"Lama Bada" Intermediate Belly Dance Choreography with Neon

Lama Bada Belly Dance Choreography Course with Neon. Learn a multitude of semai rhythm combinations that fall together into an evocative and dramatic bellydance choreography. Step-by-step + practice with music. Level: Intermediate-Advanced, "Today we’ll start learning a choreography to Lama Bada, a song that uses 10/8 rhythm "semai." This song belongs to the classical Arabic poetry/music genre of muwashahat that emerged sometime in the 9th century and flourished in the Arab world from Syria to Al Andalus."

Music: "Lama Bada" from album "Bellydance New York with Amir Naoum Chehade"

"Muwashahat was a genre of medieval Arabic poetry and music written to sing these poems - it was born sometime in the 9th century and flourished in the Arab world from Syria to Andalus. Typically a muwasha poem consisted of 5 stanzas, alternating with a refrain. Lama Bada has this classic structure, and we’ll first listen to the song to understand this structure.

The rhythm of Lama Bada, Semai, is one of the many muashahat rhythms - it is also called “heavy samai” and it counts in 10s, it’s a 10/8 rhythm - 12345678910, and if you listen to each measure, you will hear these 5 prominent beats 1-2, 123…. 12 123….When we choreograph to this beat, we typically acknowledge this structure, very often you will have a dance phrase with accents on 12 and 123. Not necessarily, of course. As a matter of fact, if you articulate every accent you dance becomes monotonour, but as we learn to dance to semai and choreograph to this beat, we’ll pay attention to these accents. Semai is common in drum solos too, by the way, so all the combinations and sequences we learn can be plucked out of our choreography to be used as drum solo vignettes."