The Dancer Leading the Musician, by Tracy Helming, www.alimahdances.com

July 23, 2007


I have always believed that if you learn to do one thing well, you will be able to do well whatever your heart desires. I spent 25 years pursuing the art of violin performance, and towards the end of that time felt like I was finally beginning to really communicate and experience what I wanted to with my instrument. After my first child, Savannah, was born, I turned to bellydance to reacquaint myself with adventure, femininity, and playfully irreverent sensuality. I knew immediately that this dance form was somehow a link to my very core, and was something that I could not tolerate being a novice at for long. I began taking lessons, performing, competing, and, yes, buying costumes, before I had any inkling of the journey on which this pursuit would lead me. During much of this, I felt it was my ability to play the violin that gave me insight into effectively practicing and improving my dance technique. Ultimately, however, my struggles to master belly dance have profoundly changed my approach to violin playing.

I used to curse bellydance because it didn’t seem to follow a standardized pedagogical structure. There was no core curriculum that would allow me to gauge my progress against that of other students or against a set of criteria that had evolved over decades and centuries, as in the instrumental world. Individual bellydance teachers seemed to teach a variety of steps, each movement having a variety of names, with no universal consensus on foundational technique. A camel to one teacher could be an undulation to another, and a reverse undulation to yet another. A standard undulation was taught as a vertical movement by some, a horizontal movement by others, generated through breathing by some, through stomach rolls by others, and from a rocking of the feet by yet somebody else. Though it was maddening to try and muck my way through this haze of lessons, workshops, and videos, out of this anarchy came a startlingly new and breathtakingly beautiful way of learning: learning through desire. Not a desire to do something the correct way, but a desire to do something the way my eyes and soul wanted to see it.

While studying violin at the Yale School of Music, I had a substitute teacher for a few lessons while my regular teacher, Sidney Harth, was conducting an orchestra in South Africa. I remember the end of one lesson he gave me very, very clearly. As I was packing up my violin he told me how his violin friends and he used to gather around a record player and listen to recordings of Fritz Kreisler, listen and analyze his tone, his vibrato. He showed me how they would try and teach each other to reproduce a sound like his; he demonstrated by rocking the pad of his finger on the glass of the coffee table in the studio. There was some fire this teacher was trying to light in me by telling me this, but at the time I was too concerned with playing the notes in the Carmen Fantasy, getting the fingerings, the bowings, to understand that he was trying to get me to teach myself through my own search for a sound that was unique to me. I was too caught up in the mental status I gave myself by being able to play a certain piece to really get caught up in the burning desire to hear a bright edge to my spiccato, or the juicy waves of my vibrato. Had I yearned for those things, I would have noticed their absence in my playing and worked towards the sound that my ear begged for. In the end, the piece would have played itself.

My best tools in the pursuit of belly dance have been a live stage and a video camera. I have had fantastic teachers, have taken countless hours of workshops, and have enough notes to paper the White House if I could get past the secret service. Watching others perform, watching myself perform, and trying to figure out what essential nuances, textures, gestures, and architecture make my favorite dancers so hot has been the source of guidance I have used as I try to find my essential voice in this dance. I am motivated by a desire to express ideas, connect with an audience, and describe with my own movements what I long to watch when others perform. There is always an endless road of development ahead of me.

Recently I decided to take a violin audition, and began digging out my old orchestral excerpts. At first I called a violinist in the area in order to take some lessons, get his advice and impressions, but haven’t yet set up a lesson time. Instead, I am listening to my sound with the full force of my heart and my opinions. I am finding that the most important step is stopping when a note does not ring to the sound I have in mind. Revelation comes from stopping when something isn’t working, and pursuing what I want from my violin until my hands and violin give me what I am asking for. Playing the excerpt well enough to win the audition is not the goal. My goal is to work at it until I can play it to the standard of my imagination.