Shoshanna in her Fabulous Four Yard Veil DVD focuses on empowering and inspiring you to be to handle long veils gracefully and powerfully while belly dancing. Shoshanna, who is 5’2″, breaks the myth that veils should be half as long as the dancer is tall. She thinks of long veils as a way of extending her reach beyond her fingertips, which allows her dance to reach farther into the space around her. She first teaches a warmup to get you ready to wield long veils. Then she teaches 20 different veil movements that can be down with long veils. Some of the movements cannot be done with shorter veils.
Focuses on empowering and inspiring you to be to handle long veils gracefully and powerfully while belly dancing.
Top Skill Taught
The top skill taught by Shoshanna on this belly dance DVD is how to recover from veil work mistakes, such as dropping the veiling, getting the veil caught on you, and having your fingers wrapped in the veil.
DVD Instructional Focus
The following is an outline of the dance skills taught in the Fabulous Four Yard Veil DVD.
- Shoshanna’s Philosophy
- Warm Up
- About the Veils
- Technique
- Index of Movements
- Troubleshooting
- Combinations
- Group Performance of Combinations
- Live Solo Performance
Shoshanna’s Philosophy
In this chapter as Shoshanna explains her belly dance artistic philosophy, she is seen performing with a long veil while backlit. It is a a very beautiful, ethereal sequence. Dance as an art of time and space living in a sea of music and motion. The music and emotions pull, push, and inspire us to move and draw out the essence of a dancer. The veil accentuates, frames, embellishes, extends, interacts, and and enhances a dancer’s presentations. She feels that within every dancer there is a prop, style, or musical genre – a vehicle through which the unique expression of the dancer may be glimpsed during their performance. Shoshanna feels the veil deepens her connection to the performance experience. It is a visual expression of the heart of the music she loves. To bring you dancing up to the level of art she says you need three equally developed components; technique, a strong body cross trained in multiple disciplines of movement to give a wide range of movements in your dance repertoire, and a vision representing your inspiration and ideas, and knowledge giving you a understanding of tradition, history, and culture. She says that dancers need to spend time trying on the styles of their teachers or popular dancers (past or present) until the dancer can let go of those styles and find a way of dancing that expresses a unique facet of you.
Skill Focus Time Breakdown Infographic
Fabulous Four Yard Veil is about 90 minutes long. The following infographic is an approximate breakdown of how many minutes are included in the DVD for various belly dance veil skills. This DVD focuses mainly on veil work technique.
Warm Up
Shoshanna leads a gentle warm up that has the most emphasis on your neck, shoulders, arms, wrists, and hands as you use these parts of your body a lot when performing veil movements.
About the Veils
Shoshanna shows many different veils. These veils vary in fabric type, size, and shape as well as whether or not they are hemmed or not. She describes how each fabric handles, the type of veil each fabric is best for, and the type of movements each veil is good for.
Technique
Shoshanna starts off the Technique chapter by showing you how to hold a four yard veil correctly with your fingers. Shoshanna has two other dancers that demonstrate the moves with her. They use a variety of different four yard and three yard veils in various materials, such as silk. The veils are either rectangular or half circles. It is nice to be able to see how the same movement looks with different veils. The movements go from easy to difficult. Shoshanna offers tips for recovering from not catching the veil. She also sometimes shows easy belly dance steps that can be incorporated with a veil move.
Veil Movements
She teaches the following belly dance veil movements:
- Flipping the veil
- Overhead toss and catch
- Around the world
- Reveal and conceal
- Through the window
- Fluffing the veil
- Letting go of the veil
- Envelope
- Hook
- Hook with Zorro
- Toss and spin
- The short end
- Toss onto both shoulders
- Butterfly walk
- Over the shoulder arm wraps
- Dive
- Snap open
- Wax on wax off
- Pinwheel
- Lunge, toss, and turn
Index of Movements
Shoshanna performs all the movements in the technique chapter one after another by herself. This is a good review of the movements.
Troubleshooting
More general techniques to prevent veil from getting caught on you costume, your head, or arms or wrapped around your fingers. And if any of these “mistakes” happen, how to gracefully recover. She wants you to become comfortable recovering from veil problems. The most important skill taught is how to “let go” of the veil in order to recover control of the veil or get it uncrossed/untwisted. A slower recovery looks better. Unbalanced off center veil.
Combinations
Shoshanna teaches two short long veil combinations that focus on the transitions between veil work movements. Combination 1 has less complex transitions than combination 2. Shoshanna demonstrates the combination alone first and then has several practice repeats with two other dancers, who use use different types of long veils.
Group Performance of Combinations
Shoshanna and several other dancers in practice wear perform each combination 2-3 times in a row. Amazingly, even these short, simple combinations look great when performed as a group.
Live Solo Performance
Shoshanna dances on stage in a cabaret costume with a stunning black and red four yard rectangular veil. In this performance she clearly shows that the veil does not need to be in constant movement in order to be a beautiful prop in the dance. She also illustrates letting go of the veil and picking it up again later in the dance.
Music Used
The following is the music used in the Fabulous Four Yard Veils with Shoshanna DVD.
- Durme Durme by Eliyahu Sills from Songs of Qadim
Dancer Skill Level – Intermediate+
We rate this DVD as suitable for an Intermediate+ dancer. You should be comfortable with some basic belly dance moves and being able to do them while manipulating the veil. Also, working with a longer veil is more difficult than working with a shorter veil.
However, no matter what your skill level, you will probably enjoy the ethereal feeling of dancing with a long veil.
DVD Review Rating – 5 Stars
We give Shoshanna’s Fabulous Four Yard Veil DVD a 5-star rating because of its complete, clear instruction on how to have a well-behaved long veil while belly dancing. Her tips on how to troubleshoot veil movement problems is something you won’t find on many other instructional videos. Also, Shoshanna’s costumed performance is sure to inspire you to try to perfect your four yard veil work.
Focuses on empowering and inspiring you to be to handle long veils gracefully and powerfully while belly dancing.