Amulya
Moderator
I admit I'm judging a performer by what they wear, but not necessarily in the way they think. My expectations of a dancer in a student costume are more modest than someone in a couture costume. If you show up looking like a beginner or a hobbyist on a budget, I'll expect you to dance like someone who isn't trying to make a full-time job out of performing, but if you show up looking like a million bucks, I'm going to expect you to dance like a million bucks.
Absolutely! People wouldn’t be judgemental of a student wearing student costumes.
I did get my students to perform, but we all wore very simple things, me included because I wanted us all to look equal, which is so much better looking than the teacher having a different costume. But that is maybe a personal taste thing I have?
Luckily when I was a student there were not many gate keeping teachers, there was one and I immediately fired her as my teacher LOL, she was a bully too. Costumes were already available in all sorts, and I liked to buy second hand and change them around to my personal taste and repair them.
This was looooooong ago, in the mid ‘90s and in The Netherlands. Off topic, but what I really hate is that the teachers back then handed out completely wrong information about origins of belly dance, they had copied articles with no references. But as student I assumed a teacher knows what they teach. Became extremely embarrassing when I went on Bhuz and found out!
The thing they did try to gate keep were workshops from famous foreign dancers. It was a horrible atmosphere because I was a new one going to those and they made me feel so uncomfortable. They were people who had been dancing longer and who had basically also done the same to my original teacher. The newer dancers wouod call them ‘the oude garde’ which loosely translates to ‘old guard’ or ‘old school’, not that they were old haha. But they were established and some would try to undermine newer dancers gigs (if they found out where and when they would offer themselves cheaper or just completely downtalk someone, claiming that the person was just their new student)