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Gut check: Male belly dancers
[size=+1]Performers roll past the preconceptions
[/size]
[size=-1]11:07 AM CDT on Sunday, September 4, 2005 [/size]
[size=-1]By LAUREN SMILEY / The Dallas Morning News [/size]
You gotta try pretty hard to stand out at Yaa Halla Y'all. Upon entering the Grapevine Convention Center for a weekend of belly-dance performance and workshops, women named Phyllis and B.J. become "Soraya" and "Tambra." A guy hawking DVDs suggests the new release Lights! Camera! Bellydance! Backstage, the bellies waiting their turn to shimmy in the spotlight run from smooth to cellulite-pocked, alabaster to cinnamon, surgery-scarred to roll-layered. Actually, there are so many you stop paying attention, until you see this one: Hairy. No hips. All man. Look up and there he is, the one the dancer in the lobby must have forgotten when she called the subculture a "sisterhood."
NATHAN HUNSINGER/DMN
Bill Riddle (left) shows James Brantley a new move he learned from a taped performance during their practice at Isis' Star Dancers Studio in Bedford.
This is Drakon, what you'd call a male belly dancer. (He's really Danielle barAbba, 54, of Austin.)
Drakon wears a fringed skirt, blue shiny pants, curly red hair down his back.
Minutes before going onstage, he's stressing because a woman dancer before him is using the same drum solo he is. Another performer in a Star Trek-style dress assures him: "It'll look different."
Different indeed.
When the 6-foot-2 man takes the stage, one hand on hip and the other twirling a cane in a typically female folkloric style, a few chuckles erupt throughout the audience.
Drakon executes some body waves, then throws in a couple of hip shimmies while gripping the cane above his head, smiling widely the entire time.
While two belly dancers from Oklahoma let out a tongue trill of appreciation, a wide-eyed woman in a back row looks as if she is witnessing a jig of the Antichrist.
No you are not at a male strip club, and you better not laugh: To the small and still underground band of male followers, belly dance is about serious artistic expression.
Thirty years after Mikhail Baryshnikov proved that men could do ballet and John Travolta discoed his way into sex-object status, Drakon is one of the male aficionados who are putting an equal opportunity spin on the dance long associated with beaded bras, genie pants and coy femininity.
So what if women rave that belly dancing is great for toning childbirth muscles? Turns out some men like figure-eighting their hips, too.
The spectator reviews were mixed. One man used the word "fantastic."
But Los Angeles-based drummer Ziad Islambouli who performed at the convention, said such theatrical dancing would not go over in his home country of Lebanon.
"In America, I respect it 'cause it's an American thing," he says. "America is way more open.
"But in the Middle East, I wouldn't accept it. It's all about the woman and beauty, and it's a very feminine thing."
Actually, male belly dance performance has a long precedent in North Africa and the Middle East, says Anthony Shay, a dance historian at Pomona College in California, and co-editor of Belly Dance, a book due out this month. For centuries, professional males dressed in a sexually ambiguous costume, working the same hip swivels as women.
They were even included in the 1893 Chicago's World Fair, where an American entrepreneur first coined the term "belly dance" to introduce the art form to the both titillated and scandalized U.S. public.
But colonial powers strengthening their dominance in the Middle East after WWI considered men's belly dance a scandal to Victorian morality and stamped it out (allowing women to continue).
But both men and women still "belly dance" at domestic social gatherings as they have throughout history, Dr. Shay says, although strict Islamic societies forbid women from dancing in front of men not related to them.
Dr. Shay says the West's "pink and blue syndrome" when it comes to dance moves isn't shared by other regions of the world, pointing to the similarities in female and male movements in salsa and Polynesian dancing.
"The idea that these movements are only appropriate to women's bodies is wrong," he says. "We think when a male articulates his torso he is somehow being effeminate, but that is really a culturally specific notion held by Anglo-Americans."
But guys aren't always welcomed in the Arab community, either. Marios Hedary, owner of Byblos Lebanese Restaurant in Fort Worth, says he hires a male folkloric dancer who "complements" the female belly dancers. But once, at a Thursday audition night in which amateurs can come try their talent on the restaurant stage, a man showed up wearing what Mr. Hedary recalls regrettably as an I Dream of Jeannie outfit.
"Sometimes you're not brave enough to stop something," he remembers. "I was very shocked, very embarrassed. It was Cinderella. It was hip shaking. It was very, very weird."
Mr. Hedary says he paced the restaurant until the dancer's half-hour performance was over, after which the dancer asked him what he thought.
"I said, 'Listen, you are not a woman. You are a man. Do not dance like a woman ... that's not right. You're embarrassing everyone.'"
Bring on the naysayers, say the dancers: Breaking out of expectations is part of the allure.
Jeff Halpin of San Francisco identifies himself as a "typical man." He syas his donning a black cloak and gold headdress at the event is "no different than a Cowboys fan getting into their blue and silver dress" at a game.
Mr. Halpin says he was hesitant for years to start belly dancing, and when he would inquire about male classes, he didn't feel welcome.
"Just as female belly dancers have to get past the stereotype that they're strippers, male belly dancers have to get past the stereotype they're doing something girlish." But now, after five years of lessons, he says the dance "gives you the strength to feel more of who you are."
Pull up to Isis' Star Dancers Studio in Bedford on any given Tuesday night, and a Ford F-150 is parked outside the window display of bejeweled bras and harem pants. A sign hanging from the license plate reads: "Once a Marine, Always a Marine."
Yep, the instructor of the male belly-dancing class is James Brantley of Fort Worth, ex-Marine and current Air Force computer specialist, or as he goes by in class: Shadid.
But he makes it clear that he is not dancing like a woman: Even in the tiny world of male belly dancing, there is a continuum of styles.
Men from the studio performed a staff dance at the convention, but Mr Islambouli, the Lebanese drummer, says he wouldn't consider that belly dance, but folkloric dance, and "anything that doesn't have the feminine dress is OK."
"That would be acceptable" even in the most conservative societies," he says.
Mr. Brantley started taking classes six years ago after he was pulled up onstage by the studio's owner at his wife and daughter's recital, and she said the hip-hop dancer and martial-arts student had potential.
Once he enrolled in class, he learned to adapt the women's movements into a more masculine form: stepping flat instead of tiptoeing, keeping his fingers together instead of "dainty fingers."
While women at the studio learn to embody emotions while dancing – joy, sadness, anger – Mr. Brantley learned the male personas: the powerful sultan, the regal pharaoh and the aggressive warrior.
Not all were able to handle the belly-dance boot camp: He remembers eight men started the class, but only he graduated.
After a year of classes, Mr. Brantley was finally ready to reveal his passion to people at the base: He said he was studying "Middle-Eastern dancing."
"When they give you a kind of deer-in-the-headlight look, I told them 'belly dance,' " Mr. Brantley says. "They weren't ready for it."
But now he has no qualms about saying he performs numbers called Lulu and Super Belly Dance.
He pops his hips during class warm-up with his head held high and can pull off a mean belly roll with his muscular gut. Mr. Brantley says he feels masculine while dancing, sometimes even using a sword or staff in his routines.
He even did a solo at a friend's Air Force retirement party.
"I like to be up there and ham it up. I need to do more to get the publicity out there that men actually do this."
Women belly dancers seem to have differing opinions on men encroaching on what many see as their art: One dancer at the convention recalls a male belly dancer in sequins and fringe being "the sexiest man I have ever seen in my life."
Another says her 13 years of belly dancing has transformed her from a woman who hid under baggy clothes into one who performs confidently in front of crowds and says men "doing what the women do in a more masculine way doesn't translate for me."
But in an era of metrosexuals, when men are increasingly trespassing and being accepted into previously female domains, male belly dancing is just another adaptation (though the men in Mr. Brantley's class say they keep hair product use to a minimum).
As Drakon points out after his performance, many say that women originally danced with a cane to mock men fighting with a staff. So he thought he'd turn tradition on its head once more.
"I thought, OK, I'm gonna take the cane and make it a men's thing ... give it a more manly look. Hopefully. I don't know if I succeeded."
As for the drum solo Drakon was worried about, he waited for the song to begin while standing for applause after his first song, but the track never played, bringing his performance to a premature end.
Technical difficulty or subtle hint? He'll never know.
E-mail lsmiley@***BANNED-URL***
http://www.wfaa.com/sharedcontent/dws/fea/entertainment/stories/DN-bellydance_0904art.ART.State.Edition1.5ed1602.html
[size=+1]Performers roll past the preconceptions
[/size]
[size=-1]11:07 AM CDT on Sunday, September 4, 2005 [/size]
[size=-1]By LAUREN SMILEY / The Dallas Morning News [/size]
You gotta try pretty hard to stand out at Yaa Halla Y'all. Upon entering the Grapevine Convention Center for a weekend of belly-dance performance and workshops, women named Phyllis and B.J. become "Soraya" and "Tambra." A guy hawking DVDs suggests the new release Lights! Camera! Bellydance! Backstage, the bellies waiting their turn to shimmy in the spotlight run from smooth to cellulite-pocked, alabaster to cinnamon, surgery-scarred to roll-layered. Actually, there are so many you stop paying attention, until you see this one: Hairy. No hips. All man. Look up and there he is, the one the dancer in the lobby must have forgotten when she called the subculture a "sisterhood."
NATHAN HUNSINGER/DMN
Bill Riddle (left) shows James Brantley a new move he learned from a taped performance during their practice at Isis' Star Dancers Studio in Bedford.
This is Drakon, what you'd call a male belly dancer. (He's really Danielle barAbba, 54, of Austin.)
Drakon wears a fringed skirt, blue shiny pants, curly red hair down his back.
Minutes before going onstage, he's stressing because a woman dancer before him is using the same drum solo he is. Another performer in a Star Trek-style dress assures him: "It'll look different."
Different indeed.
When the 6-foot-2 man takes the stage, one hand on hip and the other twirling a cane in a typically female folkloric style, a few chuckles erupt throughout the audience.
Drakon executes some body waves, then throws in a couple of hip shimmies while gripping the cane above his head, smiling widely the entire time.
While two belly dancers from Oklahoma let out a tongue trill of appreciation, a wide-eyed woman in a back row looks as if she is witnessing a jig of the Antichrist.
No you are not at a male strip club, and you better not laugh: To the small and still underground band of male followers, belly dance is about serious artistic expression.
Thirty years after Mikhail Baryshnikov proved that men could do ballet and John Travolta discoed his way into sex-object status, Drakon is one of the male aficionados who are putting an equal opportunity spin on the dance long associated with beaded bras, genie pants and coy femininity.
So what if women rave that belly dancing is great for toning childbirth muscles? Turns out some men like figure-eighting their hips, too.
The spectator reviews were mixed. One man used the word "fantastic."
But Los Angeles-based drummer Ziad Islambouli who performed at the convention, said such theatrical dancing would not go over in his home country of Lebanon.
"In America, I respect it 'cause it's an American thing," he says. "America is way more open.
"But in the Middle East, I wouldn't accept it. It's all about the woman and beauty, and it's a very feminine thing."
Actually, male belly dance performance has a long precedent in North Africa and the Middle East, says Anthony Shay, a dance historian at Pomona College in California, and co-editor of Belly Dance, a book due out this month. For centuries, professional males dressed in a sexually ambiguous costume, working the same hip swivels as women.
They were even included in the 1893 Chicago's World Fair, where an American entrepreneur first coined the term "belly dance" to introduce the art form to the both titillated and scandalized U.S. public.
But colonial powers strengthening their dominance in the Middle East after WWI considered men's belly dance a scandal to Victorian morality and stamped it out (allowing women to continue).
But both men and women still "belly dance" at domestic social gatherings as they have throughout history, Dr. Shay says, although strict Islamic societies forbid women from dancing in front of men not related to them.
Dr. Shay says the West's "pink and blue syndrome" when it comes to dance moves isn't shared by other regions of the world, pointing to the similarities in female and male movements in salsa and Polynesian dancing.
"The idea that these movements are only appropriate to women's bodies is wrong," he says. "We think when a male articulates his torso he is somehow being effeminate, but that is really a culturally specific notion held by Anglo-Americans."
But guys aren't always welcomed in the Arab community, either. Marios Hedary, owner of Byblos Lebanese Restaurant in Fort Worth, says he hires a male folkloric dancer who "complements" the female belly dancers. But once, at a Thursday audition night in which amateurs can come try their talent on the restaurant stage, a man showed up wearing what Mr. Hedary recalls regrettably as an I Dream of Jeannie outfit.
"Sometimes you're not brave enough to stop something," he remembers. "I was very shocked, very embarrassed. It was Cinderella. It was hip shaking. It was very, very weird."
Mr. Hedary says he paced the restaurant until the dancer's half-hour performance was over, after which the dancer asked him what he thought.
"I said, 'Listen, you are not a woman. You are a man. Do not dance like a woman ... that's not right. You're embarrassing everyone.'"
Bring on the naysayers, say the dancers: Breaking out of expectations is part of the allure.
Jeff Halpin of San Francisco identifies himself as a "typical man." He syas his donning a black cloak and gold headdress at the event is "no different than a Cowboys fan getting into their blue and silver dress" at a game.
Mr. Halpin says he was hesitant for years to start belly dancing, and when he would inquire about male classes, he didn't feel welcome.
"Just as female belly dancers have to get past the stereotype that they're strippers, male belly dancers have to get past the stereotype they're doing something girlish." But now, after five years of lessons, he says the dance "gives you the strength to feel more of who you are."
Pull up to Isis' Star Dancers Studio in Bedford on any given Tuesday night, and a Ford F-150 is parked outside the window display of bejeweled bras and harem pants. A sign hanging from the license plate reads: "Once a Marine, Always a Marine."
Yep, the instructor of the male belly-dancing class is James Brantley of Fort Worth, ex-Marine and current Air Force computer specialist, or as he goes by in class: Shadid.
But he makes it clear that he is not dancing like a woman: Even in the tiny world of male belly dancing, there is a continuum of styles.
Men from the studio performed a staff dance at the convention, but Mr Islambouli, the Lebanese drummer, says he wouldn't consider that belly dance, but folkloric dance, and "anything that doesn't have the feminine dress is OK."
"That would be acceptable" even in the most conservative societies," he says.
Mr. Brantley started taking classes six years ago after he was pulled up onstage by the studio's owner at his wife and daughter's recital, and she said the hip-hop dancer and martial-arts student had potential.
Once he enrolled in class, he learned to adapt the women's movements into a more masculine form: stepping flat instead of tiptoeing, keeping his fingers together instead of "dainty fingers."
While women at the studio learn to embody emotions while dancing – joy, sadness, anger – Mr. Brantley learned the male personas: the powerful sultan, the regal pharaoh and the aggressive warrior.
Not all were able to handle the belly-dance boot camp: He remembers eight men started the class, but only he graduated.
After a year of classes, Mr. Brantley was finally ready to reveal his passion to people at the base: He said he was studying "Middle-Eastern dancing."
"When they give you a kind of deer-in-the-headlight look, I told them 'belly dance,' " Mr. Brantley says. "They weren't ready for it."
But now he has no qualms about saying he performs numbers called Lulu and Super Belly Dance.
He pops his hips during class warm-up with his head held high and can pull off a mean belly roll with his muscular gut. Mr. Brantley says he feels masculine while dancing, sometimes even using a sword or staff in his routines.
He even did a solo at a friend's Air Force retirement party.
"I like to be up there and ham it up. I need to do more to get the publicity out there that men actually do this."
Women belly dancers seem to have differing opinions on men encroaching on what many see as their art: One dancer at the convention recalls a male belly dancer in sequins and fringe being "the sexiest man I have ever seen in my life."
Another says her 13 years of belly dancing has transformed her from a woman who hid under baggy clothes into one who performs confidently in front of crowds and says men "doing what the women do in a more masculine way doesn't translate for me."
But in an era of metrosexuals, when men are increasingly trespassing and being accepted into previously female domains, male belly dancing is just another adaptation (though the men in Mr. Brantley's class say they keep hair product use to a minimum).
As Drakon points out after his performance, many say that women originally danced with a cane to mock men fighting with a staff. So he thought he'd turn tradition on its head once more.
"I thought, OK, I'm gonna take the cane and make it a men's thing ... give it a more manly look. Hopefully. I don't know if I succeeded."
As for the drum solo Drakon was worried about, he waited for the song to begin while standing for applause after his first song, but the track never played, bringing his performance to a premature end.
Technical difficulty or subtle hint? He'll never know.
E-mail lsmiley@***BANNED-URL***
http://www.wfaa.com/sharedcontent/dws/fea/entertainment/stories/DN-bellydance_0904art.ART.State.Edition1.5ed1602.html
)belly dancer after living in Syria for two years. After returning to the US, I picked up some extra cash by offering a few six week workshops in it thru a local college's non-credit community outreach.