IBCC gets nearer

I've been periodically checking the IBCC website and finding it unchanged, but got a message on Facebook saying the performer lists were now available. I went to the site and lo! Not only is that information there, so is the list of speakers, including me! Amusingly, they've just lifted a reasonably OK photo of me from my Facebook and my bio from my Facebook fan page - which says a lot about how we use the internet for research! Thank goodness they picked a reasonably nice photo and not the one of me looking exhausted while smoking shisha or some really hideous picture tagged as me!

It now seems much more real. I already know that I will give my presentation on the Saturday (April 24) as part of a globalisation panel, but don't know yet which workshops will run at which times. Obviously once it's all up and established I will be able to plan my days around workshops, panels and movies I want to see. Then, it appears that in the evenings, there's the open stage performances, followed by the main stage ones. So it will be bellypalooza.

My main job, apart from doing my presentation obviously, is going to be keeping my energy levels good enough to do as much as I can. I look at the teacher list and I want to study with... all of them! Obviously that's not going to happen, so I'll have to pick wisely nearer the time.

Right now, I'm looking at accommodation options. It will be good to have that planned and out of the way.

In more shallow news:

I have dry skin. My legs, in particular, would be ashy if they weren't white (well, mottled purply capillary colour, to be accurate). The state of the skin on one's body is, of course, of vital importance to the performing belly dancer, and finding the right moisturiser is an ongoing concern. Really thick creamy ones are great but seem to take an enormous amount of effort to get rubbed in. Who wants to waste precious minutes rubbing cream into one's legs when the gig is in an hour and your face isn't done? Not me. Oils and butters, like the marvellous Palmers, are marvellous but their moisturising properties don't seem to last - they sit on the skin and the skin beneath soon seems to dry out again. Plus, Proper Old-Skool Palmers is greasy and Nu-Style Palmers oil is oily, so your costume wants to stick to it for the longest time. Great for slathering on before an early night, not so great when you're prancing about in a split circle skirt in half an hour.

I am, therefore, totally telling the world about my new and exciting discovery: Aveeno daily moisturising lotion. This stuff is GOOD. Unlike every moisuriser I've ever used in my life, it feels not like a protective layer on top of skin of variable moistness, but like something delivering moisture. It's a lotion but it feels almost like applying a gel at the same time. In fact, it feels exactly like when you put a cream or lotion on your skin while it's still wet from the shower. Even if you haven't been in the shower. Amazing. It does have a slightly greasy feel on top of that, but it's not unpleasant, and it really does seem to deliver on its promise of moisturising for 24 hours.

What are your favourite moisture treatments for the body?

Seeking something real

Nearly six months ago I quit my teaching job with a large local belly dance school for a lot of reasons that I don't need to go into here. But the quitting allowed me to become more upfront about my growing frustration with belly dance as a product and the changes in the way it is marketed and sold.

When I started belly dancing in 1998, there was still a lot of fantasy attached to it. Bad, restrictive fantasy in a lot of ways - some of you I'm sure know the deal and can recite it by rote. "By women for women"/"ancient goddess worship"/"harem dance"/"Indian gypsy dance"/"exotic"/"sensual not sexual" and so on and so forth. Despite these discourses, or myths if you like, though, belly dance teachers continued to attach it to the Middle East and students learned that they were doing a Middle Eastern dance. Dancers may have cleaned up the gritty and unglamorous reality of how professional belly dance is viewed there, but they were up front: it's Middle Eastern. It wasn't necessarily presented as pure, but it was definitely not from around here.

Latterly - and the rise of tribal and tribal fusion is partly responsible for this - globalised belly dance is increasingly disassociating itself from those places of origin. People are no longer making up fantasies about their dance's roots - or rather, they're creating new origin stories that seem more honest, more true. Tribal is defined as American. American Cabaret is also promoted as American *solely*, not a recontextualisation of a bunch of Middle Eastern and North African dance moves and attempts to evoke the Middle East, which is what it was. Belly dance as a hobby has also shifted from being centred largely round personal expression and fantasy to fitness, and fitness only. It's become a workout. And, more than ever before, a product that we consume not by watching, but by doing. Specifically, we buy classes/DVDs/workshops etc. We must learn (read: buy) ever more complex combinations, new kinds of prop, different technical approaches, drills, other dancers' "moves". For those of us who still like ME dance - and in my neck of the woods, that's not many - there's the need to learn how to dance like "them", how to do baladi correctly, how to do shaabi, how to handle tarab, how to speak Arabic... As Hadia writes, belly dance as an industry has become oversaturated with these kinds of products, and for a dancer it's overwhelming. It's even worse for a teacher, especially one for whom belly dance is only a part, albeit a big one, of a fairly balanced life. The pressure to attend every intensive, buy every DVD, learn every new style and prop and travel internationally grows ever higher. Ultimately the dancer with the most time/energy and money to spend on belly dance sets the bar for everybody else. And there's little pleasure in that. Unless of course you are that dancer.

Academically, I find the proliferation of media and other products within globalised belly dance, the connectivity, the integration with other industries like tourism, and the recontextualisation of belly dance as a personal expression that does not need to be tied to fantasies of an Orientalised other fascinating. But personally I'm appalled at some of the attitudes and sense of entitlement I see within globalised belly dance, particularly locally. For every Kiwi dancer who thinks deeply about what it means for us to use and represent a Middle Eastern dance form, there seem to be half a dozen who think they can and should do whatever they feel like with belly dance because this isn't the Middle East. Strap on a hip scarf and wobble about, for it is party time, and who cares about the Middle Eastern bit because Middle Easterners want to take away our votes and swathe us in black from head to toe, dontcha know. (As for the black, these chicks should visit Christchurch or Wellington some time. We don't need no stinkin' jihad to get us dressing this way.) Or, at the other end, there's belly dance as workout/body sculpting, like zumba but with stage presence and, usually, sisterhood, or like burlesque with muscles. Belly dance is reduced to moves, completely disassociated from its cultures of origin and repositioned as reflective of a new separatist culture that draws, depending on its mood, from gothic/steampunk/"alternative"/BDSM/this week's "edgy" trend.

All of this is really interesting. Really interesting to study. But as belly dancer I'm just aghast, sometimes. Where did the belly dance go? Where did the thing I fell for go?

Right from the time I started there were always novelty pieces. Because we belly dancers knew that our dance was Middle Eastern and we had certain rhythms to consider and Arabic lyrics to work our way around that 90 percent of the time we couldn't find a translation for, and conventional ways to interpret certain instruments and so on, we liked occasionally to cut loose with something easy and funny, like a dance to Tom Waits' "Temptation" or the Red Elvises or Actual Elvis Presley, or the Hollies. Or something arty and serious, like a presentation of the descent of Isis to something vaguely Pharonic with lots of synth and thunderbolts. Today, though, belly dance shows seem to be 90 percent novelty act. When a belly dancer looks around her in confusion when she hears an Orientale intro because the dancer hasn't entered yet, when a belly dancer says "oh sorry I stood on your big T-shirt thingy" because they don't know what a thobe is... I wonder what the hell is going on. I wonder if too many BDSS DVDs (not ones with khaleegy, evidently) and too much Rachel Brice love at the expense of learning about the *reality* and *breadth* of belly dance with all its grit and sweat and ungainliness and complexity and yes, Middle Easternness, have produced a generation of dancers who can produce a tidy hip drop but who wouldn't know Suhair Zaki from Lady Gaga. They'd rather BE Lady Gaga. Lady Gaga is sort of like a belly dancer, right? She wears false lashes and is sexy!

When I quit regular teaching I retreated, briefly, into a retro folkloric phase when all I wanted to do was cover myself in assuit and spiky wrist cuffs and become the Ethnic Police. Just get away from all that babble. I withdrew into a personal harem and created occasional events that were 100 percent Middle Eastern music and dance, NO tribal, NO western music, and only a little bit of performance. In a way I wanted the old fantasies back. I still do. Despite my transculturalist position and continued insistence that there is *no such thing as authenticity*, despite my full knowledge that when I say "100 percent Middle Eastern" that's a lie and a fantasy too, a kind of authenticity is what I crave. I want to get back to the real. I want dance that is up close, not on a stage, I want Om Khalsoum and shisha and dancing because it is beautiful and pleasurable and for everyone. I see a little hope in the growing interest in Turkish dance and oldschool American Cabaret, even though I'm too old and big for all that bouncing, myself. I want Cairo and Istanbul and hell, San Francisco 1973. I don't want to see you waggle your butt with a burlesque bow, calling yourself edgy. I don't want to see you lock and pop in a bikini with a dreadlocked sporran on top. I don't ever want to see a fan veil again.

I want to see you *belly dance*.

International adventures

During 2007 and 2008, I wrote an MA thesis about belly dancing in New Zealand, which was duly marked and pronounced to be good. You can find it in the University of Canterbury library, and read it online here. It consumed my life for that year and a half. i read a lot of writing in the field, such as there is. One of the things that happens when your life is consumed by a topic, especially when it's not a widely written-about topic, is that you sometimes imagine idly to yourself "wouldn't it be SO COOL if Important Scholar X, who I am citing, read my thesis?" And also "wouldn't it be SO COOL if somebody one day invited me overseas to talk about my research, enabling me to meet other scholars in the same field and also maybe study some belly dancing while I'm at it?"

So you can imagine that I was reality testing rather a lot when I received an email from Barbara Sellers-Young inviting me to participate in a panel with her and Anthony Shay, among others, at the International Belly Dance Conference in Toronto in April 2010. Was I awake? Had I fallen unheeding and unheeded into psychosis? Or did those two idle daydreams just come true?

Accordingly, I'm planning my trip to the IBCC, where I will be able to do a ton of study, jet lag permitting. I am literally flying there, arriving the night before, and flying out the morning after it all finishes, hopefully without totally crashing afterwards. (For those of you just joining us, I'm in New Zealand. I'll fly to Australia and then direct to Canada. It involves crossing datelines, which is why I'm confused about how many hours it will be, but suffice it to say, it is no less than 12.)

I'm very excited by the intended instructor lineup, which will include Khairiyya Mazin, of all people, and Mahmoud Reda, Jillina, Delilah, Yasmina Ramzy, Sema Yildiz, Sera Solstice, and a couple of people I've studied with before - Hadia and Amel Tafsout. Based on the previous IBCCs there will probably be music classes as well. It's going to be incredibly worth it!

Now of course my job is to get as much cash together as I can for this, since there will be opportunities for buying music and other things. It comes at a time when I've stopped teaching dance, so the income I might have had from that is MIA. On the other hand I do intend to offer some short courses and will, hopefully, be able to pick up a few extra bucks from that.

I will post updates and reports from Toronto when it all happens, but in the meantime, join me as I prepare for this once in a lifetime opportunity!

Any minute now, belly dance will eat itself

Uh oh. I ranted.
n the 80s there weren't DVDs, videos were still new things, restaurant and bar owners still paid for musicians or DJs because there weren't the MUCH cheaper options of the electronic jukebox type technology that today replaces band, DJ, lighting technician and even chooses and supplies the music for you from changing top 40 lists. We were into pomo consumer culture but compared to now, it seems like laughably naive, sweet and artisanal times. Things did not happen as fast or change as fast. Belly dance was business but not the business it is now.

Belly dance now occupies a global consumer culture *of belly dance*. It's not about being the entertaining dancer any more. It's about students, workshops, costume sales, CDs, performance DVDs, training DVDs, festivals, weeklongs, intensives, showcases, haflas. When I started 11 years ago, in a very different milieu to Aus, you saved your pennies to buy music, zills and maybe a coin scarf or a cane at *one* annual festival. Today, it's overload. It's this style, that style, new style, fusion style, combos, drilling, new moves, drilling, technical differentiation, be new, be daring, break the mould, stand out, imitate, use this prop, that prop, all those props, new props, buy it, sell it, lose weight, emulate, drill, drill, go, go, compete, compete, beat, smash KILL your audience to keep your head above water, just to survive, just to be considered a belly dancer.

Any minute now, belly dance will eat itself.

It's exhausting. There's no pleasure in it, not unless you're a masochist or a capitalist (or analysing it, but sometimes that makes me as angry and frustrated as I am intrigued.)

Orientalism – a user’s guide

Most belly dancers are aware of the term “Orientalism” but are often not quite sure what it means. There’s a general sense that it’s something “bad” - maybe to do with sleazy stereotypes that most belly dancers now tend to avoid. Or wait, isn’t it to do with those gorgeous paintings of historical dancers? What’s wrong with them anyway? When a dancer is accused of being Orientalist, her reaction is usually pretty defensive one way or another. This is because many dancers don’t really understand what Orientalism means, and that’s a pity. One, because it’s important. And two, because we shouldn’t be afraid of addressing it.

Confusion about Orientalism stems from the fact it can refer to a number of things. Strictly speaking an Orientalist is somebody who studies “the Orient” – originally anywhere east of Europe, including China and India – usually with a focus on its languages, but also its cultures. So on that level alone, we as belly dancers are Orientalists. The term also gets used to refer to 19^th and early 20^th century fashions in painting, theatre and dance, fashion, advertising and interior design that drew on and represented “Oriental” themes. In a way, we belly dancers are often modern-day Orientalists on that level too.

Since the 1970s, however, the term “Orientalism” has mostly been used to describe a way of looking at the world that splits it into two: “us” (Westerners) and “them” (everybody else, but particularly people from the Middle East, North Africa, India, Persia…), with the West coming off as best. This idea of Orientalism as a way of thinking about things, that operates to serve Western interests, was most famously suggested by the Palestinian scholar Edward Said. Understanding this is really important for us as belly dancers.

Said’s 1978 book Orientalism goes into lengthy detail about how Western regimes – from Alexander the Great on – had good reasons for wanting control of the East and its valuable resources. A quick look at the world pages of your newspaper will reveal that little has changed! However, since you and I are (hopefully) not planning to invade Egypt any time soon, we’re certainly not consciously plotting ways to overthrow its present government and plunder its resources. Belly dancing would thus seem to have very little to do with this concept - but the truth is far more complex.

More important for us as belly dancers is what Said called “latent” Orientalism, which refers to the fantasies and ideas about Eastern countries that taught Western people to think of them as desirable, but better off conquered. It split the world into two imagined halves – East (Orient) and West. In Orientalism’s binary system, the West is all about the mind; the Orient, the senses. The West is rational, straightforward, masculine, intellectual, modern, “normal”, forward-thinking. The Orient is superstitious, sneaky, feminine, sexual, ancient, perverse, backward.

The figure of the Middle Eastern woman, either “repressed” by seclusion and veiling – the “black robed women” we see in news stories – or revealed half-naked in exotic garb, dancing in a sensual way that seems radically different to Western dancing – remains one of the most powerful symbols of the Orient. This is why the belly dancer so strongly represents both the Middle East and sex in most people’s minds. Orientalist thought and ideas that have circulated in our culture for centuries make us fascinated by the veiled woman, and obsessed with wanting to unveil her. The same fantasies and ideas underly Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt, the sexual appeal of the racially “other” person, and our interest both in “freeing” Muslim women from veiling and seclusion, and – let’s admit it – our desire, sometimes, to play at being exotic harem beauties dancing together away from male eyes.

Orientalism is a kind of “othering” which ties into both romanticising and stereotyping. When we romanticise, we make up fantasies often that belie the reality of the people we’ve fantasised about. Belly dancers often like to fantasise about being gypsies, and no wonder – the idea of gypsies as free-thinking travellers who pick up bits and pieces of culture as they move around is very appealing, especially to New Zealanders who travel so widely and are all, even Maori, immigrants somewhere along the way. But fantasies about being gypsies have little in common with the lives of real gypsy or Roma/Sinti people, who have been called the most oppressed people on earth. As soon as we start fantasising about being people who are real, we run up against harsh truths that don’t live up to our expectations. And in our globalised world, Roma and Egyptians and Africans and Irish people are frequently just a desk away.

Stereotypes, similarly, “other” people, often negatively – suggestions that “all Maori are lazy” or “Jews are tight with money” are obvious examples. One of the tricky things about stereotypes is that they are usually based on something that is common to a particular cultural group, but framed in a way that doesn’t take into account other factors. Maori “laziness” can more often be related to culturally-specific concepts of time, communal social responsibility and the need to deliberate on decisions, for instance. And of course everyone knows someone from a particular group who doesn’t fit a stereotype. The other bad thing about stereotypes is that they lump everyone in a particular group together. They don’t allow people in “those” groups to be seen as individuals, as well as members of a group.

So, maybe we know all this. We don’t do tacky “harem fantasy” belly dance shows any more and we would never present a fantasy skirt dance as a real gypsy performance. In fact, we only study with Egyptian masters and never do anything at all that is not a tried and proven Egyptian dance move. We read widely about cultural issues and politics in the countries where our dance comes from and eagerly work to enlighten people about the terrible pressures Middle Eastern women face under Islamist regimes. We’re off the Orientalist hook, right?

Unfortunately not. Remember how I said that studying the Orient is a form of Orientalism? This, too, ties into Said’s idea of the problematic racist aspects of Orientalism. Trying to be ultra-authentic, to “rescue” the dances from countries where they seem “under threat”, to know exactly how, when, where and why our dance takes the forms that it does are all just examples of us trying to get inside that harem, penetrate that veil, and know and thus control what is inside. This is why you can be performing and studying belly dance with all the good will in the world and still find yourself being accused of Orientalism by educated people from those long-colonised nations. It hurts. When you’re trying really hard to do it right, and you’ve worked so hard not to mock or misrepresent the dance and the cultures that you love, it is really painful to be reminded that as white westerners (which most of us are) we are ultimately highly privileged people, playing Lady Bountiful whether the objects of our interest want our involvement or not.

Who benefits most? The answer is always us because we are getting what we want out of belly dance. This answer holds true whether we strive to be as Middle Eastern as possible or if we reject the Middle East completely in our dance while still calling ourselves belly dancers – symbols of the Orient. Of course we as belly dancers know that this is not as simple as it seems. We know, because we have had the experiences, that sometimes our dancing makes migrants very happy, and helps them feel at home and respected here in New Zealand. We know that our interest in issues like female genital mutilation can help further the work that women in the Middle East and North Africa are doing to change practices they themselves do not like. But at the end of the day, we are belly dancing because we want to. Because it gives us pleasure – an escape, a healthier body, a chance to be glamorous, a chance to perform – and we don’t have anything that is quite the same in our own culture. So we take it.

So where does this leave us? What can we do about Orientalism? The short answer is nothing. There’s no escape, not while we and the rest of the world continue to think in binaries – us vs them, eastern vs western, sport vs culture and so on. All we can do is dance with knowledge, in the most personally ethical ways we can. For me, this means always acknowledging the Middle East as the turangawaewae of belly dance and its inhabitants as tangata whenua and tipuna of us as belly dancers. After that, it comes down to being aware of what you do and making choices accordingly. I draw on Orientalist imagery all the time – I love it – but I do so with knowledge. I am prepared to stand by my work and take on board criticism of my choices from those who I represent. It’s an ongoing process, something that will never be resolved – but it’s a wonderful journey.

Performing the belly dancer – an actor’s role

It’s not uncommon for belly dance teachers to be approached by individuals who want to study privately so they can put a dance together, often for a special occasion like a milestone birthday. Less common is an approach from an actor seeking to play a belly dancer, on a small budget and with a tight time frame.

This was the situation I found myself in when a young actor, Cassie Baker, contacted our school for help preparing for her major role as Shirin, an Iraqi café owner and dancer, in the Court Theatre’s production of “Baghdad, Baby!” last year. Cassie had never belly danced in her life, though she did have a background in other dance forms, and was eager to gain some skills before rehearsals began. This was a project I had to make time for!

Working with Cassie was very different from my usual experiences of dance teaching. It was obvious to me, even before I read the script, that my normal approach with brand new dancers would be no good in this case. We would not have time to go through all the basics and drill them first before learning a choreography. We also had no idea at that stage what music she would be asked to dance to, how the stage would be laid out, or what the director’s requirements would be.

The script also put many very specific restrictions in place. First and foremost, Cassie’s character Shirin had to be “dead sexy”. Her primary job in the play was to be gorgeous and seductive, the usual symbol of the mysterious exotic East. However, she also needed simultaneously to be a real person – a young Iraqi woman doing whatever it took, including prostitution, to get out of war-torn Iraq. We didn’t know whether Shirin would look like a “typical” belly dancer or like an Iraqi girl with a scarf round her hips who happened to be belly dancing. The character also had to deliver monologues during her dance scenes, which further reinforced that we were going to have to take a different approach. Belly dancing and talking at the same time is only easy to do once the movements are largely unconscious.

Cassie needed to embody a belly dancer rather than actually be one. She would need to move like someone who had always belly danced, which meant the usual beginner level choreography wouldn’t look right. And she would need to be able to improvise to some extent. I decided the best approach was to work with what Cassie *could* do, rather than try to make her able to do things she couldn’t, and explore ways she could, as an actor, find ways of embodying her character that would include dance movements.

We did a lot of walking to music, with a few movements that looked more like social dancing than technically difficult orientale. I was mostly determining what Cassie could do easily and what looked nice on her figure. Being young and flexible she could rotate her hips easily and she turned out to have a fabulous hip shimmy! As a singer and songwriter, she also had a good natural feel for music. I was very impressed with Cassie’s dedication to making her character as rounded as possible. As well as working with me, Cassie read widely, made contact with the local Iraqi community and at one stage visited Wellington to spend time with Ban Abdul, the actress who originated the part. We talked a lot about the kind of confidence Shirin would have about being sexually desirable. I pointed out that women who dance professionally in the Middle East are not necessarily the best dancers, so it didn’t matter if she just stuck to a few simple movements. All she had to be was self-assured. We talked about what kind of clothing Shirin might really wear, and how she could be sexy even covered up. I directed Cassie to footage of Fifi Abdo – not Iraqi but a great example of a tough but sexy Middle Eastern working woman who can work a galabeya like it’s a bikini – and some other footage I found of current Egyptian TV stars in action. I also showed her the documentary “The Bellydancers of Cairo”, which would give her some idea of the position belly dancers hold in the Middle East. Cassie was instantly smitten with Dina, feeling that she would be Shirin’s idol, and took a photo of her as inspiration. We also the costume designer, who had a look at some of my costumes and some web pages I recommended.

We had about four lessons working on basic movements before rehearsals began, working with some music I had and some that Cassie had sourced, that she liked and that seemed to suit the mood and pace of her dance scenes. As the director started having input, our lessons changed to workshopping the dance scenes to incorporate his ideas, using the music he had selected from Cassie’s collection. Sometimes this was quite hard – the director had some quite different ideas than Cassie and I had. Costuming was a big part of this.The director and costume designer were excited about being able to show off Cassie’s trim figure in a bra and belt not just in her dance scenes, but for the whole play. Their justification was that in her own space, this transgressive young woman would wear what she felt like. As any belly dancer knows, no sensible human would wear a bedleh all day, least of all in conservative Iraq. Fundamentalist Islamic values aside, they’re not comfortable and you can’t sit in them! But this was a play and not meant to be naturalistic, and so Cassie was fitted for a black and gold number. She did get to wear a chador in her “outdoor” scenes and pants and a hip scarf in the second act, but she wore her bra and beaded gauntlets throughout. I shared key belly dancer secrets: the vital need for safety pins, the danger of catching a beaded gauntlet on, well, everything, particularly the beaded curtain from which Shirin had to emerge on a regular basis.

The last two classes took place at the Court Theatre, where I got to meet Cassie’s co-stars, the director and technical crew. The first was in the rehearsal room, where the intended stage set-up was laid out for the actors to work on. The second was in the theatre itself, with the beautiful set in place, just a day or two before the show opened. By this time, though Cassie was clearly under pressure and stressed about the role itself, her dance was becoming more confident and she was bringing her own ideas to the pieces.

I was lucky enough to see both the first and last performances of the play, and it was interesting to see how all the performances changed during that time period. Cassie’s last dances were more assured than her first ones and she was interpreting the music more fully and in a more personal way. Was it great belly dance? No. Was it a hideous mess? No! Did it work for the role? Absolutely. Was I happy with what Cassie achieved? Definitely! I always knew intellectually that a dance scene in a play or film was the sum of many levels of input but now I understand that process much better. I’m a lot more forgiving of dance scenes in movies that are not “accurate” as a result.