A STUDY IN SHAABI

Topic: Egyptian Shaabi
Focuses: Social Style, Embodiment Movement, Stylized Movement
Level: Intermediate and Up

Egyptian Shaabi is a popular social dance style that has become a recent craze in the Oriental dance community. With its eccentric personality, grounded feeling, culturally connected gestures and enigmatic energy, Shaabi can sometimes be hard to define and articulate as it’s an idiosyncratic and evolving social dance. In this series we’ll take a look at Shaabi from different perspectives, Shaabi and it’s connection and crossover with Balady, older Shaabi from the 80’s, modern Shaabi and Mahraganat Shaabi (street shaabi). This series will focus on body language and expression, posture practice in order to embodied that Shaabi feeling, common gestures, styling differences between Raqs Sharqi/Oriental and Shaabi/Beledy, recognizing Shaabi music, and understanding nuance differences within the evolution of Shaabi. If you’re looking to understand how to create material in the Shaabi style, how to modify your Oriental technique to work for Shaabi, context and movement vocabulary for understanding different styles of Shaabi, or you just want to enjoy this incredibly fun social dance style, this is the class for you!