Beladi Good!

When I was living in London, I used to attend the belly dance classes of Asmahan at Pineapple dance studios. I use the term ‘attend’ loosely. I was very good at turning up between September and December 2005, come whatever stinking weather the British winter had to offer. In the new year, it dawned on me that meeting my MA deadlines was a bigger priority than learning to devastate entire nations with a flick of the hips.

Asmahan taught Egyptian style belly dance, a form of dance on a par with ballet in terms of the discipline, difficulty and control it involves. The movements are small and controlled, naturally amplified by a woman’s hips. I am a hipless wonder and found myself stuck in Beginners for three months.

At the moment I work from home, and it took me all of three weeks to start going a little nuts from being in the house all day. So yesterday I packed up some bellydance gear and headed downtown to the bellydance classes of Rhea, a whacky woman from San Francisco who upped sticks and moved to Athens with her daughters. She now teaches belly dance (Turkish style) in her studio near the Acropolis.

Why belly dance, I hear you cry? Of all the forms of dance I could have thrown myself at at this late stage in life when my bones are set and I’ve done all my growing, why did I pick an exotic eastern strip-tease?

I picked belly dance initially simply because I liked it. There was something magical about it. At the time I didn’t know what, and it took a while to put aside the reputation belly dance has in modern times to actually start pursuing it seriously.

Very few people know the history of belly dance, also known as Raqs Sharki (dance of the east) and Beladi. It is rumoured to be between 3000 and 5000 years old, making it one of the oldest if not the oldest form of dance in the world. It has its roots in ancient fertility rituals, fabled to be used to help women and girls of the Middle East strenghten their muscles to ease childbirth.

This is backed up by research that shows women who belly dance have shorter labour times. In some countries, women still belly dance at births to encourage the mother-to-be to make the movements necessary to ease her delivery. The movements for belly dance are natural to women, it’s one of the few dance forms that can be deemed as exclusive to women.

What about the skimpy clothes, then? Belly dancing from ancient times has meant encompassing everything that is feminine; since women had the gift of giving life, the midrif was bare during belly dance to pay homage to this mysterious power. Even today, couples at Egyptian weddings will often hire a belly dancer and have a picture taken with their hands on her bare stomach to bring them luck for starting a family.

The popular image of belly dancing today as something naughty and smutty came when the first explorations of the Middle East began from the West. Belly dancing was strictly a dance performed by women for other women and never in the presence of men.

So naturally it follows that any Western men who ever saw a belly dance performance in the early days were marvelling at the raunchy, badly skilled imitation belly dances of prostitutes, since no other women would dance this dance for men.

Today, belly dance is enjoying somewhat of a revival in respectability thanks to better availability of the knowledge of its history and a backlash against the badly trained dancers flooding the scene to titilate rather than captivate. In Egypt, people go out to enjoy top-notch belly dance performances in the same way as those in the West go out for a night at the ballet or opera.

Take this quote by Geraldine Brooks, Middle Eastern Correspondent and author of Nine Parts of Desire: “I had never seen traditional oriental dance before, but I recognised every movement. What she did with her body was what a woman’s body did – the natural movements of sex and childbirth. The dance drew the eye to the very centre of the female body’s womanliness.”

Proof it was ever needed that the world is indeed a very small place is that Rhea, my new-found belly dance teacher, trained with my former teacher Asmahan under the same instructor in San Francisco. The rich music that accompanies belly dance strikes a chord in the very core of you. It’s hard not to feel a part of an unspoken history when the basic instincts of what it is to be female find expression in a small basement studio in downtown Athens.

Koritsaki attended Rhea’s Belly Dance class on 20th June 2006.

Rhea’s Dance Studio is located in 9 Vironos, Plaka

http://www.daughtersofrhea.com/