Sara

Can I just say about the English thing- when people in America say, why do you spell colour wrong? And stuff like that- that really peeves me off. But as well- when I got my Ipod it says- what language do you speak? There was only English (US) I mean- English is English- from the UK so why isn't there a UK option? But yea- thing's like that drive me potty. Sure I speak with a dialect but I'm taught to read/write/'speak' RP English. I think that bugs a lot of English people though. Well ones that I know. 'American English' isn't another language it's a dialect. Like Yorksha. We just say things in different words using the same language.

But anyway- on that line of thinking- The term belly dance is like English, but there's lots of different dialects. No one is right or wrong, but then there's RP English which is what most people think of when they think English/England posh accents and all. So perhaps we can say that Egyptian Raqs Sharki is what most people think of when they hear Belly dance? I think Shanazel said this actually. I'm all confused.

__________________
With a little bit of this and a little bit of that, now shake your bum.... :P

Sara

Got it- dialects= different styles. ( I swear my mind int working.)

I hope it all made sense.

But yea- I can see all sides, but I think with Belly dance it's hard. If you said like you were doing Gothic Raqs Sharki then I'd know, but I don't honestly know what Belly dance actually means.

__________________
With a little bit of this and a little bit of that, now shake your bum.... :P

Aziyade

And where is Taletha to run in and smack me on the head?
The clip was from her show. She's going to shoot me when she sees me next.

I can see it now: "not bellydance, my foot -- stay on your own side of the river!" LOL

And she was kind enough to let me dance in her Goth show. Although frankly her "Goth" dancing is heart-wrenchingly Egyptian to me. She's the best Egyptian style dancer I've met who still doesn't think she's really Egyptian style. If Goth is about passion and emotion and bringing the audience along on an emotional journey -- well, she done that! And I wouldn't confuse her "belly dance" with social dance or anything else.

Aziyade

Hey Sara!
You're in England, right? Do you know of Hilal style "Raqs Sharqi" and the RS Society? Maybe we can make a parallel?

I think in my area, when people hear "belly dance" they think American Cabaret style, as done by Alexandra King, Jenaeni Rathor, DeeAnn, Anaheed. Because that's the style that you saw the most in the 1970s in restaurants, and that's where most people got their introduction to this dance. Larger cities that contained Arab night clubs (and immigrant dancers) may have provided a different expectation.

Here in the midwest, almost everybody can trace their dance lineage to either Dahlena, Jamila Salimpour, or every now and then Bobby Farrah. There was also a Texas dancer (just south of the official midwest) who was pretty influential in the 1970's-80's, touring and teaching workshops. Vashti, maybe? What was prevalent was sort of a combination of Am-Cab and folkloric/beledi.

When Dahlena switched to Egyptian style, and we started seeing Reda's influence in the southern states, that's when Raqs Sharqi became the "it" thing here, although a lot of what I still see touted as Sharqi is really beledi but done on tip-toe and in bedleh.

But I'm sure everyone on the board has a different experience. And personally I'd like to hear it! What does the term "bellydance " equal in your neck of the woods, and has that definition changed much since the 70s?

Norma

Oh that was me and perhaps I didn't explain myself very well. Or maybe it was a bad example. I'll try again. It seems to me A'isha was saying the following:

I learn a specific set of moves in traditional "authentic" form set to traditional "authentic" music. = I am bellydancing.

I change the music, but still do the same specific set of moves. = I am not bellydancing.

What if there is no music and I continue to dance? What if I am deaf and can't hear the music to begin with?

Norma

This was interesting to me, because no one has addressed American Cabaret specifically. Now if I'm not mistaken, AmCab is sort of an amalgamation of Egyptian, Turkish, etc. Which leads me to believe from this thread that it is not bellydance.

Aisha Azar

Dear Shanazel,
While the tree analogy was nice, it did not specifically address what it is about any given style that makes it belly dance. I was looking for something very specific and I apologize if I did not really express it correctly.
Re the tree analogy"
Lets say that the word tree is analogous to the word dance.
Then there are specific kinds of trees, such as Norwegian Spruces and Sugar Maples. Lets use the analogy of say, modern jazz and Turksih belly dance. They are two different dances entirely that have as much to do with each other as these two trees, and if they somehow could be combined, they would no longer be a Spruce or a Maple, but something else. On the other hand, if we take two Maples or two Spruces that are not the same, we still might have a hybrid Spruce or Maple, but they have a closer link than just being two trees. They have other elements in common. I think this is true of belly dance, too, but the dances have to have something in common to be a specific dance, more than just that they are both dance.

Here are some things that make my style "belly dance". ( There are people who who are much more qualifed than I to address the elements of Turkish, Lebanese, Greek etc. I feel that I am an an expert in Egyptian style only and can speak for it with real validity.)

* Use of Music- In Egyptian style bellydance, the music does not merely guide the dancer, as it often seems to do in some other forms, but actually the music is manifested by the dancer in cultural/physical and in cultural/emotional form. ( I sense that this is true in all forms of authentic ethnic belly dance, but feel that others can speak more aobut this than I can.)

*Essence- We are discussing the cultural and emotional and spritual qualites of belly dance that is inherent in even the movements. All of these must be present in Middle Eastern form for the dance to be belly dance. There is rarely a "theme" in belly dance in its natural state, though in western off-shoots, a theme often seems important. The dance is about feeling and response to the music instead of telling a concrete story of any kind, Belly dance seems to differ greatly from Goth or what Sadie and Kaya do in this instance. This is partly what is meant by the difference between intellectual and visceral. There is often a symmetry in western dance that is not present in belly dance. Often the western dancers wants to create drama and theatre, while the belly dancer works on immediate response more, and drama happens if it happens, but if not then the dance has other qualities that will come to the forefront.

Choreography- Choreography has a different meaning in ethnic belly dance than it does in what is presented on western terms. Belly dance is usually a solo dance and it may have some do woppers in the background as an entrance, but the dancer expresses the meaning and reality of the music by herself. This is because the dance is so complex physically and emotionally that there is no way two people could possibly do it the same way. The do-woppers in the background are usually there for just a short while in Egyptian dance, but many times the western American Oriental is done with more than one dancer and following a strict choreogrpahy. This is not true of Egyptian bellydance where even the choreographed dasncer is following a loose plan rather than a strict one.

Emotional content- While this is a quality shared by most styles of dance, Egyptian and other ethnicstyles are based very strongly in this as much as physical technique. And often, the western forms sort of choreograph the emotional content into the dance whereas in bellydance, the content is a response to the music the dancing, etc, that is not planned.


The physical dance- Often in western dance we see a symmetry of movement that is not there in authentic ethnic dance. Western dancers often use patterns of two movements on one side and then the other, or similar patterns. In bellydance there is often the 3-1 pattern instead. Egyptian dancers specifically use a lot of circles to cover horizontal space where western dancers do not do the same. The ethnic belly dancer often uses a repertoire of movement, but also relies heavily on angling movement to show it in different ways as opposed to dancing straight on, For example, 10 O'clock and 2 O'clock are commonly seen stances, where in western dance you see more 12- 6- 9 and 3 O'clock stances. The Goth video that Aziyade showed is a good example of this. Also, vertical movement is very imortant to the belly dancer, while often in western dance, we see that horizontal movement is more important. There is an example of this in the Goth piece as the prima dansuese in the piece must travel to make important things happen within the drama of the dance.

There really are rules and regulations in belly dance. Western from have more freedom in them in some ways.

I hope you willl still give me a more specific idea about what makes any given style that you choose to discuss, "belly dance".

Dear Aziyade,
It did not look like belly dance to me either. I also felt that I did not really have an understanding of what it was, but perhaps there was an introduction that explained its deeper meaning?? As for it being good dance, yes it did look like there was some nice technique there, and meaning, but again, not belly dance. I wish I had hear an explantion of the dance before wathcing it. I wou;d ahve enjoyed and understood it more.

I am not sure if it was you or Shanazel that brought up about the belly dance here in the State in the 60-70s and what people thought was belly dance. We have to remember that the general audience thought they were getting the authentic ethnic thing when they were watching the dance, and many students thought they were learning the authentic etnicvthing...but were not. We were often terribly misled! I was there when Jamila admitted publicly that much of what she taught then was , in her words, "Hooey". ( I don't think I ever loved her more than when she courageously got up in front of about a thousand people and admitted that!)

Regards to you both
A'isha

Aziyade

Hi, Norma,

Oh, sorry about that. I HAVE seen people complain (about workshop and video choreographies) that what they learned won't fit with other music. And I wonder about that, you know?

On the deafness issue, there's a school for the deaf outside of Indianapolis, and they use light and an oscilloscope (spelling?) -- the thing that takes sound waves and turns them into a visual wave -- to help students understand music.

You can touch a woofer and feel the beat of the music, so I would think you could probably dance by feel -- it would be a different kind of dance, but it would probably be interesting! The oldest musical instruments known to man are the drum and the flute. So if you could feel the drumbeat through the floor, and could see the visual representation of what the flute was doing, I'm sure you could dance. But that's not your point, LOL.

TribalDancer

Aisha said: I have to disagree with this, and being that it is a root of the labelling argument, though it seems small, it is rather big and important.

MOST people *I* know think of I Dream of Jeannie, James Bond girls, and the like when they hear bellydance. In my estimation, most Americans think of American Cabaret and Hollywood imagery when they hear the term. Beyond that, a lot of people think of strippers or go-go dancers. I do not think for a moment that a majority of folks think of Raqs Sharki (specifically Egyptian styled bellydance) when they hear the term bellydance.

Now this may be a case of the blind men and the elephant. Aisha is touching the tail--she works in a lot of restaurants and travels in a lot of closed circles which involve ethnic dancers and patrons. I am touching the trunk (hi over there!), and travel in wider circles (as it pertains to bellydance) with less of an ethnic audience or fan base. But I would bet some prety significant coin that a poll of 1000 Americans about bellydance and what they think of, very few would describe anything quite like Fifi or Dina, but more likely Mata Hari impersonators, maybe Salome, definitely Jeannie and Jasmine, and their favorite Hollywood movie start spoofing it up in a harem get-up.

I think the term bellydance is pretty wide in its usage.

I have always felt, since talking this over with you Aisha, that it would behoove you to really get behind the marketing of the term Raqs Sharqi, helping it to gain wider recognition and appeal, so that you can distance yourself from the term and community at large that seems distasteful or offensive to you: bellydance. I don't mean that to sound dismissive at all: I know you appreciate some of the performance art aspects of the dances labeled bellydance, though you object to the term to describe Egyptian style dance (Morocco also objects to the term, so you are in good company!).

I would argue there is no getting away from the term as far as the general public is concerned, since it is so deeply entrenched in our language; but if it is important to you that things be called what they are, then it seems to me that since you perform Raqs Sharqi, and do not prefer the term bellydance in any case (let alone what your dance would be associated with if sharing that moniker), then you use the label that works for your dance, and others can use one more suitable for theirs...

Bottom line:
I consider myself a bellydancer.
You don't like the term bellydance and you don't think what you and I do is the same thing.
So use the name that is accurate for what you do, Raqs Sharqi, and all is well...

Shanazel

That is a lot to think about,A'isha, and I will copy the post and take it home to read it again. Thanks for the explanation. Now I will try and give you specifics.

I am a western dancer. I don't choreograph. I don't set a theme for my dances. And I am the most asymmetrical person you are likely to come across in a day's walk. I internalize the music, respond to it with what my body had learned to do as a dancer over many years. I pefer honestly expressed emotion in dance and don't care for planned drama. I understand and utilize angling and vertical movement (one of my biggest snits came from a dance teacher informing me after a performance that I needed to use the entire stage ). I prefer to dance to middle eastern music that has no overtones of hip-hop, rap, or polka, for that matter. I have learned from Am Cab dancers and whenever I have had a chance, from gen-u-ine ethnic dancers. They have all had some effect on the way I dance. I lived for 10 years in a part of the country that was well populated by middle eastern immigrants, and while my understanding of any particular culture is not as broad as yours, I'm not quite without a clue, either, and I honor what I understand to the best of my ability. These are some of the specifics of why I believe what I do is belly dance.

BUT- in addition to these things that make what I do belly dance, I admit to some things that probably were trained into me by ballet and modern classes. Samia Gamal, however, showed some of those same things in her dances, and I don't think anyone would say Samia wasn't a belly dancer because of a certain turn or way of holding her arms. You wrote once that there isn't much difference in what you do with your hands and what Gelsey Kirkland did with hers- it is a matter of essence. When I turn or lift my arms or shimmy, I am not thinking, did I learn this thirty years ago in ballet or from Anoush; I am feeling that this is the best thing to do in response to what I am experiencing in the music.

I'm a hybrid, I will admit, but I am not a new kind of dancer (or tree ). I am a bellydancer.