Suhaila Salimpour Intensive Brighton 14-17 July 2011

A belated, yet still extremely excited post outlining my thoughts on attending Suhaila Salimpour´s Intensive in Brighton from 14-17 July 2011. I want to thank Hilde Canoodt for organizing this wonderful event and providing European students and lovers of the Salimpour format with the opportunity to study with a legend. After meeting Suhaila, I remember her as wonderful teacher who believes in tough love and brings out the best in everyone by pushing her students in a positive and very healthy way. I love her format, and truly, the ideas and intention behind her approach to teaching. Studying with Suhaila was such a privilege and really reinforced my conviction that preparing for her certification is the right way to go.

Her technique is based on a muscular approach to mastering belly dance, regardless of what stylization you settle with eventually due to personal preference (be it traditional, modern belly dance, Tribal Fusion).
I really appreciate the way the format brings out individual discipline and students really work hard to achieve the tasks Suhaila is giving them (us). The whole weekend was full of (sweaty) wholesome training, devotion, pieces of valuable historical information on American style belly dance and yet more buckets of sweat. I loved it!

I particularly enjoyed the way Suhaila started the weekend with an introduction to the Jamila Salimpour format. Her mother Jamila is the "grandmother" of modern belly dance and we really owe her a lot. Learning about her through her daughter is a grand privilege. It beats reading up on the history of the dance via internet channels and it is wonderful to be able to learn directly from the source. The rest of the weekend was dedicated to Suhaila´s format, and both her and her two assistants did such an amazing job. I was largely familiar with drills because of my personal training (via her online classes) but the extra pieces of advice were so invaluable and I cannot wait to progress and dedicate myself more to the study of her format.

And really, I wish Suhaila could be coming to (and staying in Dublin) to promote the art form in this city. To have her around as a mentor must be incredible, and make you grow so much as a dancer.

I hope to attend one of her Intensives and study with her in her California based studio soon.

Thanks for a wonderful weekend, so much passion and knowledge you passed on to us at this event.

For more infos on upcoming events I am attending see http://jasbellyfusion.com/upcoming_and_past_events.html

Jasmin