“Arab domestic dancing nowadays tends to involve tea, cakes, female friends and relations, little girls and old ladies, a scarf around the hips and a lot of laughter and gossip. Western versions, particularly in the US and Germany, are the bastard children of aerobics exercises, women’s groups, New Age Goddess awareness, and the perennial female weakness for fancy underwear and showing off in it.”
-Louisa Young
The heatwave peaked at around 36 degrees Celsius, drying out fields of cabbage as well as fish ponds. Seoul in the summer of ’04, I came with a healthy amount of skepticism about many things, including the lack of a bellydance scene here. With the usual amount of book-knowledge and general ignorance that most people land with, and only a handful of sites that I could find in English, I was convinced there was nothing except for one English-speaking teacher in Yongsan.
Then one day I was proven wrong when an instructional video of bellydance showed up on TV and I have continued to be proven wrong every year. I found bellydance schools, instructors who trained overseas, instructors coming over here to hold their workshops. The past 5 years the dance has stuck around, outgrown the latest fads, and has grown in popularity each year. The dancers have become better technically, winning competitions overseas and showcased alongside health fitness schemes and shiny outfits, with awkward pop stars in hip scarves giggling next to miniature sleek raven-haired petite women in bedlahs. All this and more to expose the masses to this Middle-Eastern dance form.
It has proven to be more than just a way to get rid of offensive stomach fat that the full range of people enjoy complaining about – including my favorite 4 year old kindergartner and my mother. There is a whole generation of women, a wide spectrum of women, from ajummas to children taking bellydance classes. Some of them indulge in their princess fantasies, some use it as a way to keep fit and have fun, and others who dedicate themselves to the dance follow a path of growth, healing, empowerment and learning. Either way, there isn’t and shouldn’t be anything wrong with any of this. But perhaps what is wrong are the misconceived notions that revolve around the performance arts in general.
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