Well it’s eleven days into the new year and I’ve already managed to set myself up for another busy year. I guess I must just like it that way

I had a nice relaxing Christmas with my family and now I’m back to teaching and dancing again. My regular Monday classes restarted this week and my Tribal Fusion classes will restart in March. My ‘Conditioning for Body and Mind’ course starts at the end of January. In the meantime I have lots of things coming up. I’ll be teaching a mini workshop at Hipnotic at the end of January. I will also be teaching a full three hour Tribal Fusion workshop in February which is booking well. In March I’ll be performing at Bellydance and Burlesque and my student troupe will also be performing at Hipnotic.

In April I’m running a hafla and I’ll also be hosting Lisa Thompson, director of ATS troupe Kamara in Reading too. She is a certified ATS teacher with sister studio status who will be sharing her love of FCBD format with attendees. There will be more details coming soon about both events. I am currently in the early stages of planning something very exciting for November which I’ll talk about more later in the year. I’m also going to be teaching around the UK in Southampton, Derby and at Celebrating Dance in Devon.

As for my own training. I’ve already taken a workshop with Samantha Emanuel last weekend, which was brilliant as always. If you can train with Sam you should, as she is amazing. I have a workshop with Ranya Renee at the end of the month which I am very excited about. I have also registered for Eight Elements part II: Cultivation in Portland in October of this year, which is hugely exciting. I loved taking Initiation last year and I am so excited to be going back.

So, a busy year….

When I last posted I had just come back from America after completing Rachel Brice’s Eight Elements level one certification. My certificate arrived in the post not long after, which my mother would like to frame.

I had a week off (apart from teaching my usual classes) and then I was teaching at the Celebrating Dance festival in Torquay. I’ve been to this festival many times before, but it was my first time as a teacher. I really enjoyed experiencing it from the other side. I was sharing a room with my friend Kathryn who photographs the event (you should check out her website) and was producing a charity calendar featuring the teachers from this year’s event. If you want to buy copies of the calendar (I am one of the dancers featured in it) get in touch with her for details.

The following weekend I was up in Wolverhampton at a bellydance intensive run by Alexis Southall and Bex which was also great. I was in the show on the Saturday night, as was my troupe Covert Bling. You can see the showreel of the event here. Then, the next weekend was the final weekend of the JWAAD foundation course, which I am pleased to say I passed. So I now have official confirmation that I know how to teach safely!

I had a couple of weekends off and then it was the last Hipnotic of the year on Sunday, which was brilliant. It was very well attended and we had some great performances as usual. I now have only two more weeks teaching before the Christmas break which I think I’ve probably deserved after this very busy year!

So after that round up of what I’ve been up to, on to the meat of this blog post which is about counting. I’m talking about counting in the “one ah ah ah, two ah ah ah, three ah ah ah…”* sense of the word. I’ve wanted to blog about this for a while, as I have some strong opinions on the value of counting, the problems that counting produces, and the more I watch dancers and the more I teach about the way music works, the stronger they get!

My opinion on counting can be sumamrised in a nutshell; I think it’s important for learning, but detrimental to performance. This creates a conflict for dancers which can be hard to overcome, however overcoming it is one of the keys to making your dance fluid and meaningful.

So, why is counting important when you are learning? It’s down to the nature of bellydance. Like the majority of dancers, bellydancers dance to music. Music has a structure, it has a rhythm, a tempo, it is divided into phrases which are themselves made up of bars, and a lot of music has a melody, which then brings other elements to do with tone and harmony and which instruments are dominating when. In bellydance there is a close relationship between the music and the dancer. We try to express the music through our dance. In order to express music properly you need to be in time with it, and this is where counting comes in. If you know the time signature of the music you are dancing to, you can use that to count yourself through it. We use this a lot when we teach combinations or choreographies, often counting our students through it as we teach it, so that they will get the timing right.

So this is good then? Well yes, ….and also no. While understanding and using the structure of the music is really important, there are some problems that come from counting all the time. The first is that it can make you obsessed with rhythm. Unless you are dancing to a piece of music that is totally percussive, the music you use will have a tempo, a rhythmic structure and a melody. When dancers obsess over counting, they can get fixated on the rhythmical structure of the music, and then ignore the melody. This manifests itself in a number of ways. Dancers can totally fail to notice and reflect the instruments that are playing, and when they change. They can repeat a motif or phrase too often because the rhythmic structure repeats, and it ‘fits’ mathematically, but it may not fit the melody if the melody changes during that time. From a technique perspective, you can become stunted in the way you execute a move, always doing it so that it fills a set number of beats because that is what you are used to doing. This is especially common if you are used to always using music with the same time signature and tempo (whether you mean to or not). All of this results in boring and/or dissatisfying choreography or performance. It can also make a dancer look more beginnerish than they may actually be, because they don’t demonstrate a deep connection with the music, just an ability to reflect the rhythm. They may also repeat phrases too often, or not show a breadth of technique execution, both of which are associated with less advanced dancing.

The second problem with counting is that you run the risk of physically counting all the time which you really do not want to do when you perform. You will perform that way you practice. If you count the whole time that you practice for performance you WILL do it when you perform, and if you count when you perform, the audience will see it. Either you will physically say ‘one, two, three, four… ‘ when you dance (I have seen it, it does happen) or you will have that vacant look on your face that comes from listening to your inner, verbal metronome and not externally connecting with the soul of the music, and your audience. This too will make you look like an inexperienced dancer, even if you are not.

Finally, counting all the time can really hinder musicality. It goes back again to the ability to reflect melody. The melody in music is divided into phrases. This is a complete section of music which makes complete sense by itself. It’s like the musical equivalent of a sentence. When you get used to music and musical structure you may find yourself working with phrases whether you realise it or not. When we choreograph we usually do so phrase by phrase too. One of the things that adds fluidity to dance, is the ability to dance in a manner moves through the phrases, rather than starting each phrase, dancing it, ending…. and then starting the next. You push through and link them all together. It’s the difference between walking down a staircase and putting each foot on the next step down every time, as opposed to bringing both feet next to each other on the same step before stepping down again. The ability to do this makes dancers looks more advanced. If you are continually counting however, as well as listening to the internal metronome and potentially repeating yourself and ignoring the melody, the chances are that you will be stopping at the end of each phrase whether you mean to or not.

So what do you do? Counting is good, and also bad? The answer is to know where counting is useful and where it is not. Counting is useful when you are learning and drilling, it isn’t useful when you are rehearsing. When you are working on a piece for performance, whether you are improvising or choreographing, there has to come a point where you know the music well and and you stop counting, and instead work on your connection with the music, rather than your ability to count it’s tempo or rhythmical structure. You will reflect it anyway (possibly better) but you will also have the freedom continue, and move, and push through and play. If you are very rhythm focussed when you choreograph, pick a piece of music that doesn’t have any percussion and work with that, look at how you have to adapt your methods and what you end up producing, and then use these new skills in music that does have percussion, and see you can produce a balanced choreography that gives a nod to both.

*apologies if you’ve never seen ‘Sesame St’ and don’t know what I’m talking about.

So what has happened since I last posted? I had my ’summer break’ from teaching, and prepared for my autumn of business! Classes restarted at the start of September. I have a brand new class of beginner students, and more of my students from last year have moved up to the improver and intermediate class. I’ve also been running another term of Tribal Fusion classes which I am half way through at the moment, as well as continuing to prepare for Conditioning for body and mind which starts in January.

In September I also started the JWAAD foundation course, which is an externally recoginsed qualification (by the Open Colleges Network) about the safe delivery of bellydance classes. I shall finish this next month. I’ve done all of my homework, and I hope I will pass it!

In September my student troupe Slow Djinn, performed a group Tribal Fusion piece at Hipnotic. There’s a photo of us below that another of my students took

It went really well and I’m very pleased with them. We’ll start working on something new for the spring very soon.

Finally I went to Portland OR to undertake the first stage of Rachel Brice’s eight elements programme which was amazing. I’ve not been to the USA before, and despite a fairly awful flight over (three hours late leaving Heathrow, air traffic control issues, running out of fuel, emergency landing at Detroit to refuel, finally arrived in Chicago six hours late…..) it was brilliant. Portland is a really lovely city and the programme itself is amazing. It focusses on Tribal dance obviously, but it isn’t just about dance technique, it’s also about creativity and breaking through your own boundaries, developing practice and understanding yourself more. There’s a photo of my group below (I’m in the back row, sixth from the left)

I was very nervous before I left, as I wasn’t sure what to expect. We had to do a bit of work before hand and I trained hard for the six months leading up to the intensive. Nobody from the UK has been over for it yet so I felt the weight of the UK on my shoulders! I am pleased to say that I passed certification

So what now? Well I’m currently recovering from jetlag, I’ll be teaching as usual this week. I’ll be teaching at Celebrating Dance in two weeks, and then performing at Infusion Emporium in Wolverhampton in November (there are still some tickets left for this). Once the JWAAD course is over, I think I’ll deserve a rest!

Having excellent workshop experiences brings me to the subject of this post, which is about the value of good teaching from people who know what they are doing. It’s an old chestnut in bellydance, because there are a lot of people who start teaching before they are ready, and don’t take teaching bellydance seriously. Also teaching and dancing are two totally different skills sets. People want to learn from people who are amazing dancers, because they feel they have the key to their dance mastery, but being an excellent dancer doesn’t always translate as being an excellent teacher. Similarly somebody may not be terribly at home performing, but my be phenomenal to study with. Many people have written lots of great things about the value of being a properly prepared teacher who knows what they are doing, and has something to teach, and takes the responsibility of teaching seriously, and I’m not going to rehash it here. This post isn’t actually about people teaching before they are ready, it’s about people who are teachers already, teaching subjects that they are not competent to teach (or not to the level that they are trying to teach them at).

The following video has done the rounds on the internet recently, and it is brilliant. It is a fabulous demonstration of everything I said in Good dancers aren’t cheap, but while this video is about the difference between being paid to do something, and being a professional (yes there IS A DIFFERENCE PEOPLE!) there is one thing in particular that I want to pick up on.

Ok you’ve watched it now? I know this isn’t the subject of the video, but I found it interesting that the ‘professional bellydancer’ in the video was wearing her ‘Tribal Fusion’ costume. I think in recent years Tribal Fusion has become a common victim of ‘I am doing this dance because I am wearing these clothes’ syndrome (yes, that is a syndrome I just made up), and this is reflected in people teaching it because they feel there is a demand and they want to fill it, even though they may have done little more than watch a couple of DVDs, or maybe even made it to a workshop or two, but have never actually invested in it as a style, and worked out what makes it what it is, and how to teach it, and how to understand it. It isn’t just a set of clothes, it’s a dance. You can be wearing anything, but it should still be recognisable from what you are doing.

I want to rant about this because we can be very precious of more traditional bellydance styles, but we are less precious of this one, and I am not sure why. Sure all dance evolves and changes, this is why CPD (continuing professional development) is so important for all dancers regardless of what style you do, or how advanced you think you are. How are you going to keep abreast of changes in your dance if you never go out and learn new stuff or invest some time in seeing what’s happening outside of your bubble? But back to my point, all dances evolve and change, but they still fundamentally stay true to the roots of what they are, otherwise they would be called something else. Although Tribal Fusion has evolved at a phenomenal rate over the last few years, it is still fundamentally recognisable. Take, for example, this video of Rachel Brice in 2003, and this video of Rachel dancing earlier this year. Both drum solos, both Tribal Fusion, eight years apart with all of the refinement and evolution that goes on in that time, but both recognisable as the same style.

Why is this? Well basically it’s because Rachel knows what she’s doing (well, d’uh!). It isn’t just about going and learning a bunch of cool moves, it’s about understanding what you are doing, and why it is the way it is. What makes Tribal Fusion look the way it is, is its posture, its body mechanics, the way moves are initiated, how weight and energy is transferred as you dance and it’s use of opposites. Getting your head around that takes more than just working with some DVDs, or even going to a couple of workshops. It’s consistent study and input from a number of people over time. It is however essential that you get your head around this if you want to teach it, even if all you want to do is teach a choreography, because otherwise what you will be doing will be fusion bellydance, but it won’t be Tribal Fusion.

So why does it look the way it looks and move the way it moves? Well that basically comes down to ATS, and this is another reason why Rachel Brice knows what she’s doing. She emphasises in her teaching the importance of studying ATS if you are going to study Tribal Fusion, and she is right. Tribal Fusion grew out of ATS via Jill Parker (who was in FCBD for, I think, eight years?) and ATS has left an indelible mark on Tribal Fusion. Interestingly one of the most iconic moves in ATS is probably the Egyptian Basic. It’s still seen all the time in ATS, but it isn’t quite as common as it used to be in Tribal Fusion these days. However it’s a really recognisable move, one of the first moves I ever clocked as I was getting interested in Tribal dance, and a lot of people put it into Tribal choreographies as a result. I’ve always found that you can tell how much somebody has studied Tribal by how they execute this move, and it’s all in the upper body. People who know what they are doing know how to use the Trapezius when they execute this move, they know how much to bend their elbows and how to hold their hands. They understand the mechanics of the move, because they understand the mechanics of Tribal dance. People who don’t, well, they don’t.

So why am I ranting? Well I remember a few years ago there was a rash of people doing Tribal terms of classes who had never really studied it much, and every hafla had troupe after troupe of student dancers wearing wool in their hair looking miserable and doing repetitive movements to non-dynamic music. Don’t get me wrong, a few years ago when Tribal first arrived in the UK, finding classes with people who knew what they were doing was really really hard. We had a huge appetite for it, but nowhere to go with it. I went to the first workshop Rachel Brice ever taught on these shores, in fact I couldn’t afford to do both the workshop and go to the show, so I just did the workshop. I was also lucky enough to be able to take regular classes with actual Tribal Fusion dancers in London. I took every workshop that I could, bought lots of DVDs, and as more and more people got more competent I took opportunities with non-visiting dancers. I’ve also studied ATS though. I’m not certified in it, but I have studied with both UK based ATS troupes and FCBD when they’ve been in the country (and I also have all their DVDs). But back to my point (I am saying that a lot), we went through this phase, and then it went away and we have had a lot of much better quality Tribal instruction available in the UK ever since, as a result we now have a lot of brilliant British dancers who have gone out and invested, and travelled and know what they are doing. Despite this, I have spotted a rash of people who haven’t done this, teaching Tribal Fusion, and I can’t help wondering why, when there are opportunities to study it with people who know what they are doing. What do their students get out of it? Why do they do it?

This of course can be said of any dance form and any style of bellydance, because bellydance is really varied. I picked on Tribal Fusion partly because it’s my thing. Teaching classes is tough, keeping your students interested can be tricky, making your classes dynamic and stimulating takes work and preparation. No teacher in the world is able to do everything, we all have our special areas of interest. Mine happens to be Tribal dance. I have however also studied more traditional forms of bellydance for longer than I’ve studied Tribal dance actually, and I still do, which is why I am able to teach styles other than Tribal dance. It’s also why I won’t teach fusion styles like Tribal to people who haven’t studied the Middle Eastern forms of bellydance at least for a little while, because you have to have context. Tribal Fusion has indeed developed from ATS, but that didn’t arise in a vacuum either.

I do think that teachers have a duty to properly understand what it is that they are teaching, to the level that they wish to teach it. If you have created your own new material, then great, go ahead and use it, but if you are teaching something that exists, and has a current ‘definition’ and is understood in a particular way, then at least understand it to the level you wish to teach it (and hopefully more, so you can answer questions, help fix problems, and push students who advance quicker) or else, I don’t really understand the point of teaching it, unless you’re just trying to jump on a bandwagon. But if you don’t know what you’re doing, everybody else on the bandwagon can usually tell……

It’s the last month before the summer break. At the end of term I’ll have been teaching regular classes for a whole year, which has gone incredibly quickly. I’m really enjoying it, and my students are all genuinely excellent and hardworking, which makes it all worthwhile. You can see my current improver class perform a Tribal Fusion choreography at September’s Hipnotic.

The month off teaching is going to be a busy one, with lots of planning and sorting to do. In September my regular classes will start up again as usual. I am also running another course of Tribal Fusion classes from September, this time in a new venue: dance reality studios in West Reading. I always look forward to teaching Tribal Fusion, as it’s my big passion in bellydance, and the style I’ve probably invested in the most. There are limited spaces however, so if you’re interested, sign up soon before they’re all gone! I’ll also be teaching workshops at Celebrating Dance at the end of October, my first festival as a teacher, which will a new and rewarding experience.

I have some training coming up too. I’m going to Gothla next weekend, taking workshops with Sera Solstice, Sashi and Sabrina, as well as performing on the Saturday night. I’ll be taking workshops with Amy Sigil of Unmata and Sam Emanuel in Brighton at the end of September. I’m also doing the JWAAD foundation course this autumn to consolidate my teaching skills, which will be good. Let us not forget that I’m also flying of the Portland, OR to undertake the Eight Elements Certification intensive: ‘initiation’ which is probably the most exciting and terrifying thing I’ve ever done. I’m hoping this will have a huge effect on my practice, my dance and my teaching too, so my students better brace themselves.

Speaking of which, I’m starting a whole new course, in fact a whole new concept of course, in the new year. I’ve just opened bookings for Conditioning for body and mind, which is a six session series looking at ways to improve your dancing, both by increasing your physical ability and improving your mental attitude towards dance and dance training. The classes are every six weeks, and it allows participants to create their own development plan, as well as looking at some techniques to overcome common issues and enhance creativity and individuality. It does require work between classes to assess your goals and development, and I hope at the end of it participants will be able to continue to work on those areas and track their improvement. It’s a really important part of becoming a better dancer, that teachers don’t always have the chance or time to cover in regular classes, where there are lots of competing aspirations for different students, so I wanted to create something that really focused on it. Again there’s limited space, so although it’s six months away, early sign-up is recommended.

I’ll also be performing in a few places too. I’m soloing tonight at Hipnotic, I’ve already mentioned that my students are performing in September and that I’m performing at Gothla. I’ll be performing in the September Planet Egypt, which is another first for me. I’ve been many times as an audience member, so this will be quite special. I’m also performing in Wolverhampton at Infusion Emporium in November, and then it’s the busy run up to Christmas!

I think I’ll need a break again by then.

Oh, and I’m also moving house too!

Positivity is a funny thing isn’t it. We’re always told that we should be positive, but it’s actually quite hard to do, especially when faced with obstacles and difficulties. I admit that I am not naturally one of life’s ‘glass half full’ people, but I do try. Most of the time….

I wanted to write about a particular part of positivity, because it’s really essential in dance and dance tuition, and that’s body positivity. Body positivity is self acceptance regardless of your body type, or indeed person type. It is something that a lot of people talk about, but our society isn’t very good at fostering. Unfortunately the most powerful forces in our culture are based around celebrity and fashion and they keep on telling us that we have to be slim in order to be attractive. Actually it tends to go further than that. Men are told they have to have Adonis-style muscular bodies and square jaws that the average guy with a full time job doesn’t have enough time to spend in the gym to achieve, and may not even want. Women are told they have to be slim BUT it’s good to have enormous tits too. And you shouldn’t have any stretch marks, scars or pubic hair either.

This isn’t good for anybody. People who aren’t naturally slim feel inadequate, worse than that, we have become totally fat phobic as a society to the extent of regarding perfectly healthy people as disastrously overweight, and we have lost sight of the fact that body size, and health and fitness are not always related. The extremes that some people in the public eye go to to be slim in order to retain their popularity are well documented, and then people who are naturally slim can be on the receiving end of jealous behaviour, or are accused of going to the same extremes when actually they are just themselves. The fact that so much pressure is put on people to be slim has also led to a weird expectation that you should be on a diet if you are not whatever the fashion industry considers ‘perfect’ at the moment. More than that, you’re not expected to have a life worth living if you are not slim, or else striving to be so. At the same time however, we are facing an obesity epidemic, due to our sedentary lives, and poor dietary choices. It feels like we have totally lost touch with our bodies and the food we put in them to the detriment of our mental and physical well being.

I’ve always thought that dance has a huge part to play in people’s self image. While some dance styles have a reputation for fostering eating disorders within professionals (or aspiring professionals) which may be unfair, bellydance isn’t one of them. Dance in general is a form of exercise which is actually fun, and which gives you a skill. It releases endorphins, it allows you to enjoy music in a new way, and if you want to be good at it, it is really helpful to crosstrain and condition your body to be stronger and more flexible, which introduces people to new forms of exercise which can benefit their health. More importantly (for me anyway) dance helps people see their bodies differently. You learn how to control it, it is no longer this thing that carries you around, that you may not have a great relationship with, or be especially happy with, instead it is a tool for self expression.

This is a hugely important thing for dance teachers to remember, especially those who teach adults, which is the case for a lot of bellydance teachers. Often you will have people in your classes that have never danced before (I was certainly one of them when I started), you might get people in your class who don’t like their bodies, or who feel under-confident following some life event (yup, that was me too), and everybody will enter your class with the burden of our society’s negative view of most people’s bodies on their shoulders. This makes learning dance hard. If you don’t like your body, you are less likely to be connected to it, and so you will find it harder to dance. If you are in a dance studio you’re likely to be surrounded by floor-to-ceiling mirrors which can be very intimidating when you’re not used to it. If you have body issues it can be hard to look at yourself to assess your line, limb position and other factors.

Building confidence and body acceptance is therefore an important part of being a dance teacher. If you don’t do that, then your students are going to find it hard to flourish, and to have fun! There are a number of ways of doing this. The most important factor is to avoid judgmental language about body shape in class. Sometimes we do this without even thinking about it, because it’s become an excepted part of language or you may be using a common idiom which could be misinterpreted. Positive praise is also important. If somebody does something well, tell them, if they look particularly good doing something, tell them that too. If your students are going to perform it’s worth considering the range of body shapes you have and chose a costume that will work for all of them, or as many as possible, and always give people options if there is something they don’t want to show. There are a number of techniques that can be learned from other disceplines. Practicing Yoga is a brilliant means of helping you to understand your body, and putting you in touch with it’s capabilities through asana, meditation and breathing practices. Recommeding your students experience this (or if you are suitably competent/qualified introducing it to them yourself) may also prove helpful.

Ultimately, although we are adults and we are supposed to be able to look after ourselves, sometimes we need a little help. Learning to dance can make us vulnerable and as teachers we have a choice, to either ignore that vulnerability, and potentially harm our students, or work with our students to overcome it, and make dance and maybe even life, more enjoyable as a result.

This is a quote from my about bellydance page.

“Most dancers have a deeply personal relationship with the dance and as a result many find a way of explaining how this dance came to be which is especially meaningful to them. Generally speaking however, the modern performance dance regardless of what style it is, or where it is being performed, has derived from folk dances of the Middle East.”

This is a fairly loaded couple of sentences for me. I recognise that everybody has their own relationship with their dance, and a lot of people do like to inject a spiritual or mystic element in to their dance. That is perfectly fine, we are modern people, and adding your own religion to your dance in the present is OK. I do have to admit to having an issue with people who ascribe a spiritual or mystic element to the dance way back in to the depths of time however. Without a doubt dance and spirituality had a strong bond in the past, as did art and spirituality and medicine and spirituality and anything else you can think of. My issue comes saying that bellydance is an old dance form and as a result is intrinsically linked to ancient mystic practices, because it isn’t an old dance form. Tied in to a lot of the ideas that surround bellydance as an old and spiritual dance form are a lot of other suppositions which also aren’t true. These however get repeated time and time again by dancers in books, on the internet, in handouts to new students, in introductions to bellydance for the general public and so on, and it doesn’t reflect the actuality of the dance that we do.

So lets unpack this a bit.

1. Bellydance is an old dance form

No it isn’t. It’s been around for about 150 – 200 years at most. It is intrinsically linked to colonial rule of the Middle East. This is not to say that there was no dance in the Middle East more than 200 years ago, that is most certainly untrue! However the whole idea of bellydance, being a spectacle, a performance, with the movement elements, space use, and sorts of costuming that we associate with it is not that old. Bellydance, as we think of it, developed out of a range of folk dances that were already present, and may well have already been used as spectacle/performance dances and were definitely used at various festivals and rites of passage. It wasn’t until there was a big influx of foreigners into the Middle East from the West that the industry of dance really took off, and the dance changed so it would be more interesting to this new and affluent audience.

‘Aaaah’ you will say, ‘but those folk dances are REALLY OLD’. Yes they may be, but they aren’t bellydance. Also when you start looking at the history and meaning of folk dances it gets very confusing because they are so culturally specific and dance is not immutable. It also doesn’t leave much physical evidence, and any written or drawn interpretations are contextualised, you have to be so aware of the gaze involved. Taking a more recent example of actual bellydance, a lot of people use the films of golden era Egyptian dancers to put together an idea of what bellydance was like in Egypt in that period. It’s always going to be a skewed or limited interpretation however because the sources (i.e. the films) were not created to record the dance. The dance however was used to sell the source (the films). As a result the dance will always be representative of what the desired distribution market of the film wanted to see, not necessarily the reality of the dance scene in Egypt at that time (read for example Dougherty 2005)

Going further back in time, a lot of people have tried to build an idea of dance in Ancient Egypt from tomb paintings and other pictorial evidence. At an archaeological conference in Italy I went to in 2009, a speaker gave a paper on her work in this area (you can see her research on her website). I have a number of issues with this, the main one though, is that people create images for a number of different reasons, and use a range of cultural conventions in those images (see Wolff 1993). These conventions, being culturally specific, may be hard to identify to outsiders. The context of the image is also really important. As a result you can never rely on any image created by a person to be factual (unless it’s an anatomical or medical drawing where the aim is produce fact) because there will be a range of personal, political, stylistic and symbolic factors at play during the production process. We know that Egyptian art uses a huge range of image conventions to portray relationships between people for example, so it is very difficult to look at a picture of somebody apparently dancing and have any idea about what it is they are doing. I also don’t really understand the point of doing this for reasons explained in the next paragraph.

Terminology is also always going to be a difficult one. Some people may have a wider view of bellydance to myself, while others may have a more narrow view. Moving to a different dance form, Ballet originated in renaissance Italy (though really came into it’s own in France during the reign of Louis XIV). It developed originally as a dance interpretation of fencing. Fencing in turn developed out of medieval swordsmanship, which in turn developed from earlier forms of swordsmanship – you get the picture. If you ever go a reenactment group and see people using an arming sword, you don’t think ‘oh look, they’re doing ballet!’, even though there is a lineage between the two forms. Bellydance and ancient folk dance from the same geographical region have the same relationship.

This leads me on to something else that you will also hear a great deal about bellydance

2. Bellydance is a dance created by women, for women
This is a line I read or hear all the time, and it is totally untrue. Again, it feeds in to the idea that bellydance is old. This is on the front page of the FCBD website

“Imagine this: there was a time in history, a long time ago, when the bounce and sway of a woman’s hips was considered so beautiful that they set it to music and made a dance out of it…”

Maybe that did happen – that dance wasn’t bellydance though.

If we accept that bellydance in its form as an entertainment dance is not all that old at all, then we have to accept that it wasn’t created only for a female audience. In fact quite the opposite, a lot of people who wanted to see dancers perform in the Middle East during the colonial period were men, who came to see them because, being racially ‘other’ they were able to entertain sexual fantasies and ideas in the context of Middle Eastern dancing women far more easily than they were able to about women of their own class and culture. Looked at from this perspective, you could go as far as arguing that bellydance was a dance that exploited women’s dancing bodies and Western sexual repression for male erotic benefit, and alas we have never managed to shake this off. That isn’t a full picture though. As I have already said, bellydance came out of folk dance, and folk dance is dance performed by everybody, including men.

Male dancers are reasonably common in the West now, though they are still unusual enough to draw large crowds through curiosity (see Cifuentes 2009, and Stavrou Karayanni 2004 for discussions of their experiences). However men danced in the past too, we just don’t get to hear about it very often, and the lavish images that we see of ‘dancing girls’ from the 18th and 19th century are curiously devoid of men dancing, even though they were (for example see Shay 2005; 67). On top of this, many modern dancers think that men either should not, or cannot take part in belly dance, either because of political motivations, parroting inaccurate information given to them by other dancers, or because they believe men are not anatomically capable of performing this dance.

So why do we not have so many male dancers? Well it’s down to colonial attitudes again. The Russian, French and English colonists disliked male dancers. They found it confusing because they liked looking at the sexy ladies, but weren’t entirely sure how to view the men who danced in a similar way, but were…. men. Through various educational programmes, and ‘civilising’ missions male dancers lost their popularity and ceased to exist, (Shay, 2005; 54). The popular image of a Middle Eastern dancer became that of a woman, and it has stuck. In more recent periods in the West it has been taken up by Women as a symbol of freedom and self-expression. The Middle East, still being ‘other’ to the West is now a land where we can paste on our spiritual and social fantasies, instead of our sexual ones (though that undoubtedly still exists) and so the image of the Middle Eastern dancer is no longer just that of a lovely dusky maiden, but of a liberated and spiritual woman. Even though the reality of the Middle Eastern dancer is still that of a woman making a living in a dangerous world, where most people will shun her for her career, and where she is likely to be cut off from her family because of it.

I suspect that people think that men are anatomically incapable of bellydancing because they believe that bellydance derived from birthing dance/ritual and they think that women’s structural pelvic anatomy is significantly and functionally different to that of men, meaning that they somehow move this part of their body in a fundamentally different way. People believe that bellydance has derived from birthing rituals, because a couple of the movements within the bellydance repertoire use the stomach and appear to mimic birth. Added to this was some research that Morocco conducted in Saudi Arabia where women gathered together around a woman in parturition and encouraged her to perform these movements. While I don’t doubt the validity of this account, the ritual of a group of women in one particular part of the Middle East, which involves a couple of the same movements that we use in Middle Eastern dance, does not equate to all Middle Eastern dance, which involves considerably more movements, and spans a much larger area being all about birth. To quote Donalee Dox from her 2005 article ‘Spirit from the body’:

“Artistry in belly dance is clearly not the responsibility of the pelvis alone, but the counterpoint of torso, arms, shoulders, hands, head and feet. Women in Labor rarely play zills, or for that matter, smile.” (Dox, 2005; 325)

Moving on to the anatomical features. There is a major difference between males and females; females can give birth, which means that they have different internal reproduction organs and the interior dimensions of the pelvis are different. There are a number of small differences between the male and female pelvis, for example ridging on the ventral arch of the pubis, the development of a sub-pubic concavity and a ridge on the inferior pubic ramus. Most notably however, the sub-pubic angle (the angle at front of the pelvis, where the two halves of the adult pelvis meet) is wider in women than in men (Mays 1998: 34 – 35). This means that the acetabulum – the socket that the head of the femur sits in – sits a little further out from the centre of the body in women than in men, which means women’s hips appear wider, and there is a slight difference in gait. However, that is all that is different. Women and men have the same musculature, and men are able to produce the same movements as women, they just look a little different, as do all movements on all individuals. In addition to all of this, there is so much more the belly dance than what our hips do.

Ironically, by continuing to exclude men from bellydance, we are merely reinforcing unsympathetic colonial attitudes which derived from male sexual fantasies, which modern dancers are still trying to overcome.

This leads me on very briefly to one final aspect (and well done if you are still reading)

3. Bellydance is an ancient dance performed in reverence to Goddess X
If you have read this far, I suspect you can probably guess what I’m going to say about this…. yeah. It really isn’t the case. The article by Donalee Dox I referenced earlier is really good, go and read it as she discusses this at length. My basic argument is this, if bellydance isn’t that old, and isn’t just done by women, then it can’t be part of an ancient goddess revering cult. As I have already stated, dance and spiritual practice have had a long relationship, but that doesn’t mean that the dance we do now is part of a wider spiritual system and it is very hard to find good evidence of dance steps used in ancient spiritual dance, and the meaning of them (a notable aside is that of the Zar, a dance of possession and exorcism which is characterised by wild head tossing. When the Zar rhythm is used in music now, most dancers will give a nod that they understand what they are dancing by performing similar movements in a stage setting. Some dancers also give dancers an opportunity to experience a full Zar if they wish. If you’re interested in this, go and read Boddy 1989). You can certainly use it in your own modern spiritual practice if you wish, but that is very different to blanketly stating that people in the past did this as part of their religious practice, when actually it’s really hard to know what they did at all, as I’ve already explained.

So what is the purpose of this post? Well I guess i just wanted to get some of my thoughts on this whole area out in one place. I also think that we have a responsibility to take this seriously, and not just appropriate and misinform people about a region’s history. I know some people will consider me a bit of a killjoy, and it may be that one day we will find good evidence of dance in ancient times which will help us put together a greater understanding of where bellydance came from. However for the time being we can only really safely talk about it being relatively modern, hugely influential, hugely influenced and very diverse, and that isn’t a bad thing. People will always have opinions, and most of the above is just that, it’s my opinion. However people should be able to back up their opinions. A good argument is one that takes advantage of available data, and references its sources. If you are given yet another handout in a class which tells you that bellydance is an ancient dance form done by women, for women in reverence of an ancient mother goddess, but it doesn’t tell you why or how the writer knows that, then take it as their opinion, and their opinion alone.

References

Boddy, J. 1989. “Wombs and alien spirits: Women, Men, and the Zar Cult in Northern Sudan”. University of Wisconsin press.

Cifuentes, H. 2009. “Confessions of a Male Belly Dancer.” www.orientalfantasy.com.

Dougherty, R. L. 2005. Dance and the Dancer in Egyptian Film. in Shay, A. & Sellers-Young, B. (eds) “Belly Dance: Orientalism, Transnationalism and Harem Fantasy.” pp 145 – 171. Masda Publishers.

Dox, D. 2005. Spirit from the body: Belly dance as spiritual practice. in Shay, A. & Sellers-Young, B. (eds) “Belly Dance: Orientalism, Transnationalism and Harem Fantasy.” pp 301 – 340. Masda Publishers.

Mays, S. 1998. “The archaeology of human bones.” Routledge.

Shay, A. 2005. The male dancer in Middle East and Central Asia. in Shay, A. & Sellers-Young, B. (eds) “Belly Dance: Orientalism, Transnationalism and Harem Fantasy.” pp 51 – 84. Masda Publishers.

Stavrou Karayanni, S. 2004. “Dancing fear and desire: Race, sexuality and imperial politics in Middle Eastern dance.” Wilfrid Laurier University Press.

Wolff, J. 1993. “The social production of art.” Palgrave Macmillan

However much we like to give the impression that belly dance is sweetness and light and we are one big sisterhood (sorry brothers, I guess you’re not invited into that one….), anybody who works in this industry knows that is not the case. When I was a baby dancer I was shocked, SHOCKED I tell you at the tales I would see posted in various bellydance forums of dirty tricks, disputes and other problems within various dance communities. I was so pleased that no such drama existed in my small bellydance world, everybody clearly loved each other. There were no divas, no disputes, there was no drama based history between various people on the scene, it was lovely!

And then I got more involved, and started performing and getting into troupes and I realised that wasn’t the case at all, I had just been (commendably) protected from it by my teachers.

Infighting, bitchiness and diva behaviour is par for the course in all parts of the entertainment industry, for a number of reasons. People are only as popular as what they do, and this can be fad based which can leave you insecure if you’re not part of the current craze, or your craze is being replaced by a new one. Image is a huge part of the entertainment industry, and this can lead to more insecurity as we fear that if we aren’t doing well, then we must be less thin, less attractive, less appealing etc. than other people, and this in turn leads to bitchy competition. Dance is intensely personal, we invest a great deal in to what we do, and if our dance isn’t as popular as somebody else’s guess what? We feel insecure and this leads to bitchiness and infighting…..

Bad dance behaviour ultimately comes down to fear and insecurity. We all want to be good, not just good but great, possibly the best. This makes us competitive, and competition isn’t always sporting. Bad dance behaviour can manifest itself in a number of ways. It can be needlessly bad-mouthing other dancers, it can be outright rudeness to other dancers, stroppiness and diva behaviour at events, excluding other people from events, deliberately poaching business from other dancers, deliberately shielding your students from the existence of other teachers who threaten you, or even bribing your students to come to your classes and not others. There has always been suspicion and sometimes even intolerance between groups of dancers who belong to dance style A and dance style B or dance style C about other dance styles. There can even be problems WITHIN the dance styles (especially during periods of popularity growth, as everybody is empire building, and often the external market for the end product is not there, or not very big, so everybody falls over themselves to get noticed…. and people get fearful and insecure…….) and within dance troupes as egos clash, battles for power ensue and there’s hair, eyelashes and fingernails everywhere (this may be an exaggeration).

“I hate you.” “No, I hate you more!”

The frustrating thing about this is that it isn’t good for anybody. Here is a list of bad things that come from infighting and bad behaviour

1. Stress
2. Community fracture
3. Loss of students
4. Loss of business
5. Issues with the public image of bellydance as a whole, if the problems spill out into the public domain
6. Fractured communities can lead to event boycotting, which can lead to events no longer being financially viable, and so the community as a whole suffers from reduced opportunities
7. Nobody makes progress of genuine issues within the industry that need addressing because nobody trusts or speaks to each other

need I go on?

The benefits of everybody working together and being a bit more tolerant are as follows

1. Less stress!
2. More opportunities for artistry, collaboration and learning
3. Business clustering. (Yes! If a dancer sets up shop near to you, it really can be a GOOD thing. It doesn’t always mean they are a bitch cow bag who wants to steal your empire. Chill.)
4. More students as the community appears welcoming and accepting
5. More work as the dance form is flourishing and everybody gets on so well and doesn’t sling mud in public
6. The ability to work together to sort out wider problems in the industry, such as poor image, poor pay, increased professionalism, increased dance standards etc.

The benefits of people being nasty to each other however are

1. I can’t think of any.

So there you have it, follow the First Law of Bill and Ted and reap the rewards!

A friend of mine who’s a tattoo artist recently told me that there’s a saying in her industry “Good tattoos aren’t cheap, and cheap tattoos aren’t good”. This can be applied to performing artists, and dancers among them. While there will be some variance between individual dancers and what they charge, normally there is a rough going rate for an area, that most professional dancers will respect. If you come across somebody who is charging significantly less, then there’s normally a reason for that. We call this undercutting and don’t really approve of it, as it’s unprofessional behaviour. It also brings the overall value of what we offer down. If one person is willing to charge £30 for a set, and the going rate is actually £100, then people start asking all the other dancers why they are charging £100 when somebody else is prepared to do it for £30. While the other dancers are unlikely to go down to £30, if enough pressure is put on a dancer by enough potential clients, they may drop down to say £80 and our services get a little cheaper, and we are valued a little less.

There is more to whether or not you are a professional than whether you charge for your services, it’s also about professional behaviour, and valuing what you are worth. If you come across somebody who isn’t doing that, then how can you be sure that they will have a professional attitude towards their preparation, their dance skill, their presentation and their time keeping? Sometimes a cheaper price comes at a cost.

Often our potential customers can question why we charge the amount we do for what seems like only a few minutes work. The reason for that is that we aren’t charging for only a few minutes work. The dancing that we present at a wedding, party, dinner or other event is the end product. On the day we perform we don’t just work for the length of the set, our work starts when we start to get ready. For the dancer the process of putting on make up, doing your hair, getting in to costume, getting to the venue, warming up, performing, and then doing it all in reverse can be several hours long, so we aren’t just charging for X number of minutes. In addition to this, the work we do for a performance isn’t just on the day we perform. Before the day of the performance arrives we plan our sets, rehearse them, maybe even choreograph new material. That’s a lot of hours work, for a few minutes performance, but without that work, those few minutes of professional entertainment wouldn’t happen.

It goes further than this though. We wear costumes that are expensive, make up isn’t cheap and neither is a good hair cut, these are all factors in our services that we would be pulled up on if they were wrong. A bellydancer doesn’t turn up to a wedding and perform with unwashed hair in jeans and a t shirt. Looking the part costs money, and this is all factored into the price. It goes even further than that though because looking the part is only part of it, we also have to be able to dance. Most professional dancers have spent years, and a lot of money on learning how to dance in the first place. This should also go in to our price.

So lets go back to those dancers who charge different amounts of money. It may not be the case that the dancer who charges £30 is going to turn up late with a poor quality costume, and perform badly, but I would wonder why they are charging so little, and wonder if maybe they haven’t put the time, effort and money in to their dance that the dancer who charges more has, and then wonder if the service I am going to get will even be worth the £30 they are charging. Again, sometimes a cheaper price comes at a cost.

Good dancers aren’t cheap, and generally speaking, cheap dancers aren’t good. Remember that, whether you are a dancer working out her prices, or a punter looking for a dancer for your party.

The day was a great deal of fun, I taught a taster class in bellydance, which everybody seemed to enjoy even though I worked them hard. I even had a few come back on Monday for more! I also performed in the evening. The focus of the cabaret was an auction of donated works by local artists, the entertainers performed in between. As well as me there was poetry, African drumming, salsa, Argentine Tango, music from various musicians and comedy from the people who use the centre. I bought a pottery elephant.

I haven’t decided what to call it yet.

The local press also covered the day, and we were in the Chronicle this week, you can downloaded a scanned copy of the article here.

I really enjoy taking part in events where the local community are involved. You might remember earlier in the year my troupe helped raised money for International Women’s Week. Over the summer we will be taking part in the east Reading festival, teaching a taster workshop and performing at the carnival on 3rd July. We have some other plans which aren’t finalised yet so I won’t talk about yet, but I think we all enjoy getting involved with and supporting our local community. The way we live has changed significantly over the last few decades, and it can be really easy to feel disconnected from the society that you are part of, events like this remind us that we are all connected.

Next weekend together with Emma Pyke I will be teaching and performing at the Dancia Dance Showcase to promote bellydance and the school I am part of. It should be fun and is a chance to be part of an event with lots of other dancers from different styles around the local area.

I’m also making plans for my very busy autumn. I’ve booked my flights to Portland for the Rachel Brice eight elements intensive that I am really looking forward to. It will be the first time I’ve been to the USA. I’ll also be spending time at events in the South West, in Wolverhampton and possibly Brighton from September to November, so I’m not always a local girl.

Busy busy busy.