Written by Piekielko on 02 September 2022. Posted in Dance.

Oriental dance in the east and west

The past century witnessed a phenomenon in which belly dancing became the "calling card" of the Middle East in the West. What was represented as a symbol of the Arab world often caused outrage among Arabs, who objected to the representation of their cultural heritage mostly as belly dancing - a shameful pastime for many in the Arab world.

Beginning in the 1970s, millions of women and many men in the Western world became interested in belly dancing, investing millions and untold amounts of time to acquire basic dance skills and to be able to perform on stage.

Today's Oriental dance is the product of an extremely fast-growing genre that can be described as "cross-cultural fusion dance." For some time now, Arab folk artists have begun to collaborate with Western artists taking over and using Western aesthetics in ethnic dance shows, thus complicating the historical and ideological dialogue between Eastern and Western cultures. A study of Oriental dance and its history shows that Western culture has had a major impact on the spread of dance as an art and entertainment. Although externally, the language of dance in the Middle East may seem similar, in some cases, the actual cultural code and meaning of dance may be different in the West.

What is oriental dance?

Perhaps no dance genre known to date has been so often misinterpreted. The reason for this ignorance is believed to be the widespread view of its sexuality and the public's frequent association with striptease. The international Encyclopedia of Dance eschews the phrase belly dance in favor of the French-language equivalent danse du ventre. In Egypt, on the other hand, the genre is called raqs which simply means dance. Raqs is the main dance form of urban areas. In a nutshell, oriental dance can be understood as a set of movement phenomena originating from a vast area stretching from the Atlantic Ocean in North Africa and the Balkans in the west to the eastern areas of China, Central Asia and the western parts of the Indian subcontinent in the east.

In each of these regions, the dance is characterized by isolated movements of the chest, arms, shoulders, hips and head. The way these specific parts of the body move while dancing differs from one area to another, and these differences are likely due to historical conditions. For example, the dance performed by professional Moroccan dancers called shikhat, and by most Moroccans during cultural events, are characterized by a gentle raising and lowering of the pelvis.

In Tunisia, on the other hand, the characteristic element of the dance is extensive, rapid hip movements from back to front.
While Egyptian dance focuses mainly on undulating chest movements, accentuated abdominal movements and hip vibrations called shimmy, which can be slow or very fast. In Turkey, a dance called cifte telli focuses on both fast and slow arm movements and chest shimmy.

In Iran, a dancer's grace is judged by her elevated posture and high raised arms. Experienced dancers also add expressive facial expressions to their dancing, consisting of humorous or flirtatious gestures with the eyebrows or mouth.

In Afghanistan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, countries culturally similar to Iran, the dance uses arm movements and shimmy, a graceful upward stretched posture and rich hand gestures and arm movements.

It should be remembered that belly dance is very idiosyncratic, which means that it is largely dependent on the dancer's interpretation and its individual variations can vary greatly.

Belly dance understood as an ethnic dance, the form of which depends on the region and cultural circle of its origin is danced by both professional dancers and indigenous people. It is danced not only solo, but also in duets, trios or larger groups. In individual cases, it is danced in larger communities or by groups of performers in which each person plays an individual role. In Iran and Turkey, teams of professional dancers being in fierce competition with each other had to develop a unique style. Members of these groups not only dance but also sing, play instruments, and incorporate elements of acting into their performances. The ethnic dances described above do not feature what we used to call "group choreography." Many European sources, in the case of both Iranian and Turkish dance, mention duets, in which each dancer played a role during the performance. When looking at photographs or films related to the subject, one often sees scenes with multiple dancers in the same dance space during social events such as weddings, but until such an event is choreographed for public performance each dancer remains an individual. Performers may sometimes dance interacting with each other, but they rarely synchronize their movements.

In all regions where belly dance is found, both professional dancers and local people perform it as the main form of dance expression. Professional dancers have many thoughtful interpretations in their repertoire, often highly polished performances. Therefore, the genre simultaneously consists of the social and ethnic aspects of the dance, as well as dance in the professional edition and, increasingly, elements of classical dance.

Belly dance in the cultural aspect of the Middle East

Unlike many classical dance forms from Japan, Bali or India where dance uses a language of gestures with defined meaning, Arab dance in the Islamic world involves a narrative of an abstract nature. Today in the Middle East, the overwhelming majority of the population considers this type of dance more a form of entertainment than an art form, and there is no compelling evidence to argue that it has ever been otherwise in history. In her study of Canadians of Egyptian descent, Kathleen Fraser observed that respondents described dance as being an indispensable part of their culture, but not a very serious one. They frankly admitted that they loved their dancing, but were not inclined to think that they could call it an art form.

Unlike music in the Arab world, dance does not have a long tradition (a definition, an academy to learn it at, or defined names for dance figures) - however, some changes have recently been made in this regard to place this form of expression within popular culture. The Oriental dance tradition is located at the intersection of so-called high culture and pop culture, as evidenced by the work of Mahmound Reda in Egypt, Mustafa Turan in Turkey and Jamal (Khosrow Jamali) the artistic director of Iranian origin at AVAZ International Dance Theatre in the United States, whose intention was to elevate dance to the level of art through high-level performances using choreography.

In the Middle East, professional dance performance is associated with a bad reputation, in contrast to the widely respected and elite dancers, from the somewhat muslim Java, where dance is a revered classical art form. This bad reputation stems not from prudishness, but rather from Muslim customs, which dictate that a woman must remain covered in the presence of men who are not properly related to her. Female dancers who perform in men's public spaces strongly contradict these customs and reinforce the widely held notion that female dancers are prostitutes. This is the reason why there are sometimes attacks on female dancers in Afghanistan or Morocco.

The result of this understanding of the matter is that dancing performed professionally regardless of the context is doomed to widespread condemnation by Islamic fundamentalists and those individuals in the Muslim world who believe that music and dance are full of sin and should be banned. In Iran and Afghanistan, public performances are banned (in Afghanistan, bans have been lifted since the fall of the Taliban regime in 2002). Many reports from visitors to these countries, as well as videos played on Iranian television, show that people are performing illegally despite the bans.

Egypt is currently seeing strong pressure with sometimes accompanying threats of violence to ban belly dancing performances in public, as well as at community events such as weddings. Video merchants in the Cairo bazaar say they avoid keeping certain dance videos in their stores because of the threats. Fundamentalist beliefs are by no means universally accepted, which is why belly dancing, unlike regional dancing, is a contentious element in Muslim society. Negative reactions are so strong that Anthony Shay, founder of AVAZ International Dance Theatre, coined the term choreophobia to describe the phenomenon. Dance researcher Najwa Adra lists a number of euphemisms used by the Arab population to justify their actions. She states: "It can be said that dancing is a thing that all Middle Easterners like to do, but which they do not approve of."

Belly dancing in Western culture

Representatives of the Western world's ideas about belly dance and other forms of Oriental dance represent a controversial aspect of Orientalism. The language of belly dance and its position in the structure of Western culture, especially that of the United States, defines it as "other," which is said to " not part of my culture," which in effect creates a new exotic, fantastic identity for this dance. At the same time, as a storehouse of stereotypes, it also causes physical associations with the femme fatale, thanks to dancers who play the role of strong, alluring women in a society dominated, willy-nilly, by men.

All of the often disparate dance forms from North Africa, the Middle East, Central Asia and Eastern Europe are often lumped together in the United States and Western Europe and referred to collectively as belly dance. The term was coined by Sol Bloom for the dancers of the Chicago World's Fair in 1893 to stir up thrills and excitement in audiences, and which gained new meaning in the late 1960s and 1970s when American supporters of this dance form allied themselves with the second wave of the feminist movement and gave the term belly dance political meaning.

The goal of the combined forces of feminists and supporters of Orientalism was to negate and banish from Western consciousness the identification of the female body with something shameful and negative. Susan Bordo as a feminist and social critic once stated: "The body is something negative, so if a woman is that body then at the same time she herself is something negative and evil. Whatever it is, it is evil: turning away from knowledge, God, giving in to sexual desire, violence or aggression, lack of strong will, even death."

In Europe and North America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, several dancers of which Ruth St. Denis and Maud Allan are the most famous representatives created their own interpretations of Oriental dance. This involved using key dance movements taken from Middle Eastern dances rather than attempting to recreate the dance style in question as a whole. In the 20th century, leading film stars Thedra Baba, Dolores Gray, Hedy Lamarr and Rita Hayworth featured Broadway and Hollywood versions of Arabic dance in the film series of the biblical saga, Arabian Nights, and the film Kismet musical during the early days of the film industry. Beginning in the 1940s, nightclubs served people with entertainment presented by dancers with ethnic styling whose patterns could be traced to Greek, Lebanese and Middle Eastern culture. Later, several American women with experience in other dance disciplines, such as flamenco, began to travel learning folk dances from established dancers from Morocco, Tunisia, Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Turkey, Persia, Uzbekistan and Saudi Arabia. These women later passed on the knowledge brought from different parts of the world in America, creating a new quality of dance in the process, a kind of hybrid called American Tribal. Beginning in the 1970s, this dance style began to catch on among American women. Through international festivals, it also spread to Europe, South America, Australia and Asia. This large, eclectic and predominantly female community now communicates with each other in cyberspace using more than 300 thematic websites, sharing photos and videos with each other. In this way, the diverse form - an ethnic hybrid, has become part of a global enterprise hosted in restaurants, concert halls and international festivals. In this context, professional belly dance dancers and students are engaged in building the image of women as a cultural outcome of the global politics of Orientalism.

Twinned in their ideologies, feminists and members of the sexual liberation movement, with whom most women dancers identified, contributed to the growing interest in belly dance in the 1970s. At the beginning of the formative period of the belly dance movement, this socially unacceptable image of the female body became a powerful weapon which determined to redefine the meaning of belly dance as a symbol of sexual liberation.

Nowadays, many if not all of the belly dance practitioners could subscribe to the statement that dance plays a multifunctional role in their lives. It teaches about the relationship between different parts of the body, the cooperation between the body and the mind, teaches awareness and acceptance of the eroticism of one's own body and liberates one from shame, which allows one to gain self-confidence. Belly dance is a way to express yourself, your femininity in dance. It also allows you to play roles, to play with the feelings shown on stage. All this makes it diverse and fascinating.