Tribal after Oriental

[Darshiva]

I'm just wondering who else here has started learning tribal after years (for me nearly a decade!) of studying an oriental style?

I've had a couple of issues with posture:

1) That weird 'sit into your posture' thing. That's so weird after a decade of keeping my pelvis in neutral!
2) The hands- after brutally drilling myself OUT of that hand posture, I'm suddenly required to have it again. Insanity!
3) And this is the big one - ARMS. There's this posture I call "tribal classical" because it's like classical, only with a tribal twist. And after so long with Egyptian style, I keep defaulting to supporting arm up, working arm out/down. During my lesson I had to keep slapping my arm for a physical reminder to keep my arm down where it should be. As soon as the tingling went away, up went the arm!

Has anyone else had these issues with learning tribal? What other habits from other dance forms are creeping in?

 

[Farasha Hanem]

I only took Tribal for a few short weeks about a year or two ago, but yeah, Tribal arms requires a lot of concentration, and I tend to worry more about my feet and hips and let the arms get soggy.

 

[Zorba]

Same here! I'm in a Tribal Fusion class that's a lot of fun, but the teacher is always yelling about my Cabaret hands! I keep trying - but as I also have a Cabaret *AND* a folkloric class every week...

I'll always be a Cabaret dancer - but I do enjoy the "Goth dark Tribal Fusion" - or at least enjoy trying! Yea, years of unlearning "bad habits", only to need them now!

 

[Munniko]

I started doing Tribal recently because a teacher is doing an 8 week workshop for the summer at the studio I go to. I kind of like it because it really is helping my Bharatanatyam because that is where half the weird positioning comes from. The high arms and the sitting into the position...the hands are giving me heck.

Sometimes it clicks and sometimes it doesn't. Then again I am only just getting to the one year point.

 

[Zanbaka]

By 'sit into your posture', do you mean maintaining a deeper bend in the knees?

I'm a big proponent of a soft knee position (instead of a deep bend in the knees), honoring the natural curve of the spine, and using a neutral pelvis for basic dance posture...... regardless of style. There are so many approaches to the various "flavors" of Tribal and in my experience, I've observed many different versions of posture taught in classes/workshops.

Bellydance led me to my first Flamenco class over a decade ago, which was instrumental in helping me to refine my armwork for Tribal style. It really helped me differentiate Tribal arms with an emphatic lift/rotation of the elbows from the energized, yet softer arm positions of Oriental/Cabaret/Raqs Sharqi. Same with hand isolations. Of course these are just general differences, and not always this way 100% of the time.

Cheers!

 

[AndreaSTL]

Tribal and fusion really aren't my thing, but a few years ago I traded for a workshop with Ariellah. It was fun but laughable on my part. My body just doesn't want to go to those default postures without serious thought on my part.

 

[Darshiva]

By 'sit into your posture', do you mean maintaining a deeper bend in the knees?

No, I mean that centre of balance is lower and more forward around the upper thigh instead of at the navel. There is more tension in the upper thighs and the pelvis is forward as opposed to neutral. It ends up having a 'sitting' feel without significant change to the knee mobility, which is important because as with oriental, tribal requires that you have maximum knee mobility (so if your knees are "more bent", you're doing it wrong - or so says my teacher)

 

[Amulya]

I can relatie to the arms, 11 years ago I started taking tribal classes after having done 9 years of classic/cabaret and man it is hard! And still is! I decided I like tribal arms much more so I kept training myself to keep tribal arms (yup with cabaret styles) and 11 years later and it still is an issue. I wish it would have been drilled into me from day one. Not sure if that would have helped, it is very tiring to keep arms in the tribal position and that's why it's easy to droop them back into Egyptian default.

I'm trying to figure out what you meant by the 'sit into your posture' thing and the hands. I never noticed tribal hands to be different, except some dancers hold their hands the opposite way when their arms are up:
Normally we hold them in the ballet position and some tribal dancers turn them facing away from each other. Does that make sense? Hard to explain haha.

Or do you mean holding the fingers differently? Like some Egyptian style dancers do 'birdie hands' these days opposed to a more relaxed pose like the classics did.

 

[Daimona]

I've only had a few workshops in tribal (ATS and a tiny bit of fusion) and didn't have any problems with the arms (though, I may not have dived deep enough into tribal to discover it yet). I've got more problems with the music, whether it being monotone or not following the music the way I would do in cabaret.

 

[Amulya]

ATS is yet a whole different thing from tribal fusion, I found the music too monotone too and the movements too repetitive. I did two types, FCBD and ITS. FCBD was very one sided, they do some movements only with the right side (I'm left sided so that wasn't nice) so I got this feeling of being worn out on one side :/ can't be healthy.