Shape

One of our goals as a belly dancer is to add a visual component to the music. Shapes, being a very visual aspect, are one of the best tools we have for doing that. In this episode I’m going to introduce three different tactics for adding shape, arm frames, body angles, and movement trajectories.

Arm frames are how you position your arms. Literally, they’re the shapes you create with your arms. Like all dimensions, we can use them simply to create variety. If you’re asking yourself, I’m bored, what should I do next? A really easy answer is make a different shape with your arms.

There are also practical reasons to choose one shape over another. For example, asymmetrical frames like the L where one arm is overhead, and the other one is extended are great for drawing the audience’s eye to one side of your body. If you’re doing something on the left, placing your arms in an L pointing leftwards will zoom the audience’s eye right there.

Narrow frames like holding your palms together over your head also create a long line that’s aesthetically pleasing. It also draws attention to any movements that break that line, things like side-to-side movements like hip slides or things that cause that line to undulate like vertical eights.

There are also emotional reasons for choosing different shapes with the arms because our arms are a big factor in body language. For example, the V position creates this triumphant and proud quality. I know some dancers who call it V for victory. Our standard horizontal arm position is just very open and welcoming, which is one of the reasons why it’s our go-to. Now we can’t talk about this in as much depth as I’d like because we have three areas to cover. If you want some more detail, go check out my arm frames video in the dimension library.

Our second tactic is body angles. This is simply what direction you face while you’re on stage. Again, this can be a matter of simple variety. You can use body angles to change things up when you’re starting to feel stale and add texture to your dancing without overstuffing it. Again, there are practical reasons to choose one angle over another. For example, if you’re doing a one hipped movement like hip drops, doing them at a 3/4 angle where you’re making about a 45 degree angle to the audience, that gives them the best view of the movement.

More than any other dimension, body angles create very strong body language. This is something that was called to my attention by Joe Paul Williams of Three Pillars Delsarte in New York. Each one of the body angles communicates something different. We don’t have time to cover them all, but here are the most common three that we use. In the front angle where you’re facing the audience head-on, what you’re communicating is what you see is what you get. You’re open, you’re not hiding anything. This draws on and communicates uncomplicated, even primal emotions, so strength, hunger, desire, aggression, laying your heart bare, pure physicality.

The 3/4 position that we talked about a minute ago though, that holds something back. That creates more complicated emotions and tones. It can be mysterious, romantic, flirty, even mystical. If you turn around and face the back, then you’re breaking your personal connection to the audience and especially that eye contact. You’ve left the audience behind. Either you ran away from them, or you dismissed them, and walked away. This can create different effects. One is more of a voyeuristic effect, which makes the audience aware that they’re watching you. It also invites them to look at the details of what you’re doing without being distracted by your personality because they can’t see your face, and they can’t see your expression.

Now for each of these positions there is a wide range. Let’s say you’re facing forward while shimmying. Is that a show of strength, or is it you baring your soul? Your body angle communicates the category. Is it what you see is what you get, holding something back or breaking that connection? It’s your expression and your demeanor that communicate the details. Be sure to use those two things together.

Our third tactic is a movement trajectory. These are simply the shapes that you trace with your body while you’re moving. You can do curved shapes like circles, figure eights, crescents and spirals. You can linear shapes like lines, rectangles, V’s. These are all shapes that you can paint in the air with any body part that you’d like, your hips, your chest, your arms, even your hair. Once again, we can do this only to create variety. If you’ve been doing lots of linear movements, you can switch to curved or vice versa. You can create even more texture by mixing and matching both linear and curved movements within the same combo or section.

Like all of the other dimensions, there are also emotional reasons to choose one over the other. For example, curved movements can have this more romantic or mysterious quality in the same way that a 3/4 body angle does while linear movements tend to be more strong, dynamic and straightforward. What’s interesting about this is that this is true even if they’re both executed in a soft way. Just because a movement is linear doesn’t mean that it’s necessarily percussive. You can even apply this idea of trajectories to your props. If you’re working with a veil, a cane, a sword or manipulating your skirt, you can create both linear and curved trajectories using each of these. Think about painting shapes in the air, whether it’s body parts or props.

How do you apply these to your dancing? Just like with any other dimension, a great place to start is to brainstorm different variations. What different ways of playing with shape can you think of? List or sketch out as many arm positions, body angles, and trajectories as you can think of. Then I recommend that you go through your movement vocabulary and sort your moves into curved and linear movements. Now there may be a few things that don’t quite fall into either like shimmies, and that’s okay. They don’t have to go on the list for now.

Then explore. Play around with as many different combinations of variations and moves as you can think of. You can watch yourself in the mirror, but it’s definitely better to get yourself on video since that will give you a better sense of what the audience is actually seeing. Then notice how you respond to each variation, what you like, and also how each arm pose, and body angle change how you perceive each movement. For extra credit, start watching for how other dancers are using these ideas.