Belly dancing: the sacred art

New Life Journal, Feb, 2006 by Brandi Hubiak

If you longed for a physical fitness, regime that would be more fun than push-ups and sit-ups, more gentle on the body than running, and more accessible and inviting to you right now in the shape you are in than--say--going to a health-club full of already pumped up and slimmed down bodies, don't despair: there is an option for you. Bellydance is an incredibly fun and surprisingly intensive workout, engaging core muscles while encouraging whole-body strength and flexibility. As bellydance is essentially creative and non-competetive, it allows for personal style and embellishment, making it very accessible to people of all ages, sizes, and health conditions. The objective in the dance is to internalize the music you are moving with and let that unfold through articulated movements in whatever way feels most satisfying to you, the dancer. It's not about pain: it's about pleasure. If something gives us pleasure we will tend to do it more often; if that something happens to be a good workout disguised as a good time, surely the results over time will be improved health and vigor!

Historically, bellydance has had physical, social, and spiritual applications in cultures around the world. As a women's dance, it has been passed down through the generations as a birthing aid. In its practical contexts, bellydance supports the maintenance of a strong abdomen, an erect spine, and a steady sense of inner balance, all valuable to women in enduring the tasks of carrying children, laundry, water, and market goods without strain. In gender-divisive societies such as Islamic countries, bellydance generally provides the same practicalities but also serves as a social dance offering catharsis of inhibitions, shared only in private quarters among women. The dance is generally considered taboo for mixed company.

In larger celebrations, however, it was traditionally public dancers who might incite participatory dancing among the crowds, especially the men. These numinous public dance appearances at weddings, circumcisions, funerals, and holiday celebrations are vestigial from earlier days of temple dancers and ritual hierodules. In the context of sacred bellydance, the dancer's sensual movements were imbued with meaning derived from stories of creation and fertility, goddesses or of human consorts to powerful and benevolent gods. These stories were ritually danced out as a means of impregnating human consciousness with the experience of Divine communion.

Fundamentally, bellydance is a composite dance of circles and figure eights, pelvic motion, rhythmic step patterns, isolated muscle control, and codified gestures coupled with costuming that rattles, jingles, or shakes. Numerous dance traditions around the world fit this description, including hula, samba, Cherokee jingle dancing, as well as dances from throughout the East and the Middle-East. There is no one history of the dance: there are many histories of many relative dances. Some of these have endured, some have disappeared, and many have been subjected to cultural and artistic fusion to become what we consider bellydance today.

Bellydance first appeared in America on the exotic shores of take Michigan for the 1893 Chicago World Fair. The fair was celebrating 400 years since Columbus had allegedly "discovered the New World" and indexed the "progress" made since then. Live replicas of Old-World villages from around the globe comprised the booths in the fair's Midway Plaisance as a pageant of human civilization from primitive technology to modern.

Along with contrasting technological development from culture to culture, certain booths specializing in entertainment were points of extreme contrast to Victorian mores of that time. They featured "hootchie-cootchie" and "muscle" dancers who created an uproar. These bellydancers from French colonies of North Africa inadvertently stole the show from the notable inventions of Thomas Edison and from the world's first and largest Ferris Wheel. Visitors came in hordes to see for themselves what licentiousness corrupted the prestigious fair. The dance theaters were doing far greater business than any other concessions at the lair: so, other booths began to produce their own faux-foreign dancers to simulate the already slightly Americanized version of the real thing. Competition for business at the World Fair became a matter of dancing girls and what they did or didn't do; educational and humanistic intentions for the exhibits went by the wayside. The press feasted on the scandalous element of the World Fair, delivering a misconstrued and misrepresented perspective on bellydance to the American public. Fascination with Oriental eroticism was quickly popularized through the growing trend of themed amusement parks and the new medium of Film. Thus, American fantasy gave birth to its own version of bellydance.

With respect to this history, bellydance can be approached from a variety of angles. It can be a sacred ritual dance with mythical implications. It can be a dance for health and vitality, shared among women (or women and men) in their own safe spaces. It can be an entertaining celebration dance in a secular context, purely for shaking loose any social constrictions. It can be an anthropological survey of cross-cultural artistic expression or an inadvertent co-opting of a generalized "Eastern" culture. You might or might not know why you feels drawn to bellydance or what you might achieve by doing it, but having an understanding of the dance's many manifestations is helpful in navigating your experience towards satisfying results.