If they had asked you which is the most sensual type of dancing, what you would have answered? Nowadays, there are definitely many different types of dance that could be easily characterized as “erotic”.
One could respond by saying Salsa, Bachata, Kizomba, or the Argentine Tango are among the finalists. However, there is another type of dance that is basically a solo dance and it holds the top spot as the most seductive and sensual one in the Eastern world.
Belly dance, or Raqs Sharqi as it’s more commonly known in the East, is one of the world’s most popular types of dance, with many academies across the world practicing it.
A video was posted on YouTube nearly 8 years ago of a belly dancer performing one of the most mesmerizing routines you have ever seen.
The woman in the video is Nataly Hay, a globally renowned belly dancer. And, her video has concentrated since 2013 nearly 50 million views, full of dithyrambic comments.
One wrote, “What a goddess!”, while another said, “She dances with class and grace. Beautiful”.
Belly dance has its origins in Ancient Egypt and it’s been around for thousands of years, with many different variations depending on the country of practice.
Raqs Sharqi, which means “Dance of the East”, is what is broadly known in the Western world as Belly Dance. The name “Belly Dance” initially appeared in 1864, when a review about the painting of The Dance of the Almeh by Jean-Léon Gérôme, emerged where it was explained that the dancer in the painting was dancing “danse du ventre”.
The French term Danse du Ventre was later translated into what we now call Belly dancing after real Middle Eastern dancers performed during the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1893.
According to the scholar Ibsen al Faruqi, “In these dances the legs and feet seem relatively less important than the movements of other parts of the body. . . . The solo dance also stresses torso, arms, and head movements.”
It’s a dance that really requires a lot of flexibility and agility, as you will see in the video, and you have to get to know different musical rhythms and learn to follow them.
You don’t need to be particularly muscular or skinny, on the contrary, belly dancers come in any shape or size.
“High leaps and open leg movements are rare . . . the most important thing is the intricate rhythmic interplay between movements of a particular portion of the body and the percussion or melodic accompaniment”, explains Faruqi.
In case you would like to start learning yourself, you can start here, this tutorial can show you how to do some basic hip lifts and shimmy. Belly dance is definitely not so easy as one might think, you really need to dedicate many hours practicing and learn more about the history behind the dance itself.
If you would like to see her whole performance, check out the video below!
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