning to dance you are teaching your muscles what to do and where to go. Think about the snake arm. The snake arm is a basic belly dance move which is taught in all forms of belly dance. It is a wonderful example for me because it uses so much muscle memory. The basic snake arm is broken down into many parts and when a beginner dancer learns the move, they learn them all. Slowly they speed them up and put them together. The body learns where to move and put the muscles. Over time the student no longer needs to tell the muscles where to go. The muscles have practiced enough that without thinking the body can just put the arm in the right place. Instead of thinking of all the different places to put the arm instead the dancer thinks snake arm. The dancer has acquired the muscle memory for this step.

All dancers use muscle memory when learning steps. It helps to simplify the basic steps so the dancer can focus on learning more difficult techniques. Belly dancers use this ability in a special way when they layer. To layer well a dancer needs to acquire the muscle memory for all the steps separately before they are performed together. It is important that dancer has the full understanding of each step (snake arm, grapevine, shimmy …etc) and can perform them with out much thought. This way the dancer will have the mental space in their head to focus and putting all the steps together.

What should take home from this?
1. Practicing the individual steps (drills) is useful for layering.
2. Do not try to do too much at once or your brain can’t able to handle it and it will show on your body.
3. Practice, Practice, Practice.

On a personal note: In my opinion layer is sometimes over used. I think that with belly dance sometimes simple is better. I do not feel that it is always better to have four moves layered on top of each other. Though it is technically impressive, you may lose some artistic quality.

Let me know what you think with an email or a comment.
-Nara