Dance Web

in the local scene, from baltimore, in mid-september, we have coverage from the jhu newsletter, with this rough headline, JHU dance showcase fails to inspire.

The Egyptian Sun bellydance troupe followed with a group performance and four solos. Although the members of Egyptian Sun are known for shaking what their mommas gave them to anything from pop songs to beats from the hard-core punk outfit Fascist Fascist, this time their act had a surprising lack of, well, shaking. Great bellydancing is all about “layering” — the synchronizing of abdominal movement and upper-body shimmying — and the Suns’ choreography seemed to reduce this bodacious mix to just belly rolls and shiny props.

Former Hopkins graduate student Brenda Peterson’s cane routine, for instance, featured enough sashaying and cane-twirling to bring a smile to anyone’s face, but resembled a jazz improvisation more than bellydance. Even Egyptian Sun co-founder Dori Witt’s finale, in which she waved around a beautiful set of metallic “wings of Isis” to the beat of a rockabilly tune, seemed short on the lower-body virtuosity for which bellydance is famed. Only the traditional tribal solo really seemed to show off the dancer’s skills.

perhaps baltimore’s bellydancers took the “ass shaking” comment from the city paper (here) a little too seriously…

from the baltimore city paper, we get this small item, quoted in its entirety:

Best Trend We’d Like to Throw a Robe On
Belly Dancing

It’s not that we’re inherently anti-belly dancing. We love that you don’t need to be a waif to dress like Barbara Eden and undulate. It’s just that it feels like wherever we go, from rock shows and art openings to fundraisers and corporate cocktail parties, the night is not complete until a couple of barefoot chicks with bells on their fingers have writhed for a while. At first we oohed and ahhed along, but at this point we’ve reached our belly-dancing limit. Are we really so incapable of being entertained by the shaking of our own and our fellow partiers’ asses that our hosts have to hire people to do it? Well, as people who never get tired of our own ass shakings, we say no.

now it’s time for me to editorialize a bit… and i am inherently pro-bellydancing.

baltimore has sucked itself into the same pattern that has served the musicians from baltimore so well over the decades - a self-destructive downward spiral that ultimately burns everyone out and leaves the city void for a few years before another pack of upstarts decides to make another run at it. i don’t pretend to understand all the dynamics behind this pattern, but i’ve seen it play out a few times in the music field, and the belly dance parallels are eerily similar.

so, here’s the lesson i hope someone takes from this little paragraph in a little weekly free rag: take it up a notch before you kill it completely.

bellydancers live in a tiny little universe, mostly populated by themselves. within that universe, things are different. it’s a bellydance improbability field of some sort. don’t take this as a personal slam, don’t take this as a general slam on the form - take this as a glimpse of an alternate (to your own) reality, wherein bellydance is just “ass shakings.” embrace that, and realize that you have to represent your art if you’re going to call it an art. the public may not appreciate what dancers appreciate, but the public is where you get fresh dancers… it’s where you get bigger audiences… and ultimately, it’s where you have to live.

take it up a notch. please. soon.

Review: Bellydance Superstars

The ’superstars’ themselves were individually mesmerising, true artists with perfect technique. There were dance sequences from Bollywood and Polynesia mixed with the more traditional Turkish and Egyptian dances. There were multi-coloured veils, giant golden fans, acrobatics and even a bellydancer on stilts. A veritable feast for the eyes.

While most of the dances were performed to taped music (not altogether successfully, at least at the start), live music was introduced in the shape of Issam, a master percussionist from Damascus.

and their conclusion?

A belly-wobbling 4.5 out of 5

a soloist with the New York City Ballet; he was 52