Created by Neon, New York City-based star of classic bellydance and dance fitness guru, Piece of Cake - The Bellydance Workout for Beginners is a 1-hour-and-20-minute dance fitness and instruction experience that will refresh your body and mind with graceful, evocative, sensual movement, and wash away fatigue and anxiety. It will help tone your lower body and your arms and give you that lifted, confident carriage.
Neon believes that, as a form of fitness, dance should retain its artistic and evocative nature and rich continuous texture. She created her dance fitness format focusing on dance combinations as a unit, never 'drilling' moves out of the context. Each combination - even if it is only 3-4 steps - is a mini-poem... a story... a toy to play with.
Piece of Cake uses an absolute-beginner-level dance vocabulary and allows for more repetitions and recurring dance motifs than Neon's other workouts. Neon guides you with cues and technique reminders every step of the program, her combinations are built step by step starting slow and then increasing the tempo, and the dance routines are easy to follow, even if you don’t have dance experience.
There are 7 segments in the Piece of Cake workout focusing on bellydance hipwork, shimmy, and upper body accents. These sections are very feminine, flirty and feel like dancing at a party. They alternate with sequences of graceful fluid poses of an evocative, mysterious flair. The pose sequences allow you to stretch, relax into the music and savor the meanings and moods of the dance flow.
The last segment of the workout is made entirely of poses, fluid transitions, gestures and other elements of expressive dance body language featured in the workout. It’s a cooldown with a hypnotic flow that feels like a personal ritual.
There is also a Tutorial section, where the dance steps from the workout are explained and broken down in detail, including all the building blocks of the arm patterns, gestures and dance poses.
Even though the Piece of Cake workout is designed for beginners, it is great for dancers of all levels as daily or weekly dance practice for muscle conditioning and to increase fluidity and range of motion in hipwork.