Quote:
Originally Posted by Tarik Sultan
Quite honestly, when I see a man dance, I want to see him express his maleness, not try to immitate a woman. You want to see what they can bring to the dance that is unique to their spirit.
|
This all gets into definitions - again...
Define "Imitate a woman". You'll very quickly get into meaningless rulebooks, I'm afraid. The second half of the above quotation rings true with me, but it seems to contradict the first half. *shrug* Of course, this *does* get into my last hair splitting debate with Aisha about (my view that) I can NOT imitate a woman as I'm not one. Just like I can NOT imitate a Tarik, because I'm not one. I can only imitate myself (Aisha and I have agreed to almost but not quite agree on this, let's NOT re-open this debate for EVERYONE'S sanity!!).
The most important thing for ANY performer to do is to BE HER/HIMSELF and dance as same. All else is secondary. In other words - be REAL. The "problem" with a large majority of male dancers that I've seen (IMHO
) is that they're so busy trying to prove that they're "male" that they lose track of the fact that they're Belly Dancers (Tarik NOT with standing, of course.)! It just makes me wanna scream sometimes. Something like "Get OVER it already, yea you're a male, so what, who cares? Show me your GRACE, BEAUTY, and EMOTION. That's what this is all about."
Aziz was the perfect example of this - no goofball male tricks, just utter beauty. He didn't let his gender get in the way and the viewer/audience quickly FORGOT (Or at least I do when I see old videos of his) what gender he was in the enjoyment of his performance. As it should be.
As for males not being able to Belly Dance because of their gender - that makes about as much sense as males not being able to WALK because of their gender. Yea, a male walk generally but not always has a different quality than a female walk, but its still a walk. Shanazel and I will have to agree to disagree here - it doesn't pass the duck test.
Or so it seems to me at 5 AM when I can't sleep and really should be in bed!