Originally Posted by Andrea Deagon

One of the things that is exciting about seeing dance performance -- not the only thing, but one thing -- is seeing power in the dancer -- just that physical juice that is flowing and growing and exceeding its barriers and moving through the performer's body. Tito has that in abundance. That "liquid, growing" energy is very Dionysiac -- very ecstatic, with its own ability to get you out of your self and your concerns, as an audience member.

Peppy stuff is par for the course with the average professional dancing situation, in my experience -- as others have commented, no one wants to see your deep emotions while they are having their nice dinner.

OTOH, that really powerful energy, is also not recommended for the average restaurant gig; you will tire them out.

Bummer about that sort of limitation.

OTOH there are some places, like a baladi taqsim, where you can achieve some sort of interiority if you care to, without overtaxing the patrons.

I think by interiority I mean a kind of removal from ordinary interactive relationship with the audience, and moving from a place where they become observers of an experience that is lived emotionally from where you are, not from where they are. They come along on your ride. Now you are not necessarily ignoring them and their emotional vibe, you are responding to it, but you're doing so by adopting a kind of intensity that gives the illusion of coming completely from inside. I'm not saying it is a conscious deception -- it is a natural response to the performance situation. I think we also think it's "Expressing deep emotions" or some such, whereas actually you are adopting a kind of transparency.

In any case, I do think this is feminine in one sense: the patriarchal cultures in which all of us live have an extensive network of images and expectations that tie females to interior emotional experience. Female genetalia: interior. Women's traditional work: interior. Women's emotional lives (in the eyes of the dominant culture): interior, obscure, unseen.

But the clarifying of this interiority is very sexual, even if there is nothing overtly sexual about it. If someone is really enjoying sex in a deep way, completely lost in the sensation and the moment and the mutuality, you often have the same sort of emotional clarity that comes out in a good baladi taqsim.

While our audiences are male and female, the female members have (in most patriarchal cultures) learned to "read" culture from the masculine standpoint, and to experience similarly, far better then men have learned to read from the feminine standpoint.

So a mixed audience, or an audience of men, will respond much more favorably to this kind of sexually-charged interiority from a woman rather than from a man. A man might feel it, but I think that in different ways, both Middle Eastern and Western cultures make it hard for an audience to receive that energy from a man. So men are discouraged from giving it.

I think in the case of singers, the "plot" of the song gives a context for the man's expression of emotion, so there is a plot, a frame for the kind of emotion he will get from the audience. The plotlessness of belly dance makes the interiority and emotion of the male performer take shape only with relation to the audience (though maybe the men should work with really intense songs by male artists to bridge that gap?)