The Egyptian Walk is an absolute classic move in Egyptian-style bellydance, but different teachers have different ways of doing it and teaching it.
Even in a tiny country like the UK we have different methods, but around the world, there must be countless variations of teaching and performing the move.
Indeed, most people don’t even call it the Egyptian Walk. In the US it’s called the 3/4 shimmy, some people call it a shimmy walk, others call it a hagalla step…it can get really confusing!
When I was first teaching full time, whenever I met another teacher at a workshop or festival, at some point I would grab them and ask: “how do YOU teach the Egyptian Walk?”
The reason I wanted to know, was that I’d asked many people to teach me and I’d never had a good breakdown of the move. It was as if everyone was sort of fudging the step and not really knowing how they did it.
I didn’t want to be that sort of teacher. I like to know exactly how a move works, so I can teach it successfully.
At the time I was also a regular participant on a brilliant online forum (remember those?) called Bhuz. Hundreds of teachers and students from around the English speaking world would spend hours discussing bellydance history, moves, styles, music, costuming…. you name it, if it was bellydance we would talk about it.
And one of the things we would regularly do was try to break down moves for bellydance students on the forum. In those pre-video days we were having to explain in written form (I remember endless attempts to describe how to do a jewel in words – another of those tricky moves with endless variations!)
