downspiral

Hi, I just wanted to add my two cents about the mother goddess topic. I didn't get a chance to read all the posts cos there are just so many, but here is my view:

Back in the day (paleolithic/neolithic) people viewed the Earth as feminine because it produced and sustained all of life- hence, Mother Earth, Mother Goddess.
If bellydance originated from this ideology, I personally have no problem with it. When I dance I feel connected to the Earth and all of life. Is it religious? Is it worship? Or just spiritual? Who cares? Each to her (or his) own perception of their experience.
Simple fact of the matter is the high I get from dancing is unlike anything else I have ever experienced and I love it for all it is to me, all it is to everyone else who dances, and all it ever was to our ancestors who danced long before us.

jenc

How does anybody know what they thought then.........and why is it imporetant to think that stuff about mother earth and goddesses. I just like to dance and I don't care about anything else

Aniseteph

Agreed. I don't care whether my classmate thinks belly dance is an ancient rite or fun-in-the-harem. Whatever floats your boat. But I DO care if a teacher starts teaching HER personal perceptions as if they were historical fact, and I very much care if the teaching of belly dance is affected by these personal perceptions. e.g. you have to be really sexy because you are trying to seduce the sultan, or treating it like some sort of religous rite rather than a form of entertainment.

PS. I think I'm getting sensitised to that voiceover now, can't even stomach a few seconds...

lizaj

I think some folks love to have a hold over you. Control is what they seek. Goddess dancer/teacher does love to issue promises/threats about their power I have found.They will manage to hang onto vulnerable or starry eyed students whilst the rest of us run screaming..sometimes with laughter!

Andrea Deagon

downspiral, I agre with you about the high you can get from dancing -- it feels sacred to me too. But as you suggest, that's my own personal experience and I am prone to see sacred meaning in all sorts of experience. It's just more intense and directed in dance. (And of course there are the days my knee hurts, my shoulders slump, I can't seem to get into the flow of the music, and so on, which don't exactly bubble with sacred energy ...

But I just have to comment that the idea that the earth is feminine and women have power from motherhood and fertility isn't as common among so-called primitive people as is commonly believed. Hunter-gatherers (people who live the way our most remote human ancestors lived) have a wide variety of religious systems and the idea of earth=female=fertile is not usually a key concept. It's really quite Victorian, when you think about it -- it kind of surprises me that so many people accept that the main way women gain importance in society is *naturally* through motherhood, and through association with the (plowed) earth and not through other more active and individual ways of getting along in the universe. Like being the cosmic "little woman" ...

I don't feel motherly when I dance, or at least only rarely. But I also think the ways I feel when I dance are partly my own experience but partly also the ways our culture primes us to think and feel. I think religious and transcendent experience comes in different forms according to different soceities' needs and abilities to perceive. So really, what people felt in antiquity is interesting only insofar as you can really reconstruct a true world view that is fundamentally different from our own, that can really teach us -- rather than projecting our own desires.

You can tell this is one of my favorite rants ...

Joy in dance,
Andrea

__________________
"I am not contradictory, I am dispersed." (Roland Barthes)

khanjar

It is interesting though how many professional dancers spout about ME dance being of the Goddess tradition on their instructional DVD's. It strikes me as if people coming into ME dance get these videos where a respected professional dancer starts harping on about ME dance being from the misty dawn of time and long forgotten Goddess rituals, this fantasy is only going to get worse. Perhaps the point will come where in the future unless this fantasy is addressed, the origin of ME dance will be of the Goddess, because everyone will believe that from all the tuition they have had via DVD.

Check out some of the big dance companies on Youtube, the ones where they do a short intro for the DVD's they are promoting.

Dancing being any dance type I understand as a spiritual affair, I feel the spirit soar when I get lost in ME music and dance, only this dance, as it is the only style I am drawn to and there is something I cannot quite put my finger on about dance pieces to the call of drums, the drum solo. If dance is spiritual, I wonders at the similarities between dance and actions of the shamen.

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I am a dream to some...and a nightmare to others.

Aisha Azar

Dear Khanjar and Andrea,

This would depend very much on what one means by spirituality. I am a Panthiest and believe there is never any disconnection from "God", if you will. For me,one experience is not more spiritual than another, though some can definitely make me happier or more aware than others. I can feel my spirit soar in the same way from a hundred different experiences, but does that mean that this or that experience is more "spiritual", than say, a not so wonderful experience? Spirituality is something that encompasses much more than our feelings. (We humans always seem to want to make everything about us!) There are in fact religions that proclaim that one has to move outside that kind of attachment to be truly "spiritual". I disagree since I think its all about the senses here, but what do I really know about it in the long run? No more or less than any other person. We are all just guessing!
Regards,
A'isha

khanjar

You see what I see as spiritual is a situation where I become totally absorbed in what I am doing. Prior to this latest venture, it was my art which provided that total absorbtion. The way I would describe the situation with my art is where the external, what is happening around me, I cut off and focus completely on what I am doing. If I be making something, then that article is being made to what I have in my mind, all angles and possibilities I can picture, even the control of hand tools, I instinctively know where to cut, how much pressure to apply and where the cut will stop. When I am like that, I produce my best work and quickly and I would say harmoniously.

Now with this latest venture, ME dance, when I am playing the music, I can for the first time isolate and exclude instruments in the music, so as to say, not hear other instruments, my focus being on the instructions the instrument of my focus is giving. The dance, well my attempt at it, I just move to the music, not thinking about anything I have learned, but just doing. Obviously I do not play music in a sound excluded enviroment, there is always the external noises of life going on around, but I cut them out completely such is my focus. This is what I see as spiritual, total focus and awareness, a heightened awareness where activities become natural.

__________________
I am a dream to some...and a nightmare to others.

Suheir

Wendy Buonaventura's linking of two unrelated stories, which has since been taken up enthusiastically as "fact" by some:

Andrea Deagon

Just a little note on the dance of the seven veils -- Wendy wasn't the first to link the stories od Salome and Inanna. Not long before Oscar Wilde invented the Dance of the Seven Veils for his 1891 play Salome (published in1894), "belly dance" had made a dynamic entry into French popular culture with the International Exposition in Paris in 1889 -- the US experienced the same phenomenon after 1893. And in 1880, the first (German) translation appeared of Inanna's descent, the Sumerian story that all the Ishtar stuff evolved from. By the time of Richard Strauss's Opera Salome in 1905, folklorists had begun connecting the dance of the seven veils with Ishtar/Inanna's descent. This linkage lost importance in the popular consciousness as Eastern dance lost its mainstream appeal by the end of the 1920's, and the abandonment of the theory was helped by the fact that those in the know considered it bogus. It resurfaced in the 1980's after Dianne Wolkstein and Samuel Kramer's Inanna, Queen of Heaven and Earth was published with a New-Age, accesible version of Inanna's descent -- very soon after. I haven't been able to do the micro-trace to find the first instance, but the broader New Age community had an interest in the link as well, not just us belly dancers.

I have an article on this in Anthony Shay and Barbara Sellers-Young's Belly Dance: Orientalism, Transnaitonalism, and Harem Fantasy: "The Dance of the Seven Veils: The Re-Vision of Revelation in the Oriental Dance Community." (Although at the time I wrote it, I had not discovered the earlier connection of the two stories in the early 1900's, so I suggested that the connection was only made later. My bad.) It's a dang good article, if I do say so myself. I talk about some modern interpretations of the story, including Wendy's and the one in Grandmother's Secrets. The book as a whole is excellent, BTW -- I have learned a lot from the other contributors.

Joy in dance,
Andrea

__________________
"I am not contradictory, I am dispersed." (Roland Barthes)