Belly dancing is practised and enjoyed by people around the world, but few realise that the name they lovingly know it by was really just an accident.
Rightfully, Belly Dance should be known as Oriental Dance or Raks Sharqi, "Dance of the East", a collection of similar dance styles that originated in the Near East, Middle East and/or Far East. There are actually more names that could be used depending on the individual styles such as "Baladi" meaning "dance from the country" or the Turkish and Greek name "Oryantal Dansi" meaning "Dance Oriental".
So, where did the name "Belly Dance" come from?
This genre of dance was not properly introduced to the Western World until the 18th century and even then was rarely seen until the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In 1893, Oriental Dancers performed at the World Exposition in Chicago and caused quite a stir due to cultural attitudes of the time. This was further exacerbated by burlesque performers, who took aspects of the dance and created their own titillating routines that bore no real resemblance to the traditional dances of the East but convinced Westerners that it was a sexual and immoral dance.
In a French review, a similar style of dance was labeled "Danse Du Ventre" or "Dance of the Stomach" which is believed to have quickly developed into the name Belly Dance. Even today that name causes dismay among lovers of Oriental Dance who see it as tainting the origins of the ancient art form.
Belly Dance is not even a good description. Belly Dancing does require movement of the abdominal muscles but is a dance of the whole body, incorporating upper and lower body muscle isolations, graceful arm movements, hip rolls and pelvic tilts.
However unsuitable the name might be, Belly Dance is known and recognised the world over. Instructors may prefer to label their classes "Oriental Dance" or "Raks Sharqi" but the recognition that the name Belly Dance brings will continue to ensure its use, at least in the West, for many years to come.
Electrifying music, foot-tapping dance beats and unlimited masti. When it comes to all this and more, Venom is definitely the place to be iwith the DJs ensuring the revellers enjoy themselves to the hilt. Party-hoppers, who had come dressed to kill, made sure they made most of the music as they hit the dance floor with a vengeance and were seen partying as the night got more and more groovy.
Those who were too tired to hit the dance-floor, decided to relax over drinks and snacks or played billiards. A reveller admitted, “Dancing is a great stressbuster.
Not only do you feel great, but it also helps you lose weight!” Surely, when it comes to de-stressing, it’s always great to dance your blues away. So, dance till you drop!
Wasn't it Friedrich Nietzsche who said he "would believe only in a god that knows how to dance"?
As I am reading your article on pg. 1, "Folklore requires protection: Expert", (Oct. 28) about the World Heritage Cities Conference, it reminds me of these amazing little girls learning traditional Balinese dances at the Agung Rai Museum of Art in Ubud, Bali.
With unstoppable commitment, everyday a group of more than 40 young girls, ages five to 14, attend these free classes for two hours.
Yes, you read it right, free classes! Supported by the museum that provides the best teachers, pays for the salaries, costumes, attires and make up, these classes have been set up by Agung Rai himself as a manifestation of his vision, a unique concept for a museum: keeping the arts alive -- out of the rooms, out of the box -- shaped by the uniqueness of the cultural traditions of Bali.
"Because children are the future", Agung Rai says, educating them and transmitting this heritage to them is essential. Along with dance comes gamelan music, painting, carving and batik classes -- all part of a unique tradition. But support and protection are needed or the classes will come to an abrupt end for lack of funds.
Watch them: Learning and rehearsing timeless gestures, specific movements of the hands, gracefully positioning the head, the eyes -- all movements patiently taught and ritually codified in a meaningful way.
"We pray to Saraswati to bless our dancing," explain the girls who sprinkle each other with holy water at the temple before joining the class. Actually, maybe it's not a bad idea to pray for the World Heritage Conference as well.
Pray that it urgently brings to fruition that "international protection instrument" they keep talking about -- before the gods themselves lose their memory of the steps and the children are left with TV programs only.
Dance For her new work, The Sublime Is Us, Luciana Achugar had an eye on Dance Theater Workshop—but rather than its main theater, she was drawn to the third-floor studio space. “At first, I wasn’t thinking of performing there—I was mainly thinking of using mirrors,” she says over brunch in Williamsburg. “That’s where my idea came from, and in rehearsal I realized, Why build a set when what I’m actually doing and what my work has been about is the working process? I should just bring the people to the dance studio.”
In the intimate production, to be performed over the next two weeks and allowing only 30 audience members at a time, Achugar uses the mirror as a tool. “I wouldn’t say specifically that the piece is about that, but it’s a big protagonist,” she says. Though Achugar, 38, is reluctant to divulge the particulars of audience placement—in this instance, it’s best to save the surprise for showtime—she acknowledges being fascinated by the relationship between form and content.
“Form reveals itself visually,” she says. “I do look at myself in the mirror when I make work. I’ve always done that, and I know that in contemporary dance, a lot of people don’t. I’m always keeping the eyes of the audience in my mind so when I look in the mirror I can kind of pretend that I’m looking at them. I’m interested in that relationship; it’s not that I’m dancing and people happen to be watching, but that it’s about that gaze. I’m obsessed with that.”
She uses the act of feeling and looking—the sensation of doing something and the image it produces—throughout The Sublime Is Us, in which she dances along with Hilary Clark, Jennifer Kjos, Melanie Maar and Beatrice Wong (the alias of Jmy Leary, who also designs the costumes under the name of Icon). With her new work, Achugar is moving away from the idealist themes she explored in dances like Exhausting Love at Danspace Project and Franny and Zooey, in which the focus was the group as a collective. Now, things are different, and it’s not just because she is four-and-a-half months pregnant (the father is her boyfriend, choreographer and dancer Chase Granoff). Achugar is figuring out how to be a director.
“For one thing, it just happened naturally that I use a lot of symmetry in this piece,” she says. “It’s four dancers and myself, so a lot of what I designed in symmetry I’m not in because I had to be outside in order to design them. It’s not like I’m obviously directing everyone—it’s more subtle, but I am in the piece somewhat as the choreographer. In some ways, I feel like I’m drawing myself out. I am very much a hippie, and I like the utopian idea of us deciding everything together, but I do have a very specific vision. I do like what I want, and I’ve allowed that part of me to come out more.” She laughs. “To make your vision your own, you have to direct. I’ve had to work really hard at that in this piece. I like to be nice and I’m not your typical person where the dancers leave crying—even though I have made the dancers cry. You can’t help it.”
The score by composer and visual artist Michael Mahalchick is a combination of electronic music and instrumentation. “It has that kind of krautrocky, psychedelic feel,” he explains. “It’s going to be a pretty psychedelic soundscape for this show, which is really fun for me. But with the mirror being such a huge part of the show, that seems appropriate.”
In The Sublime Is Us, Achugar draws upon her dancers’ individuality—more than usual, she suspects—with sensual movement in curves and spirals that captures the feeling of unraveling. Yet she also focuses as much on the experiential nature of dance. She remains intrigued by the notion of the double or, as she puts it, the dichotomy of dance serving as both a visual art form and an experiential one.
“Not that I want to make a statement that one is more important than the other,” she says. “But I feel like I’m dealing with that, and asking myself that question I do think I have a reaction against people who only see dance as a visual thing, like you’re watching TV or something. I also feel like I want to be responsible for the fact that it is a visual tool. I’m still in search of finding the meeting of the two. Not that you’re going to be like Martha Graham, because it’s a different time now, but I am interested in dance and movement for a reason, and I’m still looking.”
The NAC kicked off its new all-Canadian dance series Thursday night with a sweet/salty double bill by Coleman Lemieux & Compagnie.Married dancer-choreographers Laurence Lemieux and Bill Coleman have earned their place in the Canadian dance pantheon, with an international reputation for their stunning productions of works by James Kudelka. Successfully based in Montreal for years, Coleman-Lemieux recently opened a new studio and performance space in a former Salvation Army soup kitchen in Toronto, where their two children are enrolled in the National Ballet School. Their newest work, Interiors, is a family affair, with prominent roles for Jimmy Coleman, 12, and his nine-year-old sister Juliette.Set to Schubert's melancholic B flat Major and A minor Piano Sonatas, Interiors is crafted as a triptych showcasing the intimate, delicately shifting dynamics of a loving family. The work opens with the four family members arranged within a large square made up of stacks and piles of letters, papers and books. Each individual character has her or his distinct language of movement: the nervous, watchful mother; the father, who is distracted yet in search of a deeper connection with his wife and children; the boy, poised at that awkward juncture between childish games and teenage disdain; and the girl, blissfully confident as only girls that age can be.The middle section is a strange, powerful duet for Lemieux and Coleman in which they almost never touch. Her children flown, the mother seems lost, manic, punch-drunk. Her partner is in his own world, until he finally notices her anguish and takes her, still fighting and twitching, in his arms. It's a beautiful moment. Unfortunately, the final section is the work's weakest. The two kids monkey about while their parents sleep, and the choreography deteriorates into the shallow and cutesy.From family-friendly to R-rated: the second work on the program is In Camera, an early Kudelka piece from his Toronto Dancemakers days. Although the movement isn't overtly sexual, In Camera is nonetheless about sex, and all the dark, flirty, twisted games people play to have it.The seven dancers slink and sniff around each other; there's a saucy little pas de trois that ends in a sweaty tangle of she, he and she. But Kudelka offers some caution to go along with the lust: in their forlorn, horizontal duet, Lemieux and the formidable Dan Wild convey all the bitter emptiness of the post one-night-stand blues.
For many, belly dancing suggests a certain alluring art and recalls a mysterious tradition of ancient history. For Memie Watson, of Beverly, it’s a good part of her life.
A full-time paramedic in Danvers for 20 years and a Justice of the Peace on the weekends, Watson is also the coordinator of the North Shore chapter of the North East Belly Dance Association. Her chapter will present a belly dance performance entitled, “It’s a Great Belly,” at the Northshore Unitarian Universalist Church in Danvers, 323 Locust St., on Sunday, Oct. 26.
Watson, 52, grew up in the area studying ballet, tap, and jazz, but it wasn’t until the late 1980s when the art of belly dance captivated her.
“I was at a party, and I asked the hired dancer, ‘what are you doing?’”
Soon after, Watson enrolled in classes and has become a “professional student” of belly dance, she insists. For the past five years, she has worked as a belly dance instructor at local studios, as well as North Shore Community College.
“I teach in a non-judgmental environment. Egos have to be checked at the door,” Watson said. Her students have ranged in age from 13 to 72, and she’s even taught one male over the years.
“By the time the elderly women leave, they say, ‘I never knew my body could do that.’ It’s for every age, shape, and size of women and men,” Watson added.
Gail Bernard, 39, of Danvers, shares a similar mantra.
“I was a stay-at-home mom of two after being a professional. I wanted to do something just for me,” she said.
A former environmental scientist, Bernard enrolled in one of Memie Watson’s belly dance classes two and half years ago. There Bernard, or “Ghaleena” (her dancer name), met nine other women with whom she formed the troupe Sisters in Dance, a fusion style group whose members’ ages range from 26 to 53. The group performs “family-style” belly dancing for birthday parties and Girl Scout events.
This past Sunday the Sisters in Dance joined other local belly dance troupes at Jahayra Flores’ Belly Moves studio on Main Street in Peabody to demonstrate the dance for the Danvers Herald before the upcoming event.
Standing in a black robe behind the counter in her studio, Flores explained: “Belly dancing is so captivating and mesmerizing. It makes you feel so beautiful.”
As a self-taught dancer and instructor and a former Certified Nurse Assistant, Flores opened her studio in April 2008 after working out of the basement of her Peabody home for four years.
“When I first started, the idea was to get my younger cousin away from the streets and bad influences,” Flores explained. “And I’ve found that it works.”
“It kind of motivates me, gives me confidence,” said Diana Escoboza, 24, a student of Flores’. Escoboza, who lives in Lynn, performed with her troupe, the Desert Stars, on Sunday, dancing to a Shakira song in an American Cabaret style. The four young women in the troupe wore glittery costumes of blue and white sequins and clutched long colorful scarves.
What it isn’t
But, while these dancers all share a passion for belly dancing, they also recognize the taboos surrounding belly dance — taboos they hope to belie.
Flores explained that people often mistakenly associate the dance with more vulgar forms of dancing.
“It kills what I’m doing when people don’t give it a chance,” Flores said.
“In beginners’ classes, we talk about how belly dancing is so stereotyped. It’s not a sexual dance; it’s sensual,” she explained.
Flores did admit, however, that on more than one occasion, she caught an old man peeking through the windows of her studio while she and her students rehearsed.
“That’s why I bought curtains,” she laughed.
While Memie Watson and Jahayra Flores are more public figures in the local belly dance scene, other dancers still sneak off to rehearsals or retain certain anonymity.
“I’m a professional. I don’t want my professional world knowing about it because I know [belly dancing] is taboo,” said another member of Sisters in Dance, who revealed only her dancer name during the interview.
Ancient history
The Sisters in Dance gathered together in their ornate hand-made costumes on Sunday and talked about their troupe’s strong sisterhood and the history of belly dancing, which can be traced back 5,000 years to ancient Oriental, Indian, and Middle Eastern cultures. Belly dance was originally performed by women for women, as part of an ancient fertility ritual, they explained.
Even more, belly dancing is linked historically to the birthing process, and the dance has helped many of the “Sisters” become mothers. For belly dancers who learned to isolate muscles in the stomach region, “it was easier to undulate and to give birth,” Watson explained.
Today, there are various styles of belly dance, including American Cabaret, Egyptian, Tribal, Gothic, and fusion.
Phoenix Avathar, a dancer for nearly ten years and an instructor originally from Everett, also performed this past Sunday. Avathar explained that while some dances are choreographed, in tribal style there are leaders and followers who rotate roles during the performance. The followers look for cues from the leaders which signal a change in movement.
“It looks like a choreographed dance, but we’re actually improvising,” she said.
Since Avathar just began a new teaching job as a local high school science teacher, she’s waiting to unveil her hobby to her students. In the past, however, she taught at a boarding school in Vermont where she openly shared her passion for belly dancing.
Middle Eastern fears
“My first month of teaching is when 9/11 happened,” Avathar said. She explained that some of the Egyptian students were being harassed.
“So I started this belly dancing group,” she said. “Everyone’s so focused on the terrorism [in Middle Eastern society]. Belly dancing shows there’s beauty.”
Avathar will be teaching a workshop at Sunday’s at the Northshore Unitarian Church event as well as performing.
“The money [from this event] goes back into the Association to put on more belly dance shows,” Watson explained.
Every chapter of the North East Belly Dance Association also commits to hosting at least one fundraising event a year for a good cause. This upcoming year, Watson’s chapter will raise funds for the Northeast Animal Shelter, and some of the proceeds from the Church’s event will go towards this. She invites the public to support this effort and to enjoy the beauty of this dance first hand.
“By the time the show is over, I hope [the community] has more of an understanding of what belly dancing is all about,” said Watson.
I think salsa has taught me the lesson of responsibility. In break dance, you basically dance solo without having to think of anyone but yourself. But salsa ...” paused Alam as if he had gone into a deep reverie, “... salsa makes you think of the other person”.
Otherwise, the Muar, Johore, native who is the second of eight siblings, would most likely be found hanging out with fellow breakdancer and best friend, Ezhan Azman, 22.
“There is this place in Muar called Tanjung Emas, a favourite area for kite flying with the locals. There is a park and a river there with lots of trees and at a certain spot, you can see the whole town of Muar. This is where the both of us like to go and practice our dance moves,” revealed Alam of his “dating spot” with Ezhan.
And speaking of Muar would make him think of his family too.
“Coming from a family of eight makes us a noisy bunch indeed. Come meal-times, it looks like we are having a house party. Since I am based in Kuala Lumpur now, I do miss them very much and there are times when I would call my parents at 4am because I was feeling homesick,” said Alam.
Meanwhile, for the time being before fame truly catches up with him, you may also find Alam showing off his nifty moves in Jalan Bukit Bintang, KL, at the square in front of Maybank. This is a favourite spot for breakdancers and many are seen to congregate here on weekend nights to see who’s the best of the lot.
And without question, all that dancing will inadvertently make Alam look for food!
“I love fried drumsticks and I get them from KFC. Otherwise, I don’t mind a hot bowl of ‘sup gearbox’ (beef marrow soup). But what I really miss is my mum’s cooking. She makes great asam pedas dishes with ikan keli, ikan pari and ikan patin,” said Alam who was clearly drooling.
Lastly, Alam confessed that sleeping in on Sundays is also one of his favourite things to do. He has been known to wake up at 11am, only to go back to sleep again three hours later!
“I don’t see anything wrong with that as long as there is no work. At times like these, even a ringing phone will not wake me up as the ring tones will just be part of my dreams,” concluded Alam and while one may be mistaken but it does look like he is stilfing a yawn.
But sleep is the nurturer of life and here’s hoping that Alam will wake up to a fresh start to entertain us as the nation’s favourite dancer!
Haslam Abdul Rahman, or Alam, never tires of dance, an activity he indulges in every day.Ask rising breakdance star Haslam Abdul Rahman, who is known as Alam to his fans, what he does on Sundays and the inevitable answer is a no-brainer.“I dance, of course,” replied this So You Think You Can Dance Season 1 champion who is now the star of his own reality show, Alam’s Story, which airs on 8TV every Sunday.With this, the 22-year-old bachelor who is currently taking a break from his hotel and management diploma, revealed his private hangout is the Cintabboy studio in Bandar Mahkota Cheras in Sungai Long, Selangor. This is where he gathers with the Wakaka crew, a b-boy dance outfit to hone his moves and to teach aspiring dancers how to breakdance for free.And when asked why Alam has decided to exempt payment, his promptly replied, “Break dance is about freedom”.This, he insisted, had nothing to do with keeping with the nice guy image. Rather, he pointed out, realistically, that the dance form had its basis in practice and it was up to the individual to look at the moves and then build up enough physical strength to perform the dance. Alam revealed that he himself learned the ropes this way and he guarantees that once the fitness kicks in, the moves will come au naturel.But there is the saying that goes, “One will get tired if served the same menu every day”. In Alam’s case when he thinks he needs a break, it’s time for a few rounds of salsa with his partner, Tengku Noor Fatimah Zaharah Tengku Zaimi Azlan, 27, his dance partner from SYTYCD.“Breakdance is rough, salsa is sexy. I feel that learning how to salsa has put a bit more polish and suaveness into my movements,” affirmed Alam who struck a pose for effect.The couple’s favourite dance spot would be none other that a club at Westin Hotel in Phileo Damansara.
