Are there basic belly dancing moves?

There are basic belly dancing steps and different teachers call them different things, which is hard because there is not a universal belly dancing language. Thirty years ago we used to talk about setting up a glossary of belly dancing terms. It doesn’t look like that is going to happen. You get master teachers coming from Egypt and elsewhere and everybody has their own names for these basic steps. You can list Cairo steps, but again, people are going to call on different things and we have to see them. All figure 8’s are pretty much basic. There are different kinds of shimmies. There are about four or five different ways to shimmy, the chest or shoulder shimmy and hips. Egyptian belly dancing differs from the Turkish and American belly dancing. So aerobic is pretty much a generic term. The Egyptian style is much more subtle, it’s more difficult, it’s more contained. The modern Egyptian style has a lot of modern dance, jazzy, ballet type steps to it. The old Egyptian style is very kind of funky and you combine those into cabaret. The Turkish styles are a little different. They’re getting more Egyptian I think, but they are also getting a little more classical. It’s a little wilder. Lebanese style can be pretty wild. So there is variation.