Belly Dancing for Fun & Fitness

A collection of 16 classic performances by the most prominent Egyptian belly dancers of the 20th century. The selections are from appearances in movies and other shows over a 30 year period.

Sisters Veena and Neena Bidasha have been bellydancing since their childhood and have travelled around the world learning, refining, performing, and teaching this ancient and erotic dance. Now they have created a series of videos to instruct students in the arm movements, shimmies, and sultry looks of bellydancing. BASIC DANCE begins with a brisk warm-up routine and continues with a step-by-step tutorial isolating the upper and lower body while slowly demonstrating each hip drop, shimmy, and undulation in the full choreographed routine.

In this beginner-level doumbek course, Amir Naoum teaches Southwest Asian drum rhythms and doumbek techniques to drummers and dancers.

A woman stands in front of a building, a chair to her left, dressed in black, full skirt, quarter sleeves, and a scooped bodice. Her hair is piled high. She bows slightly, and, with finger cymbals, begins to dance the cooch.

Stark...sublime...intense. The phenomenon of Gothic Bellydance or "Raks Gothique" is a multitude of poetic visions born out of the Goth, or Gothic, subculture, music, imagery and fashion, and expressed in the language of Bellydance.

Enter our dark labyrinth and meet an exotic array of striking characters and creatures: Souls possessed by an ancient evil spirit; a black-winged fallen angel; an incarnation of Kali and Isis; a leopard-woman from the island of Dr. Moreau; a tormented silent movie vamp; a Gothic “Lolita” in love with Death; a wanderer in spiritual exile; a snake morphing into a human; a seeker violated and redeemed by divine domination; a Siren exercising her lethal charms; a worshipper of a winged serpent; a flame whose deadly habits are all-too-human; a run-away gargoyle; a maiden transforming into a warrior sorceress; a haunting deja vu where victim, violator and avenger merge into one... and more.

In southern France, a Franco-Arabic shipyard worker along with his partner's daughter pursues his dream of opening a restaurant.

A Texas congressman sets a series of events in motion when he conspires with a CIA operative to aid Afghan mujahideen rebels fighting the Soviets.

A mismatched couple discovers that whatever can go wrong will go wrong during a family visit.

A stranded carnival dancer takes on a corrupt political boss when she marries into small-town society.

The film is about the relationship between crazy scientist George Edison and his son Leo. After being electrocuted as a child, Leo is no longer able to touch people without electrocuting them.

We seek to find the inner light of each one and thus turn on new lights, to leave the paths illuminated, so as not to walk blindly and alone. It is having a real awareness of our actions, that our life is a commitment and that if each one of us acts, a great change will be seen in the world. The power of life is to give us existence.

A Brooklyn postal worker follows her Egyptian boyfriend to Cairo where she takes belly-dancing lessons from a legendary but disgraced Egyptian dancer.

A lord’s servant, Ali Baba, is sent to retrieve a slave for his master, but ends up on an adventure filled with gold, mischief, love, and forty famous thieves instead.

An Egyptian man falls in love with a Polish woman and gets a scholarship to be with her. Meanwhile, an American student decides to seduce him for revenge.

Saracen pirates aboard the "Black Eagle" attack Christians strongholds along the coast of Spain. When they stop off in Sheba to re-supply, they also buy female slaves and end up fighting over them.