Belly Dancing for Fun & Fitness

In this beginner-level doumbek course, Amir Naoum teaches Southwest Asian drum rhythms and doumbek techniques to drummers and dancers.

Sisters Veena and Neena Bidasha have been bellydancing since their childhood and have travelled around the world learning, refining, performing, and teaching this ancient and erotic dance. Now they have created a series of videos to instruct students in the arm movements, shimmies, and sultry looks of bellydancing. BASIC DANCE begins with a brisk warm-up routine and continues with a step-by-step tutorial isolating the upper and lower body while slowly demonstrating each hip drop, shimmy, and undulation in the full choreographed routine.

Stark...sublime...intense. The phenomenon of Gothic Bellydance or "Raks Gothique" is a multitude of poetic visions born out of the Goth, or Gothic, subculture, music, imagery and fashion, and expressed in the language of Bellydance.

A collection of 16 classic performances by the most prominent Egyptian belly dancers of the 20th century. The selections are from appearances in movies and other shows over a 30 year period.

A woman stands in front of a building, a chair to her left, dressed in black, full skirt, quarter sleeves, and a scooped bodice. Her hair is piled high. She bows slightly, and, with finger cymbals, begins to dance the cooch.

Enter our dark labyrinth and meet an exotic array of striking characters and creatures: Souls possessed by an ancient evil spirit; a black-winged fallen angel; an incarnation of Kali and Isis; a leopard-woman from the island of Dr. Moreau; a tormented silent movie vamp; a Gothic “Lolita” in love with Death; a wanderer in spiritual exile; a snake morphing into a human; a seeker violated and redeemed by divine domination; a Siren exercising her lethal charms; a worshipper of a winged serpent; a flame whose deadly habits are all-too-human; a run-away gargoyle; a maiden transforming into a warrior sorceress; a haunting deja vu where victim, violator and avenger merge into one... and more.

Leni takes Rafi to meet her family in Madrid. Leni's family is Jewish - mother, father, older sister and daughter, brother, and grandfather. Rafi is Palestinian, in Spain since age 12. Before her father returns from work, Leni reveals Rafi's origins. He accidentally drops a block of frozen soup out the flat window, probably killing a passerby. Leni initiates a cover-up and Rafi figures out the body is probably Leni's father. The body disappears and without telling the rest of the family what they know, Leni and Rafi organize a search for dad. Mom is sure he's having an affair. Leni's belly-dancing sister kisses Rafi. Her brother grabs a rifle to shoot the Arab. Can anything be put right?

In the 1980s U.S. Rep. Charlie Wilson, Texas socialite Joanne Herring and CIA agent Gust Avrakotos form an unlikely alliance to boost funding for Afghan freedom fighters in their war against invading Soviets. The trio's successful efforts to finance these covert operations contributes to the fall of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War.

A Brooklyn postal worker follows her Egyptian boyfriend to Cairo where she takes belly-dancing lessons from a legendary but disgraced Egyptian dancer.

A stranded carnival dancer takes on a corrupt political boss when she marries into small-town society.

A doctor uses special eye drops to give himself x-ray vision, but the new power has disastrous consequences.