Bellydance & Striptease: Have things really changed?

While on my way home tonight from teaching, I logged into facebook and came across Dilara Sultan's article: "Belly Dancers: You Gotta Go With Your GUT!"

She approached a controversial topic concerning bellydance performances in Burlesque shows. I thought it was great advice she gave: follow your gut. If it doesn't feel right, don't do it. I am known to have strong opinions about Oriental bellydance as an art form and while this golden rule is great for making decisions you're just not sure about, my gut reaction to this is don't do it.

I've had the privilege over the past few years to be surrounded by women dedicated to elevating bellydance as an art form. They work towards excellence always learning new things, producing high quality gala performances that appeal not only to other bellydancers, but the general public. I've also worked with outstanding professional Middle Eastern musicians and collectively we have all respected each other as artists.

While I am viewed as an artist by my students & colleagues performing at galas and with live music at an Arabic nightclub, there are the other gigs....the ones where I'm hired by a wife/girlfriend for their husbands/boyfriends birthday, the calls I get to perform at bachelor parties (of course I don't perform at them), and the comments when I arrive to dance at a party: "look at you, you're so hot! The guys are going to love you!!" So here, I'm no longer a serious Oriental dance artist, but a PG13 option to hiring a stripper.

So as it stands here in 2010, bellydance as an art form is still so exotic to a majority audience. These types of clients are not calling a ballerina to dance for their husband or boyfriend. Now put this next to a strip tease act?? Is this really helping our art form?

Bringing us back to the bulesque show. Don't get me wrong, I LOVE burlesque and I hope that one day bellydance is strong enough of an artform to be in a burlesque show. I see these women as artists and their status as artists share some commonalities with us bellydancers! For example, most people who tell me they saw a bellydancer at such and such a place once, I ask, "What did you think?". The responses are either, she was really good! or she was really awful and why did she just keep trying to drag people up to dance with her?!?

Bellydance as a new art form means there are fewer standards as to what gets seen on stage. Meaning, in other dance forms, it is less likely to see a dancer in a professional setting who has not had many many years of training. Unfortunately for us, sometimes dancers begin to perform publicly outside of student shows and the result of an amateur performance viewed by people most likely seeing a bellydancer for the first time results in the public taking us less seriously. I've seen similar catastrophies in burlesque shows. While there are some stellar performers out there, when amateurs take the stage as professionals, it brings the whole art form down.

I think a big part of the blame is in the concept of the "bellydance community". This whole idea that we should not criticise one another and tell everyone that they are very good just to be supportive is detrimental to our art form. If the only people showing up to our shows is the bellydance community, we're doing something wrong. It's ok to criticise! Be nice about it while demanding excellence!

I really love this art form and I want to see it elevated to the same levels as other dance forms such as contemporary dance, ballet, and even Flamenco. I think we have a long way to go. Ballet took 200 years to have a standardized vocabulary of movements and really we have only been around since the 1930s. In the mean time, we have to continue to work hard to put high quality bodies of work out there for the general public and be conscious of what settings our dance is being viewed in.