Belly Dance

I want to start this article with the view of a small girl, a girl dancing around the room. She wears her sister’s skirt and imagines herself dancing in far-away lands. She has in her hand a scarf that she twirls and twirls, spinning around the room. In her mind, she is exotic (though at the tender age of 6, she doesn’t know that word), beautiful. She dances in the palaces only heard of in children’s tales. She dances joyfully. In the child, you can see the woman she will someday become. She is already a lover of dress up, of movement, of jewelry. That girl is the author, and her love of movement has never diminished.

Over the past several years, I have become acquainted with the power of belly dance in the average woman’s life. Fairly new on the scene, or at least new to our small valley, is tribal belly dance. The thing that I have noticed is a push back against the ever-so-thin style of ballet that was advanced as “the thing to do” when I was a child growing up. Myself, I have a strong history of dance, mostly modern and jazz, and, being a woman of some size, ran afoul of that particular prejudice against true woman-shaped dancers. If someone had a weight problem, breasts that were larger than average, or she was too tall, she was not encouraged to be a dancer–or at least a ballet dancer, especially professionally. Dancers, for years, have been encouraged to be a certain shape and size. There was even a story (this was a news story I remember from 60 minutes) about women who had collagen injected into their lips and had bone removed in order to look like a particularly favored famous ballet dancer. It was difficult to be a plus-size dancer back then because the scene was not one in which being able to dance well was the ultimate deciding factor, it was how you looked. One of the most beautiful women I know ran into trouble because of the size of her chest. She persisted and even started her own dance group, while I moved to dance types that were a little more tolerant if you didn’t look anorexic. However, in college, it was clear that to go pro, you couldn’t look like me. 

Now there is belly dance. Small women, big women, all women are accepted and encouraged in this type of dance. One of my favorite names of a dance group is “Fat Chance Belly Dance,” and this group sort of formed the template and set down the rules, according to what I have learned, as to the moves that define American Tribal Style. As you can guess, in this troupe the women are of various sizes, beautiful in motion, comfortable (or getting comfortable) with their own bodies. My own dance troupe is a cross-section of body styles and ages, as well. My teacher long and lean, and young. My dance sisters are older and younger, short, willowy, pudgy, voluptuous. In tribal fusion, our style of belly dance, there are elements of jazz, ATS (American Tribal Style), cabaret, modern, and even a little ballet. As its name suggests, the styles are fused. We learn the basic elements of ATS, and then add on.

Speaking further of the belly-dance style. I believe it shares a part in the rise of the sacred feminine recently, with its the empowering of women. I believe this is because it embraces all the various physical forms of woman, promoting an opposite view of Hollywood’s physical beauty of so many years–the bulimic, anorexic stereotype that extends back to Twiggy,

Image via Wikipedia

who was the anti-heroine and the bane of my pudgy growing-up years. The belly dancer celebrates the belly, complete with its stretch marks, the battle scars of childbirth.

The moving dance meditation calls on us to honor ourselves, our ancestors, the floor we dance on, and our dance sisters. In the tribe or troupe, we are accepted and we are beautiful. To look for strength, we only have to look as far as the sister beside us. In addition, we get more fit (who knew?). Belly dance is all about “core strength.”

In general, movement is basic and trends come and go, but the interest in belly dance goes back a long way in America. The Cabaret style of belly dance came down from early motion pictures. Who can forget the dancing girls in their glittery costumes dancing on the silver screen? Their smoky looks burned holes in men’s minds. In our town, we have many troupes of various styles. We have several cabaret troupes, with their flashy costumes. Sequins and shiny material is the basic here. The hands are flashy. The moves are sharp, and, somewhat unfortunately in my own opinion, this style of belly dance is associated with sex and seduction. We also have a more traditional Arabic style of belly dance, while occasionally incorporating various folkloric styles of dance. One of the groups here calls their style Pagan-style. 

In the cabaret style and the more traditional style, they also have men dancers. However, in the tribal style my troupe does, it is a women-only club, making it comfortable for all of us who participate to be ourselves.  Though the styles of belly dance are many, all of them have this is in common, the joy of movement, the closeness of sisters and fellow dancers.

It is not my goal here to get fully into the various styles of belly dance. There are many writers who have already written on this. I want, instead, to look at the social trends in belly dance. It is more than movement that brings women out. There is the costuming, along with the simple joy of having a tribe or a troupe that a woman belongs to. In our troupe, we got together for a sewing circle, working on our costumes. I had never been to a “sewing” circle and came with my own angst about what was to transpire, being convinced I was going to embarrass myself. Instead, I was amazed at how many women had no clue how to sew, or how to use a sewing machine. My own fears were for nought. I found there were several professional women there who had never sewn anything (I actually had Home economnics and had to learn to sew to some extent, though it is not my bliss by any means).

I realized, through this experience, that missing from our busy lives, in this day and age, is community. I have friends who talk about it all the time, this lack of community. We seek it now through Twitter, Face-book, My Space, I guess even in Triond. In our cyber-world, we seek connection. Our hard-won freedom, as women, of going to work and having our husband’s participate fully as partners in our world, has resulted in a disconnect with many of the coffee klatch, the connection over the back fence with our neighbor, the women’s clubs, sewing circles, knitting circles, and/or simply learning at our mother’s and grandmother’s knees. In my small community where I grew up, for instance, all the women in the town got together to make quilts for everyone. I have a quilt that group created. In it are patches my mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother put in. I am lucky to own it, this representation of a time when the women of a community were so connected. Please don’t get me wrong. There are women in community groups; however, we are more likely to get involved in a work-related coalition or organization (that was all I was involved in until this dance group), rather than something with a more homey twist.

I have seen the need in myself and other women to reconnect, in a very basic way, to our feminine self. If this were not the case, why would we be so fascinated with the skirt, the decorated bra, turbans, sequins, veils–all of it so opposite to a power suit, or the sensible shoes of the nurse. In this form of dance, we celebrate the feminine–the belly, the place that life grows. This form of dance, the belly dance came out of the harem. It was made for women by women. Those who have practiced it for years tell me of its origins as exercises to strengthen the body for childbirth, and to recover afterward. These moves are beautiful, fluid, and each movement strengthens the body as it isolates each and every muscle. So many other forms of exercise also strengthen these areas, but in belly dance the emphasis is on the beauty of the movement, and its history is that of women’s strength. In the belly dance, we see the face of the goddess, the goddess in ourselves and every other woman we dance with. We come back to our homes feeling stronger, more connected, ready to go on with the mundane work in our lives. In our daily lives, we remember the dance and are children again, dancing around the room–beautiful, exotic, complete.

(This video shows a variety of styles and a joy of dancing, set to my own song “To Dance,” a song about dancing of all kinds [the dance of life] and what gives each of us joy).