If you love cane and can get your hands on it, you should. This is one of those DVDs that everyone recommends and after managing to get my own copy, I can see why.

Nourhan Sharif, who is an internationally famous dancer and instructor of Middle Eastern dance, manages to cram in a lot of material in a relatively short (under an hour) DVD. The DVD goes comprehensively over various cane/assaya technique. There isn’t a great deal of drilling and no choreography to learn, but it’s easy enough to repeat a section and the goal is to teach assaya technique. The demonstration of what to is excellent and Nourhan’s verbal explanations of both what to do and what not to do are clear and easy to understand.

The DVD ends with a lovely performance by Nourhan, who radiates joy in this performance. I thoroughly recommend it as a resource for those who do not have access to an instructor who does assaya well (though is always optimal) or are looking for an additional resource. I’m not sure what level to gauge it for; I’m going to go with a generic “not beginner”, because I imagine it would be difficult for a beginner to figure out how to use this technique.

Small warning: this DVD is quite hard to come by. Occasionally, a store will offer it or a dancer will sell his/hers on Bhuz, but those are truly rare occurrences. If I have one complaint about it, the complaint would be how difficult it is to obtain a company. Well, actually two. I wish there were a follow up to this DVD.

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