00:00Hello, I'm Tina Hoven. At the age of 82, I'm still dancing and believed to be the oldest belly dance teacher in the UK.
00:15I started in the early 70s after being introduced to a dance by an American dancer called Saidi, and I just got hooked.
00:35And so many people who knew me said, oh, Tina, come on, show us what you do, which I did.
00:42A friend of mine who runs a Keep Fitness class invited me to come and show the ladies a bit of belly dancing.
00:50And unbeknown to me, she'd also invited a journalist from our local newspaper in Abingdon, in Oxfordshire.
00:57From that moment, I never looked back. It's been a really exciting journey, doing workshops, summer schools, just teaching people throughout the UK.
01:12I've always been a dancer. Apparently, I was dancing as soon as I could stand on my feet as a toddler.
01:20And my grandmother sent me to ballet classes at the age of two and a half.
01:24My first stage show was at the age of three and a half. And from then on, I never stopped.
01:30In my teens, I did also Gilbert and Sullivan shows and other kinds of stage shows, which was exciting.
01:38I've done all kinds of dancing. I could think of tap, ballet, jazz, what they call jazz now. We didn't call it jazz in my time.
01:48I just took to it. It just was meant to be.
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