Belly Dance, Pilgrimage and Identity

Barbara Sellers-Young

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781349949533
• eBook ISBN: 9781349949540
• Topic: Medien & darstellende Kunst
• Subtopic: Tanz

This book examines the globalization of belly dance and the distinct dancing communities that have evolved from it. The history of belly dance has taken place within the global flow of sojourners, immigrants, entrepreneurs, and tourists from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century. In some cases, the dance is transferred to new communities within the gender normative structure of its original location in North Africa and the Middle East. Belly dance also has become part of popular culture's Orientalist infused discourse. The consequence of this discourse has been a global revision of the solo dances of North Africa and the Middle East into new genres that are still part of the larger belly dance community but are distinct in form and meaning from the dance as practiced within communities in North Africa and the Middle East.

© The Author(s) 2016

Barbara Sellers-YoungBelly Dance, Pilgrimage and Identity10.1057/978-1-349-94954-0_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: Belly Dance: Transmission in Popular Culture

Barbara Sellers-Young¹

(1)

Dance Department, York University, Toronto, Ontario, Canada

Keywords

Belly danceOrientalismConvergenceIdentityGlobal discourse

End Abstract

A dancer stands on the stage of an urban cultural centre. The dancer is dressed in what has become recognizable as a belly-dance costume with a sequined top on the upper torso, bare belly, a hip-level skirt or pants and a belt with long rows of sequins slung around the hips. As a community of belly dancers “whoop” and “shout” in support, the dancer integrates gestures of the torso and pelvis with a soft placement of their arms. The dance is a staging of self and therefore a public representation of a personal conception of identity and its realization within the performative environment of the belly-dance community. For in the creation of the performance, the dancer has chosen the music, created the costume and choreographed and/or improvised the movement.

While the dancer is performing on a stage in an urban centre in Tokyo, Sydney, Chicago, London or New York, there is a woman or man, at a wedding, betrothal or other celebration in North Africa, the Middle East or related diaspora, who, dressed in the clothing of their community, are incorporating gestures of their torso, hips and arms to perform their improvised version of the dance in which they are dancing their physical expression of their gender, ethnic identity and personality, which is also a symbolic representation of their community. ¹

Belly dance in its countries of origin and in its global dissemination has since the nineteenth century been situated at the confluence of celebrations associated with rites of passage—births and weddings—and popular culture as entertainment. Victor Turner in his conception of the performative (1982) discusses the relationship between the liminal and its relationship with ritual transformations and the liminoid as a related, and yet differentiated space of play associated with the stage and its representation of social/cultural processes. This is a psychophysical space that is betwixt and between one mode of being and another. Primarily associated with rituals and the extraordinary performance spaces, such as the dance studio, stage and cyberspace, this imaginary space of the liminal or liminoid provides an opportunity for a participant to transition between psychophysical modes of identity. Within liminal ritual celebrations such as weddings, dance, according to Turner, serves an integrative function in that it unites, via music and movement, people from separate kin groups in a similar expressive aesthetic that signals for the individuals and the community a new status for the individual performers within that community. When dance becomes part of the public environment of the liminoid, there is a convergence of a performer-audience experience in which the dancing body is, as Ann Cooper Albright has pointed out, an object of representation and the subject of its own experience that engages in a “variety of discourses: kinesthetic, visual, somatic, and aesthetic, as well as intellectual” (1997: 5). In these liminoid spaces, which are often associated with popular culture, dancers negotiate the intersections between self, society and the perceptual awareness of the dancing body. The dancer’s body is, therefore, an act of mediation between the expressive gestures of the dance form and personal conceptions of identity. ²

Andrew Ross (1989) in describing the history of jazz, blues and rock points out the synergy that exists between forms as they evolve separate musical traditions in interaction with each other and related twentieth-century economic, political and social forces. Through the medium of popular music, he articulates one of the fundamental components of popular culture; its ability to constantly evolve within competing discourses from the mainstream to the margins. In Between the Middle East and the Americas: The Cultural Politics of the Diaspora (2013), Alsutany and Shohat draw attention to the shifting nature of representation of the Middle East’s popular culture. They note the impact of Brazilian telenovela O Clone (2001–2002), which focuses on a love story between a Muslim Moroccan woman and a Catholic Brazilian man. The backdrop for the narrative was “Orientalist exoticism rooted in a tropical imaginary long marked by a fascination with a distant Moorish/Iberian past. The telenovela’s imagery of harems, veils, nargilas, and belly dancing ignited a Dança do Ventre craze and generated classes in belly dance across Brazil” (Alsutany and Shohat 2013: 3). There were also popular culture derivatives from O Clone in the new music/dance fusion genre, the Belly/Samba; costumes for the 2002 Rio Carnival were based on the telenovela’s costumes, and the show’s popularity caused it to be ultimately broadcast throughout North and South America, Portugal and Spain. As Alsutany and Shohat note, “there is a stubborn persistence of an Orientalist imaginary” (2013: 11) that exists in narratives such as O Clone, and which is also manifested by Disney World’s Epcot Center’s exhibit of Arabic exotica, “Arabian Nights” experiences at the Las Vegas Aladdin Hotel and Middle Eastern cafes throughout the world that integrate Arabic pop music Arabic food and belly dancing. The exotification of the Arab identity is also embedded in the music industry through the performances of Columbian/Lebanese singer Shakira and other music icons, such as Beyoncé and U2. The global history of belly dance, as an ethnically based aesthetic form in popular culture, is a negotiation of these often competing political, economic, social/cultural and aesthetic forces.

This complex discourse has been brought to public attention in the media with headlines such as the article in Time magazine in 2006 entitled “Body and Mind: Belly Dance Boom” which reported the increasing popularity of belly dance (within this text references to dance consistently refer to belly dance). Numerous James Bond films have used the dance to set the scene in North Africa or the Middle East. Other media articles from different parts of the world focus on the dance from a variety of angles and contexts: for example, the position of the dance in popular television programmes (“Belly Dance on Boogie Woogie,” Times of India), ³ its role in fitness (“Belly Dance, Fitness and Weight Loss,” LiveStrong.com), ⁴ personal self-improvement (“Find a Little Wiggle Room,” Bangkok Post), ⁵ the role of male dancers in the Middle East (“Male Dancers Back in Vogue in Turkey,” Reuters, ⁶ and “Male Belly Dancers Make a Comeback in Egypt, Defying Suppression,” Bloomberg), ⁷ the dance’s relationship to Egyptian politics (“Belly Dancers Worry About Possible Islamist Takeover,” Al Monitor), ⁸ the role of the dance among diverse diasporic communities (“Arab Lesbians: A Place to Dance Freely,” New York Times) ⁹ as well as individual articles on male and female dancers from across the globe.

There have been in the last ten years several films whose narrative structure involves individuals whose lives are changed by their involvement in the dance. They include: the Tunisian film Satin Rouge (2002); the Hong Kong-based film My Mother is a Belly Dancer (2006); a French Canadian Romantic drama, Whatever Lola Wants (2007); a film about two Chicago women, one born in the US and one from North Africa, Just like a Woman (2013); a documentary on the international touring company Belly Dance Superstars entitled American Dancer (2003); an account of the dance community in Cairo, The Bellydancers of Cairo (2006); a documentary on the position of male dancers, Belly Dance Man: from Canada to Cairo (2009); and Zenne Dancer (2012).

In general, media versions of belly dance subsume all dances of North Africa and the Middle East under the general designation of belly dance. However, within the history of dance in North Africa and Middle East, there are distinct solo improvisational forms that integrate movements of the head, arms, hands, torso and hips. They include— al-raqs al-baladi or raqs sharqi (literally village or oriental dance in Arabic), raqs misri (Egyptian dance), baladi (dance of the countryside), cifte telli (Greek dance), majlesi (dance of the social gathering in Iran) and less well-known terms such as cifte and karsi-karsija (variants of the Turkish cifte telli and karslima) in Serbia and Macedonia. As Torkom Movsesiyan has noted, in some parts of Lebanon the dance “is often called raqs alfarrah, literally translated from Arabic into English as dance of happiness.” ¹⁰ Traditionally, the dance is a popular form of entertainment for weddings, saint’s days and associated festivals as well as in restaurants and nightclubs in such urban centres as Beirut, Istanbul and Cairo. There are some variations on these settings, such as Sudanese weddings, at which the bride performs a variant of this solo form for the groom and assembled guests. ¹¹

Since the Napoleonic era, the public performance of the dance has been identified in travel accounts, paintings and photographs as primarily an occupation of women (Said 1978; MacKenzie 1995; Brenstein and Studlar 1997; Beaulieu and Roberts 2002). This is despite the existence of a number of male performers, some of whom have imitated women and others who have not, such as the Khwals of Egypt and the Köçek and Zenne of Turkey. ¹² Beyond its position as popular entertainment, the generalized movement style was the vocabulary of public female performing groups such as the Schikhatt in Morocco, the Ouled Nail in Algeria and the Ghawâzȋ, in Egypt. ¹³

The construction of the Orient and these solo dances as feminine and by extension as sensual, exotic and mysterious encouraged a popular reading of North Africa and the Middle East as a site of excessive display. In due course, this image of the Orient, as documented by Edward Said (1978) and others, became embedded in Western European visual and performing arts of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Dance scholar Noha Roushdy (2009) has suggested that the image became so deeply entrenched that the elite in countries such as Egypt disavowed the roots of their expressive culture. This disavowal included a denial of the legitimacy of solo dance as an appropriate expressive form for men or women. Karin Van Nieuwkerk elaborates on the tensions between Islam and performance in her consideration of contemporary performance in Egypt since 1970. In Performing Piety (2013), she describes the position of conservative Islam that all performance—singing, acting, dancing—emotionally distracts from the worship of Allah. Specifically, public performance is haram, or sinful, as such performance is considered to display the body in a manner that threatens the social and emotional life of a community.

What Anthony Shay (1999) refers to as the “choreophobia” of Islam discouraged performers of raqs sharqi and other solo forms from developing the legitimizing structures of a named movement vocabulary and the direct transfer of a vocabulary from teacher to student, such as exists in ballet, bharat natyam, nihon buyo and other dance forms. Instead, the transmission process for solo dance forms from North Africa and the Middle East has historically been a matter of observation through community participation. As the solo dance forms moved within the global media flows of the late nineteenth and twentieth century, the absence of legitimizing authority converged with their orientalist imagery and allowed for a variety of interpretations of the movement vocabulary and a generalized naming of these as belly dance. ¹⁴

Modes of Transmission

Dancer Ibrahim Farrah described how he learned to dance at family celebrations. People would dance to the phrasing and rhythms of the music and children would imitate them. Today the dance is still transmitted in these family environments but it is also taught in dance studios as well as video reproductions that are viewed individually in homes or in the community of cyberspace via YouTube and online dance courses. As these modes of transmission ultimately influence perceptual awareness, they are the foundations of an enactment of the performative frameworks that Judith Butler (1993) references in her conception of the social/cultural basis of identity and gender formation as evolving from the material embodiment of social scripts. It is a foun...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• 1. Introduction: Belly Dance: Transmission in Popular Culture
• 2. Egypt: Place of Pilgrimage, Place of Home
• 3. Dancing the Goddess in Popular Culture: Resistance, Spirituality and Empowerment
• 4. San Francisco and American Tribal Style
• 5. Fusion, Dark Fusion and Raqs Gothique
• 6. Belly Dance, Gender and Identity
• 7. Belly Dance and the Stage: Nationality, Ethnicity, Identity
• Backmatter