Belly Dance Boston

I had studied Arabic for several years, and lived in the Middle East for a while, but when I thought about it I knew nothing about Belly dancing. In Egypt I had seen the occasional night club act, invariably performed by blonde, American dancers with names like Cassandra or Delila in the Sheraton hotel, or the informal celebrations of movement in nightclubs in Alexandria, in which a woman would hold the floor and the men gathered around her in a circle on bended knee, clapping obsequiously and gazing up at her as at an object of wonder. Once, in a village in Upper Egypt I caught a passing glimpse of a courtyard in which young girls were twirling and gyrating to the hilarious amusement of older women sitting cooking over open fires.

When I started dating an American woman who professed to be a belly dancer I was intrigued. Surely this was everyman’s fantasy—a belly dancer! What could be more exotically sensual than that? What could be more evocative of the hedonism and decadence of the ancient East? But as a one-time student of Arab culture, I was also skeptical: Belly dance was one of the country’s many inherited customs which sat very uncomfortably with the prudishness of its neo-Islamic population, and while many modern Egyptians enjoyed a good belly dancer at a wedding or party, no one wanted their daughter or—god forbid, their wife—to be one. What would it mean, then, for a foreigner taking on this art, that the culture which gave birth to it looked upon it as a kind of bastard child? And what would it mean to embrace this tradition without studying the wider culture?

Gustave Flaubert writing in the nineteenth century described his amorous adventures with the “Whore queen from Damascus,” the belly dancer/prostitute Kuchuk Hanem, and she remains perhaps one of the most infamous belly dancers, doing little to combat the association of belly dancing with prostitution, and setting up later scholars for their assertions about how Europeans had imagined the orient as their fantasy of decadence and eroticism:

Kuchuk shed her clothing as she danced. Finally she was naked except for a fichu, which she held in her hands and pretended to hide behind. And at the end she threw down the fichu. That was the Bee.

So when my girlfriend revealed this side of her I was conflicted. On the one hand it was clearly appealing to be dating someone involved in so sensual a pursuit. But to be a belly dancer in America seemed to pose lots of problems: it seemed as if the dance itself had been ripped from its natural habitat and transplanted without the rest of its cultural environment, without an awareness of its place in the wider society, without a knowledge of the language which accompanied the music, without a knowledge of the dance’s lineage. Secondly in the old country belly dance was embroiled with a host of sensitive issues related to gender relations, part and parcel of the world-wide struggle between modernity and tradition which was busy reshaping peoples’ identities, and as a student I had spent considerable time and effort tip-toeing around these, attempting to strike a balance between being culturally sensitive, and yet critical enough of clear misogyny.

I suppose that having had an association with the Middle East, I felt in some unwarranted way possessive over the culture of belly dance: I interrogated her about the teachers, the students: Were they Arabs? What relationships did they have with the Region? When they listened to Umm Kalthoum, Egypt’s heroic diva, or Farid Atrash, the Nightingale of Lebanon, did they understand their words, could they interpret the melancholy poetry speaking of loss and desire and love?

As I suspected, it turned out that the practitioners of this American version of belly dance were almost exclusively white girls. Even the teachers, who had stage names which sometimes evoked the cabaret style, associated mostly with Egypt—like Cassandra, or Layla—were all American, born and bred. What was becoming clear was that no Arab girl seemed to want to touch this custom with a ten foot pole; but also the women practicing the dance in this country did not give a hoot where it came from or what that necessarily meant for them: they just knew they liked it. This was an indictment of Arab culture, to a large extent, and perhaps symbolic of its gender segregation and its hypocrisy, that a custom so deep-rooted historically and so pervasive across the region, was treated with such a double standard. How could it be acceptable to watch and enjoy, yet not approve or partake? It was also symptomatic of the incredible American ability to take and remold customs without reproducing the ancient prejudices that came with them in the old country.

Above and beyond all these thoughts of culture, however, was the brute fact that I found the idea of my girlfriend being a belly dancer sexy: who can argue with a gold coin bra? Who can remain intellectual in the face of hip-belts set to jangling by shimmies? But in time it also became worrisome; its attraction began to wane in direct relation to the seriousness of our relationship and with what I learnt about the belly dancing scene. The more I thought of her as “mine” the less I liked thinking of her as a sexy dancer. At dinner parties it frequently came to the attention of the guests that she was a dancer, and when questioned and she revealed what kind, people really sat up and paid attention. Clearly Kuchuk Hanem was still with us. Perhaps I had inadvertently started dating her. The men looked at me with something approaching awe; but they didn’t look at me for long, they looked at my girlfriend, with a wholly new interest, imagining her no doubt, in a gold coin bra, a tassled belt and a whispy fichu.

This was, in fact, pretty much the kind of costume she used, so they weren’t far wrong. Over the course of the first two or three months of our relationship I gradually began introducing some of my concerns to my girlfriend. I didn’t really think that she wanted to be a stripper, and I realized that there was more to it than that. It was difficult, however, to explain this to others who, I feared, were jumping to that conclusion, for the simple reason that barely anybody had more than a Hollywood perception of belly dance, and that was all about erotica. I found myself leaping into conversations to explain how belly dance is not a kind of exotic dancing; that it’s a respected and legitimate art form, performed more for women, in fact, than for men. But I could tell nobody really bought this.

I also found that my questions about setting belly dance in some “holistic” cultural context fell on deaf ears, since my girlfriend’s concern was the dancing, and sure, she was interested in its history and tradition, but she also wanted to dance. She was, in other words, taking something from outside our culture and using it for her own expressive needs, and using only that which was suitable, discarding the rest like chaff. I slowly began to realize that I was witnessing the transformation of a tradition for which America was so famed.

The first performance I went to see only worried and confused me further, and it did not arm me with more ammunition to make the case for belly dancing’s respectability. A well-known local dancer was performing at a restaurant in a hotel on the Charles River in Cambridge. The restaurant was usually a Greek venue, but on Thursday nights it became an Arab nightclub. The dancer was scheduled to hit the floor at midnight, so we arrived a half-hour before to make sure we had an uninterrupted view of her. My girlfriend was excited because she had heard a lot about this woman, who was supposed to be one of the best in the country.

The restaurant was one hundred percent Middle Eastern, and packed. There was hardly a non-Arab face in the crowd. Lebanese couples sat drinking Arak, feasting on Hummus, babaghanoush and grilled lamb kebob. Groups of sharply dressed young men with pointy beards and cell phones strapped to their belts shook hands and chatted animatedly. The women present were uniformly attractive and dressed in the latest fashions, heavily made up. There was no hint of Islamic prudishness here, this was unapologetically secular Arab society; Kuwaitis and Saudis mixed with Egyptians and Iraqis and Palestinians. Even before the dancer arrived I found myself transported to Egypt’s cafes and clubs from years before, the animated conversation, the energy, and I could not imagine how a white girl from suburban Massachusetts would fit in here, let alone provide the center-piece of the evening’s entertainment.

Finally, at about 12:45, as I was practically dropping off my bar stool, the announcer arrived and spoke in Arabic for a few minutes, then, with a flourish announced the dancer and left the stage. “Ruby” ran barefoot onto the stage, which was now bathed in a golden, dappled light. She was wearing a scarf around her face and a gauzy skirt which went almost to her ankles. The scarf was a kind of body wrap which covered her entire midriff. She began to undulate her mildly fleshy hips gently, only her eyes visible through the scarf. She began what I would later be able to identify as a classically Egyptian cabaret number, the standard fare for a night-club performance. The scarf came off and revealed her face, her lips set in a smile half-way coy, half-way courteous, then her belly, and as she began rippling the skin over her stomach, young men came onto the stage, danced around her for a few seconds, then let fall cascades of dollar bills over her head. I was transfixed; there was no doubt the dance was arousing; at least to my male gaze it was a brazenly sexy, designed surely to arouse man, woman and beast alike. This was horrifically confirmed for me when one young man leapt on stage and commenced dancing with the performer, and judging by the obscene bulge in his pants he was overcome by her power.

Her dance lasted for eight or nine minutes, including a mesmerizing drum solo in which she stayed mostly in one spot and oscillated every inch of oscillatable flesh. When she finished the audience swarmed the stage and soon half of the young women present were doing their own version of what we had just seen, holding their arms in the air, their thumbs and forefingers touching at their tips and their hips describing graceful arcs in the air around them, smiles playing suggestively over their painted lips. The men were doing a quirky and elegant series of moves involving pointing their two fingers in their air and holding their arms out in front of them. This was a side of the Middle East that one rarely guesses at from everything else we usually hear about the region; its sheer seductiveness, its celebratory quality more usually associated with the more hedonistic cultures of Europe’s Mediterranean coast. Here were the bars and cafes of yesteryear’s Cairo and Beirut, strains of Damascus and Baghdad deep under the suffocating influence of local politics and stern imams, here was the irrepressible heart of a vital culture.

In the car on the way home I was still having flashbacks to that one male dancer who had serenaded Ruby. It was one thing for the audience to delight in their traditional dances together, I said, but I was still unconvinced about how much respect the professional dancers were accorded. What did the Arab audience think of this white girl from Leominster being the evening’s spectacle? And what did it matter, to them, to her, to me?

Over the next few weeks we argued over these issues, my concern for the abstract questions of culture and meaning giving way bit by bit to concerns over the reputation of my girlfriend as a dancer in the public realm, in the realm, ultimately, of brutish and libidinal men.

“Its not about how they see the dance,” she said, fending off my assaults. “Its about how I present it.” I discovered that our views of public perception were wildly different: I was doubtful that a room full of American men would be able to discern choreographic phrasing, muscular dexterity, and emotional expression from exotic dancing. She believed that it was all in the way she danced.

“Believe me,” I said, “Once you put on that costume you might as well put tassels on your nipples and look for the nearest pole.”

She had been living in Germany after college, and the woman in the apartment upstairs from her had been a belly dancer. A German belly dancer. Something about the expression of femininity had captivated her and prodded her to find out more about it. In talking to some of my girlfriend’s belly dancing colleagues this was universally the case: no-one saw it as a form of exotic dance (well almost no-one). Most of them found its movements and rhythms liberating and empowering, and this was what was so fascinating to me; an art form so denigrated, and held in such suspicion by men and women alike in the Middle East, in America offered the promise of liberation, of empowerment.

This became more clear, when, tagging along with my girlfriend to another show, I came across the transsexual crowd. We found that in the Boston area there was a regular belly dance meet. It was usually held in large halls, such as an Elks, or an American Legion Hall, thus absolutely guaranteeing the absence of any fast crowd. There would be no cascades of dollar bills here. This event was organized by an odd couple: Tom, a fiftyish hippy type who played electric guitar and a synthesizer which he used as a tabla, and his partner, a six-foot three blonde woman called Julie. Bizarrely they appeared to monopolize the New England belly dance scene, and managed to attract some major names in the business.

The room was filled with a Cambridge/Somerville crowd of new age women and their supportive men-folk. The women ranged from late teens to late sixties, and many of them seemed to know one another. The one exception to this was Buddy. Sitting next to me at one of those large round fold up tables like you find at Elks functions or church rummage sales, Buddy was a World War Two veteran, and had decided to saunter down to the hall since he had nothing else to do that Saturday night. Belly dance, for him, was a reminder of his prime, when he was a young man wandering the theatres of war, escorting top generals to meetings around the world as part of a flying security detail. He had spent time in North Africa and had seen belly dance there, and to my surprise he seemed full of an uncomplicated respect for it: “They train their women to dance good,” he told me. “They all do it, its just part of the culture.”

Buddy looked on in anticipation as the hostess, Julie, took to the dance floor after some procedural notices about upcoming events. Tom, his guitar slung over his spreading belly, produced tabla sounds from his rows of keyboards, and grinned enthusiastically as Julie commenced her routine. Julie commanded attention even without moving; she was a full foot taller than Tom, and her broad shoulders, long flaxen hair and equine teeth gave her the look of a mythic Nordic hero. She executed a few wandering circuits of the dance floor, all the while grinning an enormous and unfaltering grin and clacking her zills. Then she maneuvered herself into a prone position on the floor, as Tom entered into a drum solo. Once fully stretched out on the floor on her back, Julie lifted her right leg and began to vibrate it alarmingly; she lifted her head off the floor high enough for the audience to witness that she had not ceased her enormous grin, and continued in this position for several minutes. Her stomach was very flat and very white. I kicked my girlfriend under the table. She kicked me back. Her legs were long and skinny, yet with surprising muscle on the thighs. She appeared to be completely hipless, which is a definite drawback for a bellydancer.

Buddy had taken several large pulls on his Bourbon, and was chasing it with Budweiser. My girlfriend made an almost inaudible sucking sound and leaned over to whisper in my ear: Pretty tacky floorwork. I looked around the room, searching for signs that the audience found this tacky too, and if it was there it was pretty well hidden. Most of the women were returning Julie’s enormous grin, and as she raised herself from the floor, with considerable effort, and began to twirl around the room to ululations and clapping of the audience, an older woman came onto the floor and threw a sad collection of three or four dollar bills at Julie, to the glee of the audience. Clearly the Middle East was a distant and misunderstood dream. She paused on one circuit of the room and lasciviously kissed Tom on the lips before continuing around the room. Julie’s performance seemed to last forever; Her grin perpetuated itself throughout, and when the vibrations from her final stomach roll had died away and her snake arms fell still, there was a palpable sense of relief in the hall.

The performance following Julie’s was remarkable in its improvement over what we had just witnessed and proved to me that the belly dance scene was uneven in its accomplishments; while there were rank beginners who were simply bad dancers, there were also individuals of extraordinary talent. The dancer following Julie executed a fusion of Eastern European and Middle Eastern dance, mixing a gypsy sensibility with something oriental. There was little focus on the belly, in fact, and whereas many belly dancers tend to dance from one spot, she raced around the floor like a twister, her colorful skirt billowing out, paying homage to Andalusia more than Egypt.

I spotted in the crowd an Iranian woman who I knew to be a professor of gender studies and Middle Eastern culture. I had taken a course with her several years before in grad school. When the dance shows were over, Tom and Julie invited the audience to a free-for-all and the floor was flooded with women twirling their arms in the air, undulating their hips filling the air with trills and shrieks. The professor was there with a young woman who I assumed was her daughter and they were both joyfully partaking in the free for all.

Buddy and I sat this one out. He talked some more about the war, about following generals around the world in their generals’ plane, and he offered me a few more benign observations on A-rab culture. When the free for all was over, I found the professor in the crowd and told her I had once taken one of her classes. I asked her what belly dance in America was all about: “Well its multi faceted,” she said, watching her 20 year old daughter, the only one on the floor who looked like she had a middle eastern origin. “But its connected to many things: first, I’d say there’s the new age movement blended with a post-feminist sensibility. Clearly, this is a safe space to exhibit your femininity in a sensual way; that is not surprising, but also a little ironic, since belly dance has historic associations with prostitution. These women have de-contextualized much of the dance, have sort of made it their own. Then there are the transsexuals….” I look over at Julie, the Norwegian giant.

“More than one?”

“Oh yes,” she said. “I’ve noticed several here tonight. I think that since it’s a safe space for expressing feminine wiles, transsexuals can do so too without fear.”

On our way home, I told my girlfriend about the professor’s remarks. Was she exploring her sexuality, finding out what it was to be a real woman? Loosing her shackles? She said that sounded about right: she’d never danced as a kid, she didn’t necessarily have any training in the art, no pre-teen ballet, no high school chorus, no cheerleading, even. But in belly dance she found something with which she innately connected, which permitted her to feel sexy, feel seductive, and enjoy the powers of her body, but primarily for herself, not for the enjoyment of money-throwing men in sweaty night clubs (although, if they got a kick out of it, power to them).

While I was far from convinced about the level of acceptance the dance had achieved, I was beginning to see how American belly dance had in many ways liberated the tradition itself from its degraded position in its region of origin, how in America women were able to express themselves as beings in control of their bodies and their sexuality, without fear and without stigmatization. Or almost without stigmatization. If I thought of myself as a relatively liberated male, then my own reservations about the combination of my girlfriend and belly dance was an indication that mainstream Western Man was perhaps not far ahead of his bigoted Middle Eastern cousin.

In time Katy and I were married. The issues I had encountered around sexual possession melted away thereafter, to become eventually inconsequential. Looking back on it I’d have to say there was no moment when all was made clear to me; it was a gradual process of becoming acquainted with the dance and the dancers, and perhaps, of my own coming to terms with the fact of Katy’s essential fidelity, which did not leave any room for her belly dance persona to get out of control, for Kuchak Hanem to ruin our lives. It also showed me that the ancient bogeyman of male sexual possession is alive and well in our culture and is one of the remaining obstacles to sexual equality.

She continued belly dancing, making appearances at local haflis, dance parties mostly for practitioners, and attending workshops. From time to time I would pick her up at one of the workshops, or go their final show. The dancers represented a wide swathe of American womanhood. In one class there were three generations of Guatemalan women, who swung between hysteria induced by costume crises, and hilarity engendered by the routine gaffs of their senior member. There were empty nesters charmingly thrilled to be on display, shy, yet uncaged; there were oversized women who would never had met such easy acceptance and support in any other dance circles; young women full of coquettishness and confidence, reveling in their—yes, sexuality. There were even men—well, one man, in tights, who performed in front of a room of crunchy new-agers; he was met with all due respect, and—only if one really looked for it—subtle signs of mirth.

As for Katy, she danced pregnant with our first child, then a few years later, she danced pregnant with our second child, in a church, surrounded by candles and tapestries and good vibes, in front of other belly dancing women from the Goddess school of dance, a new age and highly eclectic gathering of forces.

Over the few years that this took to happen belly dance grew in popularity with American women to an extraordinary degree, to the extent that one found it listed in catalogs for evening classes at suburban technical colleges, and lighting up the interiors of unused Elks and Legions across the country. The men attending were no longer limited to the Cantabrigian, new age yogis, but came from all walks of life, many more at home in the bleachers than amongst the spangles, beads and skirts of a belly dance troupe. And in watching them I often wonder whether they’ve gone through the same dark night of the soul, witnessing their wives or girlfriends, or daughters be transfigured, momentarily into an incarnation of Isis, or Kuchuk Hanem, or Venus. And if so, that’s no bad thing, and it is testament to this country’s endless ability to translate experience across cultures, across generations and even, perhaps, across genders.