baltimore city paper is bored with bellydance

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.