Judy Hammond

Judy completed Raqs Sharqi teacher training with Suraya Hilal in 1990, having begun dancing Raqs Sharqi in 1984 with Anne Ashcroft in London and later with Liza Wedgwood in Hertfordshire. She danced Suraya's choreographies in performances at Theatro Technis and the Lillian Bayliss Theatre, and directed many Winchester and London student performances for the Hilal School of Raqs Sharqi.

Following Suraya's move to Italy Judy was one of the team that founded and managed the Raqs Sharqi Society, and helped to create and deliver the Society's first teacher training course, where staff included nationally and internationally renowned teachers of Raqs Sharqi, Alexander Technique, Pilates and anatomy.

For many years Judy taught several weekly classes in Hertfordshire plus weekend workshops and longer residential courses in the UK, Italy and Greece. She produced and/or directed many community performances, and danced in a professional performance which appeared in four UK cities including London.

As well as holding a deep and ever growing love for Egyptian music and dance, Judy is a lifelong dancer and mover, beginning with ballet in childhood and moving on to contemporary dance in early adulthood, studying with several internationally recognised teachers and performers. In the early 1980s she gained a ballet teaching qualification and a Cert. Ed and then a B.Ed (English and psychology), and began to study T'ai Chi and Pilates - both ongoing passions, as is yoga – Judy is planning to take a teacher training course in 2008.

In 1986 Judy qualified as a teacher of Alexander Technique after training for five years at ATA, an exciting and eclectic training school where the staff included representatives from all three major lineages of AT (Carrington, Barlow and McDonald), and as well as the standard AT syllabus there was a strong performance aspect with movement and voice. Subsequently Judy taught regularly for some years as a guest teacher at Fellside Alexander School in Kendal, helping to train several generations of teachers under the guidance of the extraordinarily gifted director Don Burton.

Over the past ten years Judy has been developing Moving Mindfully, an inclusive approach to the teaching of movement based on the principles of Alexander Technique, T’ai Chi and Pilates and including movement material from those disciplines plus yoga and dance. She currently teaches four weekly classes in Alexander Technique and Moving Mindfully at the Letchworth Centre for Healthy Living (recently awarded Best UK Complementary Health Centre www.letchworthcentre.com) where she has been on the teaching staff for twenty years. Her Raqs Sharqi teaching is now focused on workshops and residential courses in the UK, Italy and the beautiful Greek island of Skyros (www.skyros.com).

One of Judy's particular interests is in finding anatomically sound and emotionally comfortable ways to facilitate the learning of the movement language of Raqs Sharqi, and then creating a learning environment in which dancers can feel, engage with and embody the layers of mood and emotion in the music, in ways that foster joy and satisfaction, authenticity and confidence.