The video's opening credits include a nice half-minute clip of Katia performing graceful arm movements to flowing music. In brief introductory comments, she provides a helpful table of contents of what the video contains.

The video is divided into the following major sections:

•     Warm-ups for arms
•     Snake Arms
•     Percussive Arms
•     Arms With Other Movements
•     Choreography
•     Performance

I found the warm-ups and teaching of arm movements to be the strongest parts of the video, and the choreography the weakest part. The performance provided a nice closing, especially since Katia's performance used some of the arm movements taught on the video.

In the warm-ups part, Katia made several excellent points about correct posture and the need to warm up the whole body. I agreed with her decision to not teach whole body warm-ups on this video--she appropriately kept the focus on arms, but also appropriately mentioned that full-body warm-ups were important and should also be done.

In the sections dedicated to teaching assorted arm movements, Katia introduced a wide variety of arm moves suitable for a variety of musical styles. She also did a nice job of showing how to incorporate those various arm movements into the dance through combining them with various hip moves. Some of the moves she taught were fairly simple, and others more challenging, so this video could keep a beginner busy for some time while still having something good to offer more experienced dancers.

I found the teaching portion of the choreography section hard to follow. It showed Katia going through each move in slow motion while voiceover described what was being done. The music intended to accompany the choreography was not played until after this voiceover of the entire routine from beginning to end had finished, so it seemed really out of context and hard to figure out how the moves would match up with the music. If I were a beginning dancer, my first reaction would probably be, "Huh? Run that by me again, please?" Since it is possible to rewind a video over and over, a really determined student could probably figure it out, but I wasn't determined enough to try! Still, I'd recommend that beginner-level dancers make the effort to learn the choreography, since it provides a nice structure for learning how to put a variety of moves together into a completed dance.

Following the choreography was a 5 1/2 minute performance showing Katia on stage at a belly dancing event. She used a beautiful rainbow-colored silk veil, and did a nice show.

The video ended with closing credits, followed by what appeared to be outtakes from the choreography instruction. Unfortunately, they weren't quite funny enough to work well as bloopers. I think the video's ending would have been better without the outtakes--the 2 1/2 minutes devoted to them could have been better spent taking more time to teach the choreography.

kualitas DVD Original
durasi 46 menit
rilis 2000
detil lihat dipreview