Tribal Fusion Bellydance with Sharon Kihara Review

Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)
Sharon Kihara has a presence all her own. She's deliciously cool, a pleasure to look at and seemingly effortlessly elegant. On her first instructional video, she takes you through a yoga warm up, short muscle isolation drills, and four stylish combinations that reverberate with shimmies.

The warm up
There are two parts to this. The first is a variant of the yoga sun salutation. It includes the triangle and warrior poses. The second part has you doing some "straddle squats". Next is a section that warms up and drills the glutes, muscles that belly dancers use to power their hip work, making movements sharper and more controlled. In this little drill, Sharon gets herself into a split position, tough to achieve for most people. She even does a ¾ shimmy in this position. To get the abs stronger, Sharon goes on to do some crunches and works the obliques. This drill ends with a yoga pose for the back relief to counter the pressure you may have felt during the crunches. Then there's a bit of an arms drill which takes you through shoulder diamonds, shimmies and snake arms. The chest drill followed by the torso drill has the usual stuff you'll find on belly dance videos, but more briefly. The torso drill demonstrates the sharpness of Sharon's undulations. There's an even tinier section quickly taking you through the vertical figure eights and small pelvic circle or "ami". If you haven't been doing any drills, this may be a nice beginning. If, like me, you have, it's more like a demo than a drill. A little more time is spent on hip ups and downs and shimmies. All of this is done to Indian-flavored music. Surprisingly, there are no safety tips and not many posture reminders. That tempts me to lop off a point, but considering it's not aimed at beginners, I'm inclined to let it go.

Combinations
American Tribal Style or ATS parentage shows in the four combinations Sharon takes up. It would have been nice if she'd have shown the combination first and then went on to explain it. For each combo, she tells you what has to be done, and then shows you the whole piece. There's no dance-along or practice built in. Again, I'm tempted to take a point off for that. Every other tribal instructional video I have (and that would be about 15 of my 87 video collection of belly dance videos) does take you through some practice. The combinations are full of rather nice shimmies, very graceful arm moves and style and attitude. Sharon is such a pleasure to watch that I don't think she deserves any points off. Especially when the video is entirely affordable. The combinations finally are danced at one go in a choreography to Bollywood's Chaiyya Chaiyya.

The entire instruction is in Sharon's voiceover. Chapters broken down and easy to get to. I'd recommend actually watching the "bonus feature" first. It's an interview (except there's no one interviewing her)of Sharon and she tells you a bit about the video.

I wouldn't recommend this video for an absolute beginner. And for others who've been dancing already, I'd say do explore the entire lot available now. Some do offer better warm ups, others definitely have stronger and longer drills, and some have more combinations. I do a lot of drills and yoga, and so this nowhere near makes me sweat. If you're like me though, you'll just be delighted to include it in your collection and will love working with a new set of combinations to add to your repertoire. If ten new tribal fusion instructional videos were to be released this month, I'm very afraid I'd buy the lot.

As I said, right at the beginning, no matter what else you get out of this video, you'll get the pleasure of watching this lovely dancer.

Click Here to see more reviews about: Tribal Fusion Bellydance with Sharon Kihara

Product Description:
Sharon Kihara welcomes you to the world of Tribal Fusion Style Bellydance, a beautiful, expressive and stamina building art form.With her first long awaited and popularly demanded instructional DVD, she presents to you a fun and invigorating take on learning to move with strength, grace, and power.With practice and patience, the exercises in Tribal Fusion Bellydance with Sharon Kihara,Technique and Conditioning can help you increase your strength, flexibility and overall muscular control, and contribute to a lifelong healthy dance practice.