Is summer just about beach vacations? 🤔 Obviously not! 👉I remember when I was living in Toronto, summer was a very busy season for wedding and restaurant gigs.

20+ minutes NONSTOP for a SOLO dancer, especially when performing for a non-Arabic audience, can be very tricky… 😬 Do you know how to structure such program, and keep it both engaging for the audience AND doable for you as a performer?

This was my typical ‘formula’ for success 👇👇👇⁣

1️⃣Opening song: You can stick to a classical mejance entrance, or if you are performing for a non-Arabic audience, you can choose some fusion "belly dance fantasy" song, and enter with an extravagant prop.💃💃💃⁣⁣

2️⃣Second song: Usually I try to still keep it as my "performance" song unless the audience is super impatient, and someone just jumps on the dance floor. 😂😂😂 This is something we can't fully control, but there is one trick. 💁‍♀️I almost always preferred to keep the second song not too crazy upbeat... Of course, nothing super slow, or dramatic, but something that would encourage people to still ☝️keep watching rather than rushing into dance.

3️⃣Audience participation: Now it's time to engage people on the dance floor. 🥳🥳🥳 Any upbeat pop song works. It needs to be easy to dance to for any kind of audience. ☝️☝️☝️ I usually put two songs for dancing with guests, and also blend them together, so that there was NO stop ❌in between songs.

4️⃣Closing part: Here comes a drum solo and finale for exit. I like to finish with a drum solo. It guarantees that the overall impression of the show ends on the most upbeat note.💥💥💥If the crowd is very much into dancing, I might still interact with people during the drum solo, or often they naturally formed a circle around me, and watched with enthusiasm. 🤗💃🤗💃⁣⁣

The one exception in this order is when a client asked me in advance to transform my show into an open dance floor, so that their DJ could take over right after me. 👉In that situation I put a drum solo before I start engaging people into dancing, and I cut out the finale (exit) part of the show. 🎶

💁‍♀️This is a BRIEF overview on how my typical program looked like.

Would you like me to share more about my gigs experience here? I remember many more tips and tricks like this, although in the last few years I've mostly been teaching online and traveling. 😜 Let me