Moon

Can someone help me please? I can't see if this dancer is a man or a woman: YouTube - Fifi Abdo in tv Lebanon-saedi dance
It looks like a woman, but so powerful and graceful I guess it must be a guy.

Demure??? SURE! The first thing people think about when you say "bellydancer" is demure...
And I don't flirt with the male audience!!! The guy who wrote this apparently doesn't know any other dancers, or he might know many of them are married.
What???

Dear Khanjar, please don't believe articles like this. I agree with the others Tarik Sultan and Zorba have an awful lot of 1000x better information available.
The writer of this "article" should be ashamed of himself, misquiding new male dancers like that.

Brea

I don't know, in my experience with people from Egypt and elsewhere they don't have a problem with men doing this dance. However, I have been seeing lately a lot of things (such as the ban for male dancers in Egypt) that make me wonder. Social dance vs. professional dance could be it, but it wasn't always that way. Men were dancing professionally, in public, in the ME long before the Western ideals of propriety/sexuality came into play.

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www.breamorgiane.com

khanjar

Ah, thanks, I will stick with both Zorba and Tarik Sultan then, as at least they are active on here and perhaps through here I will manage to wade through the rubbish.

Both sexes, it is natural to have masculine and feminine aspects in the character, to be wholly one is imbalance. I may have long hair and wish to learn ME dance, which may be feminine to some, but most days I spend battering hot metal over an anvil in my trade as a black smith, something which I suppose could be masculine, although there are female black smiths.

Pink !, that's desert camouflage.

gisela

...or dessert camouflage, when you sneak around the cupcakes.

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You need chaos in your soul to create a dancing star-nietzsche

Tarik Sultan

The colonial aspect changed many things. There was a time when male dancer were common in Egypt, no matter what their gender expression. It wasn't a big deal to see a guy dancing in full drag. Some guys were feminine in their expression some weren't. It wasn't an issue because they were valued for their entertainment skills and watching them was not seen as a reflection of the individual's life style or sexual preference. The problem was when the Europeans came in, they took thinks out of context and gave it a meaning that never existed in the culture before. Its because of this change that they now feel uptight about male dancers ESPECIALLY if they project an effeminate vibe. Social dancing however doesn't matter. A guy can be effeminate or not and no one cares. However, because professional dancers are regulated by the government, they are very concerned that effeminate dancers will reflect badly on the male dignity of Egypt because it has happened in the past. That is not the image they want the World to have of them. This is why when it comes to professional dancers, guys who still maintain a masculine image find more acceptance although there are many who can't get pass guys stepping into territory that has been exclucively female territory for the past 100yrs or so.

khanjar

So, it would seem perhaps the rest of the world and the middle east were ok with gender and expression, but it took the Europeans to wade in and change peoples ideas. Now the West, has moved on, expression and gender are not such a big issue, but as to the Middle east, the damage is done.The west's prudish mentality has rubbed off.

Tarik Sultan

In a nutshell, yes! The West painted a picture of the Middle East where the women were tarts and the men were switch hitters as propaganda to prove how immoral and backward they were, thus needing the intervention of superior Western Civilization to save them from themselves. And you though George Bush invented this line of B.S.

There are some aspects of truth to the article, but it goes off the mark. Its a case of being totally unaware/connected/exposed to the real culture and trying to over compensate for the effeminate male dancer stereotype.

Men in the cultures are naturally graceful, yet they maintain their masculine energy. This clip is not of Oriental Dance, but two Persian guys dancing socially. What you can see is that although they have a masculine strength in the upper body, they are not stiff. They are totally relaxed and comfortable in their skins. This is the quality that Middle Eastern men have in general. When you bring the dance to the stage as a man, you have to reflect the natural way men carry themselves. However, this is achieved by relaxing and being yourself not TRYING to look masculine. This is where Ank misses the boat.


Egyptian guy social dancing. Notice the hands and general carriage of the body.


This is a professional dancer from Argentina. You can see he has the upper body strenght, but its not that he's trying, he is BEING.



Same guy doing a social improve. Watch the hands and arms and over all carriage and flow of the body as versus the lady.

khanjar

Thanks Tarik, those videos do explain much, particularly the last one with both male and female dancers, the difference being obvious.

So, all these ideas of effiminacy stemming from the west leaves me with one assumption, men of the west were/are uptight about who they are, perhaps insecure in that they have to identify and ridicule others to make themselves feel more 'manly'.

I have often in the past admired other nations when seeing them in social dance contexts, and believe, my country, might well have been the same at one point, just making me wonder where it all went wrong.

Tarik Sultan

Turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. 1800's rejection of 18th century aristocratic values in favor of "working class" masculinity meant gentility (as in gentle man) was now seen as prissy, dainty, sissyfied. 1900's the psychiatric establishment creates the concept of sexual orientation, (which never existed before) homosexual vs heterosexual, as well as ways of "treating" homosexuality. Now people were either one or the other as versus just being a person who may or may not have engaged in certain behaviors over the course of their lives. Men were also much more affectionate with each other before this time because it didn't carry any implication of a sexual relationship, but that all changed with the new boxes that were created.

khanjar

Ha, the coming of the psychos, that possibly explains it, and the modern penchant for putting people into boxes.

But English folk dance, what would have been the social dance of the past, have you seen it ?

Kind of rigid, mind not as rigid as Irish dance, perhaps like our mentality, definately lacks the emotion and fire of ME dance and that of other countries. I just wonder if what other countries have might have been a more universal thing at one time.

It almost seems as if emotion in English dance is not allowed.

Talking of Irish dance, they were pulling down an old dance hall in Dublin and under the floor boards they found an old dusty book called ;

' Part B, what to do with the hands '