Sabah

 BellydanceSuperstars.com > Profiles
Aaron Stipkovich

Fri, 1 Jan 2010, 23:21:00

It is a great testament to the art of bellydance that it attracts such wide and diverse interest from all over the world. When it attracts first class dancers, dancers who would compete well in any dance form but choose bellydance as their chief love it really says something for the special nature of this dance. Sabah is one of the greatest examples today of a consummate dancer who has chosen to make her name in this art.

Sabah became a member of the Bellydance Superstars in 2006, and the company quickly took advantage of her wealth of dance experience and especially her prowess in ballet. Her creative merger of ballet and bellydance was quickly added to the show as a special feature and remains one of the high points in each successive new BDSS show. Sabah brought into the company 20 years of extensive training in classical ballet mixed with an obsession with bellydance. Her arrival also afforded the company a unique opportunity to utilize her talents to train and hone the other BDSS dancers in ballet as it would apply to bellydance and especially to intricate choreography of the the troupe. Her main ballet mentors growing up were award winning teacher and choreographer Homer Bryant and Sherry Moray. As a teenager, Sabah auditioned and was accepted and received some scholarships to spend her summers studying intensively around the US in summer intensive programs including: Houston Ballet, Boston Ballet, San Francisco Ballet, Pacific Northwest Ballet and ABT. No stranger to the stage, Sabah began her professional career performing in numerous professional productions of The Nutcracker continuously for 12 years, working her way up from young adult to principal roles. She has been a part of professional companies including The Ruth Page Dance Foundation in association with Ballet Chicago, Momenta, Chicago’s Festival Ballet Company, and The Alabama Ballet.

It was not until Sabah attended Columbia College to expand her dance education beyond ballet that she discovered her passion for bellydance. This lead her half way around the world to Egypt where she studied with famous Egyptian instructors such as Mahmoud Reda, Raqia Hassan, Aida Nour and many more during her year abroad. She attended the American University in Cairo and joined their folkloric troupe, which performed locally and in the International Folkloric Festival of France. It was also during this time that Sabah met Hallah Moustafa the creative genius behind Sabah's costumes and bellydance mixed with pointe technique. With Hallah's training and well wishes, Sabah auditioned for a license to work in Cairo as a dancer in 2004. This lead to a contract to work as a solo bellydancer with a full band and back-up dancers for the cruise ship the Nile Pharaohs in Cairo.

Sabah is currently a principle dancer with the BDSS and Club Bellydance, and one of the company's top teachers for pure bellydance, beginners to advanced, as well as ballet-bellydance fusion. As such she has taught all over the world including China, Iceland, England, Belgium and Morocco. She is the reigning queen of applying ballet technique and training to enhance a bellydancers overall dance, and BDSS has just released a DVD ("Advance Your Dance with Sabah") on that subject. She also appears in the BDSS DVDs, "30 Days to Vegas", "Babelesque: Live from Tokyo", "The Art of Bellydance: Live from Shanghai", "3D Superstars" (Vol. 1 and 2), and "Bombay Bellywood: Live from Los Angeles".


Sabah is grateful for every opportunity she has had to study, perform, and pass on to others her passion and obsession for dance and especially the art of bellydance.
 
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