As a Belly Dancer I feel as if I am challenged to keep pushing myself for better and better combinations, harder footwork and floorwork, more impressive music, and above all a greater stage presence. While we should all strive to be our best dancer, I sometimes feel lost in all of the technicalities. I find myself dissecting performances and repeatedly drilling combinations until I feel frustrated. And my poor students! They also get to join in the fun of almost hip-hop level pops and locks, while doing a basic Egyptian and shimmying! It gets to be too much at times.
When I get into this little dancer funk I tend to think back to when I first started Belly Dancing. How mysterious it was. I like to remember how strange the music sounded to me as I clumsily tried to move my body to it. I sometimes think that the more we dance the more we tend to analyze what we do and somehow start to enjoy it less…maybe that is just me.
One of the best ways for me to emerge from this dance version of “writer’s block” is to watch some of my favorite clips of Golden Era Belly Dancers. Naemet Mokhtar, Soraya Salem, Zieinat Elwi, and Samia Gamal , to name just a few, with their luscious shimmies and gorgeous attitudes seem to tell me to "just dance!" I first encountered these dancers during the summer 1999 when I became friends with a girl named Sahra. Her family had recently moved from Saudi Arabia and her mother had an amazing collection of Middle Eastern movies that we would watch together. I remember being so captivated by the dancers in those films. They seemed to be effortlessly wonderful! Those dancers created a tradition and style of Belly Dance which we would later refer to as the Golden Era of Belly Dance.
These dancers radiated Orientalist mystique with 1950′s party girl attitudes. To watch them, it would seem as if they have removed all of the "extras" of Belly Dance and left it raw and in its purest form.
In a lot of ways a part of me feels as if Belly Dancing really was better back then. Yet, I know that is not entirely honest of me. Belly Dancers of this generation have simply perpetuated the evolution of Belly Dance by developing new styles of the dance such as Gothic Belly Dance, Tribal Fusion, and American Tribal Style Belly Dance. Not to mention the props that Belly Dancers have come to use over the years; fan veils, goblets, swords, fire(!) these things have all contributed to a new era of Belly Dance.
And somehow I think that our Golden Era divas just might be proud of us. For more information about Golden Era Belly Dance, check out this post at worldbellydance.com to learn more about the history of Belly Dance and their picks for The Top 10 Belly Dance Legends of the 20th Century.
Happy Dancing, Habibis
-Katya
