Product Description

Lavish and overflowing with deep, rich, feminine movement, Luscious: The Bellydance Workout is made of 100% of bellydance moves and steps It is gentle, but it will work your body to enhance your muscle tone, flexibility, and fluidity, and promote weight loss. With a special focus on muscle conditioning and elongation, the program works each group of muscles deeply - using carefully built combinations to switch between muscle groups and add intensity to the workout.

Luscious: The Bellydance Workout features gorgeous music and a beautiful flow undiluted by conventional exercises. Systematically addressing each group of muscles to deliver a total body workout, it creates an entertaining and aesthetically fulfilling dance experience inspiring you to do your best in executing each move with the proper depth, range of motion, and articulation.

A true dance experience as much as a fitness experience, Luscious is beginner level, but it offers you a perspective of challenge and growth. The workout consists of 7 sections, each building consistently upon the dance vocabulary covered in the previous sections through its own series of combinations. The combinations include classic bellydance transitions between steps to help you create the muscle memory to ingrain dance in your body.

Luscious is an instructional workout. It introduces the dance vocabulary in a careful, systematic way and contains an extensive tutorial section breaking down each move used in the workout.

If this is one of your first steps in bellydance, this program will be a fun introduction to all the basic groups of bellydance moves and transitions. If you are a dancer, it s a great way to practice the core of the bellydance technique and vocabulary through functional drills performed in the context of dance combinations and transitions creating an extra layer of muscle memory that isolated drills do not provide.

Workout duration - 45 min.

Tutorial section - 50 min.

The Circles section explores circular bellydance moves. It follows a slow-to-moderate tempo, working both the lower and upper body through isolations.

Next is the Infinity Loops section. Together with the stretching and toning impact of every move in this section, infinity loops are the ultimate exercise in fluidity.

Undulations maintain flexibiilty of your spine and help develop deep awareness of your core. They are also a challenging full-body muscle-conditioning exercise.

The bellydance hipwork section exercises your thighs, glutes, and abdominal muscles. In the Hip Accents section we ll perform traditional bellydance hip moves and then weave them together with the fluid movements: circles, infinity loops and undulations. Hipwork is what gives bellydance such vibrancy and party appeal - these steps look great on any dance floor.

The Shimmy - that effortless shaking of the hips - is actually hard work! Join us to shake your way through a few styles of shimmy, and enjoy the wide range of shimmy flavors.

The Body Line section is built of moves involving your total body. It shifts focus from working individual body parts to dance steps that offer the most stretching and give you a dancerly posture and carriage.

The last section is a short dance routine choreographed entirely of the bellydance moves featured in the workout.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #9327 in DVD
• Released on: 2008-05-27
• Rating: Exempt
• Aspect ratio: 1.33:1
• Formats: Colour, DVD-Video, NTSC, Widescreen
• Original language: English
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 120 minutes

Review
A langurous, yet intense escape into the beauty of the dance... By Irina Dumitrescu (New Haven, Connecticut, US) Did we really need another bellydance-based workout? I wouldn't have thought so, but Neon, as usual, has gone and proven my expectations wrong.

Luscious is an exquisitely made program, with more good qualities than I can enumerate. The costumes and setting are gorgeous -- nothing like the typical brightly-lit aerobics studio -- and Neon advises you at the beginning to dress up for it and join the three dancers here in making the movement special. This is the kind of thing that sounds cheesy, but I did it, and it makes sense: how will you forget about bad body image or those extra pounds if you're wearing ugly workout wear? Dressing up makes you feel like you're dancing, not punishing yourself.

The instruction itself is taught in sections themed Circles, Infinity Loops, Undulations, Hip Accents, Shimmy, and Body Line. Each dancer leads two of the sections: she stands at the front and her voiceover describes the movements to be done. What I really like about this is that the sections weren't assigned randomly; instead, each section bears the particular dancer's imprint, and showcases her strengths. It's subtle, but you start to notice that Neon leads complicated, quick-changing combinations, Blanca shows her wonderful, large, and sensuous movements, and Sarah Skinner adds an upbeat Turkish feel to the shimmy section. This made the instructors seem much less like exchangeable dancing bodies, and much more like teachers with particular areas of expertise.

The movements are varied, and quite a few combinations are introduced and repeated from two to six times. This is not a four of this and four of that drill. In fact, I would suggest that complete beginners start with a different video. This would be great for advanced beginners like me, who are not expert enough for a complicated choreo with tons of layering, but get bored when everything comes in fours and is repeated ad infinitum.

All along, the dancers offer tips on putting emotion into the steps, on maintaining form, and on making movements deeper and stronger. While the dancing is rarely fast-paced, the slowness of the movements is often more challenging and grueling. The workout made me sweat (though it might not make everyone), but more importantly, it challenged me to maintain grace, form, and muscle control while learning the combinations. I couldn't believe it when the forty-five minutes were over -- it felt like fifteen!

If you have weak knees, you might want to be careful with some of the lunges and plies; on the other hand, there aren't a lot of them, and they're done slowly enough that you can be careful. I'll also repeat the warning that this might be a little hard for complete beginners who aren't already good at picking up choreography. However, the video does have a well-indexed instructional section which describes all the movements used in the workout. As a step up, there's a version of the workout with music alone, and no voice over.

In case my enthusiasm wasn't clear enough, I really think WDNY has a winner with this video. It's simple, but also simple enough to do regularly and to grow into. At the same time, even once you have learned the step combinations, adding graceful arm and handwork (to say nothing of being aware of facial expressions, head positions, and dancer's poise) poses an extra layer of difficulty. And finally, the movements are, quite simply, beautiful. You will be happy to be dancing. --Amazon.com (US)

About the Actor
When Sarah Skinner was 11 she attended an Oriental Dance show by Gamila of Montreal (who was in her 70s). The mesmerizing beauty of that performance moved and inspired Sarah: That day she knew she would become a belly dancer.

She started taking bellydance classes, and grew up being a part of a wonderful dance troupe in upstate New York performing in Montreal and the Northeastern US. Sarah's Oriental Dance style incorporates elements of Turkish tradition, and her repertoire includes dancing with veil, Spanish fan, boa fans, candelabrum, and hand candles.

Sarah s passion is dance theater and live music. Based in New York City, she is a sought-after performer at top New York night clubs and restaurants featuring bellydance with live music. -0- Blanca has devoted her life to the pursuit of unveiling her own language as a dancer and artist.

Against all odds, she followed the career of a belly dancer from her childhood in Mexico where the profession did not yet exist. Says Blanca: Since i was a teen there has been nothing as important to me as becoming a good dancer. The dance has taught me compassion, made me grow in infinite ways and continues to allow me to tap into my deepest artistic expression.

She continues: I became a belly dancer against my conservative beginnings... against the notion that to be a dancer one has to be a size zero, and start ballet at age 3. After years of painful work, I realized that it was all for nothing--until i connected with my spiritual side and began to dance from there...

Blanca has performed onstage with Alabina and the surrealist gypsy punk band Gogol Bordello. Her television credits include the Bollywood Music Awards, which aired worldwide, as well as multiple appearances on Spanish television networks Univision and Telemundo, Fox and BBC. She has performed at venues as diverse as Trump's Taj Mahal, the Brooklyn Museum of art and Lincoln Center. Other credits include: Rolling Stone, Universal Pictures, MTV, and Disney.

Customer Reviews

The Three Graces
"Luscious" is a terrific bellydance instruction DVD geared towards beginners, though intermediate students may enjoy and learn from it too, as Neon, Blanca, and Sarah are superb dancers and teachers, and the choreography is varied enough to find interest and enjoyment for a very long time.

After the "Welcome" by Neon, the dancers guide you through the moves, each taking their turn at being in the front and doing the teaching. There is also the option of a "Step by Step Tutorial," which explains each move in detail, as well as an option to practice just with the music, without the voice-over instructions. The music is marvelous, all with a traditional flavor in its instrumentation and melodies.

Your instructors:
Neon is a stunning blonde born in Russia; a famed dancer, teacher, and choreographer, whose technique is dazzling, and creativity amazing. She has helped bring the art of bellydance to a new level. Blanca is a goddess. Born in Mexico, her sensual style and grace have few equals. Sarah Skinner is a dancer I'm less familiar with, but she is incredibly impressive and beautiful, and fits in well with Neon and Blanca. These 3 dancers are the epitome of "The Three Graces."

"Luscious" is very well produced, and the dancers are filmed in a simple stage setting with excellent lighting, making it easy to discern and follow the movements. The costuming is also lovely, in shades of teal and red, and adds to the visual beauty of the program. This is a great way to learn bellydancing, relieve stress, get your exercise and have fun at the same time. If you want weight loss, many experts agree that the best way to lose is through doing continual movement as is done on this DVD, rather than in aerobics. "Luscious" is a superb DVD for your dance instruction library, and if you're just starting out with bellydancing, it will inspire you to keep practicing and learning.

Luscious Belly Dancing DVD
While I agree this is an excellent video - I would like to add, due to the dancers legs being covered in their costumes it is difficult to see many of the knee/leg movements.

Luscious: The Belly Dance Workout for Beginners(2008)
This is a very good "work at it" DVD for beginners and intermediates. There is only one way to learn belly dancing and that is practice and practice, drilling and drilling and refining the basic moves and getting them into the muscle memory. I have been doing belly dancing for a few months now and I am beginning to realise that if I am ever to be any good at this art, I have to be prepared to put a lot of hours and a lot of practice into it and that's exactly what this DVD is showing us to do. My only complaint is that Neon, Blanca and Sarah were dressed up in their performance costumes which prevented somewhat observing how the movements are ment to be done.