Dance of Abundance and Peace:
Alia Thabit – Joy, Harmony, and the Matriarchal Roots of Belly Dance
By Katharine Hikel and Margaret Michniewicz
As a special holiday gift to our readers, Vermont Woman took
a trip to Catamount Arts in St. Johnsbury to interview dancer Alia
Thabit, 48, about the art of belly dancing, and its influence on world
peace. Here are the highlights of our talk.
VW: We read somewhere that belly dancing had its history in the
matriarchal culture, with women teaching women movements to ease childbirth
and labor.
AT: The birth connection is actually historical, because female traveling
dance troupes were also traveling midwives. They would assist at birth;
the birth ritual that still exists which we’re assuming – we
don’t necessarily know for sure – was the same. Everybody
undulates with the birthing mother, and that undulation is definitely
the contraction of birth because when I had my first child – nobody
told me this before, I didn’t know this – when I had my first
child and I was in the middle of labor and having these contractions
I thought Oh! That’s where this movement comes from! It
was a straight-ahead revelation out of the blue.
It’s certainly a pre-Islamic dance; it appears to be a pre-Christian
dance; it appears to be a very, very, very old dance.
There are, for example, contracts from Phoenician times to bring dancing
girls from Egypt. There are accounts by Roman soldiers, at the time of
the Punic Wars, describing dancers; the general agreement of the scholars
is that this is what they are talking about; this is about as good dating
as you’re going to get for something that people took for granted,
and didn’t think was unusual.
VW: Another fabulous story, about the dance in modern times, is that
there are dancers in the Middle East so revered that, when they perform,
in very elite clubs, the sheiks write blank checks and stuff them into
their belts.
AT: I never heard about the blank checks – that’s a good
one. I have heard showers and necklaces of thousand pound notes.
VW: Tell us about your trip to the Middle East.
AT: I went to Cairo; I went to Beirut; I went to Palestine; I went to
Bethlehem and Ramallah; and I passed through Jordan and spent a little
time in Amman. I wanted to go to Beirut because my family is Lebanese
even though there's not really any family left there. I knew there was
going to be a dance festival there and I said, “That’s what
I’m doing!”
There's an annual dance festival in Egypt, and my friends were going
to that; I thought, “I’ll go to both!” The Lebanese
festival ended up being cancelled. The State Department does not recommend
travel to Lebanon, so there was a lot of anxiety – enough to sink
the festival, which is too bad, because I never had one single moment
of anxiety when I was there. I went to Egypt, and stayed with a friend
of a friend of a friend who is a professional dancer there.
VW: Tell about where she dances.
AT: She dances mostly at weddings; not so much in nightclubs, but in
some tourist venues like on a Nile cruise boat. The boat is shaped like
the Sun Boat; it's very decorative -- gilding, lotus blossoms, and Egyptian
hieroglyphic motifs everywhere – a total Orientalist fantasy. You
sit outside in the dark at night and watch the Nile slipping by. A lot
of people from the Gulf come – there were a lot of Arab family
groups on the boat when I went.
photo courtesy of Alia Thabit
VW: Do you speak Arabic?
AT: Ten or twenty words – ten when I left, twenty when I came
home.
VW: How did you get into the dance?
AT: There was a lady down the street from us giving lessons when I was
sixteen, in Brooklyn. I thought, oh that’ll be fun and cultural,
and sexy and cool! It was something fun to do. She got tired of giving
lessons after a while and so she said, if you still want to do this,
you can go to the classes that I go to. Her teacher was a world-famous
teacher – Ibrahim Farrar – in New York. I went to his professional
classes, three times a week, for two hours at a time. I was very, very
lucky to have this chance.
VW: How often would men be teaching?
AT: A lot of men are very respected teachers; but most of the men who
teach – my teacher was an exception – won’t perform
Oriental dance. They perform only folkloric dance; they’ll dance
with sticks – a stylized, martial arts-based dance form.
I find it a little irritating; I want to see them perform! You know,
I don’t want a stick!
When Arabic people dance socially, they are doing essentially the same
thing that you would do if you were belly dancing. Guys do the same things
as women do. But there’s something about performing Oriental dance
which is apparently not regarded as sufficiently masculine over there.
I know an Egyptian guy in England who dances Oriental, but when he went
to the festival in Cairo, he could not perform Oriental – he
did folkloric: he did “shamadan”.
He came on and I nudged my friend and I said “There’s a
guy who’d rather be dancing Oriental.” I asked him
later and he said, "Yeah, in England that’s what I do, but
not here."
VW: How many classes do you teach?
AT: Five classes per week; and then I teach periodic workshops on the
weekends.
VW: Who are your students?
AT: I have wonderful students -- teenagers all the way up through people
in their sixties. Most of the people who want to come to class call me
up and say: “All my life I’ve wanted to do this!” “I’m
forty and I decided I wanted to do something for myself for
a change." Well, come on, honey – we have a home for you!
photo: Charlie Frieburg
VW: What keeps them coming?
AT: It’s a wonderful dance about celebrating who you are and
enjoying who you are and expressing who you are and being really happy
and comfortable with who you are. People have this glorious perfumed
fantasy of themselves with the eyeliner, the spangles; they’re
beautiful and they’re transformed.
VW: And you don’t have to be built like an athlete or a supermodel?
AT: No! Absolutely not. That’s the great thing about this dance.
My moment of real revelation came when I went to California, to this
enormous dance festival called Rakkasah, north of San Francisco. It’s
been going for years, and they have a very democratic performance policy – there’s
a call-in day, and whoever gets through gets to perform. There are two
stages, with performances happening Friday night, all day Saturday, and
all day Sunday – nonstop.
VW: The Woodstock of belly dancing?
AT: Really! Every year. We watched hours and hours of dancers. People
of every description – really old people, really young people,
really beautiful people, really homely people, really accomplished people,
really unaccomplished people, and people of every possible description
dancing… beautifully. Other dance forms have this ability – I
think it tends to be ethnic social dance forms that have a transformative
ability and a welcoming potential -- but few of them offer the opportunity
to dance solo on a stage.
VW: Belly dancing is very popular in the States -- there's a coast-to-coast
network of dancers, teachers, vendors, and hundreds of web sites. How
did the dance get here?
AT: This dance came to America in the late 1800s; there was a proliferation
of “Little Egypts” and “Salomes.” Salome was
big – the play (Oscar Wilde, 1893). Maud Allan spun off her
Salome act into vaudeville, in the early 1900s. There was actually a
school turning out Salomes at some point. So all the Little Egypts, and
the Salomes, and all this stuff – precursors of modern dance --
were jumbled together in the vaudeville and burlesque circuits, with
the strippers. Middle Eastern dance never really recovered its
social standing.
When they brought it to this country, they put it in a tent, and said
only men are allowed to see this because it’s too shocking for
the ladies; this was Victorian times. So it was being played as a skin
show – and, that’s where it still is in a lot of people’s
minds. If you ask me what I do I say “Middle Eastern dance” – but
if I make a poster I put “BELLY DANCING!” in big letters.
VW: Is it hard? Do your regular Vermont/New England farm gals have a
hard time learning this?
AT: Anything is easy to learn a little bit of – but any art is
hard to do well. Every semester I teach a seven-week/one credit "mini" class
at Lyndon State College. The first day I showed them, and said this is
what it’s going to look like. They looked at me and said “At
the end of this class are we going to be able to do that?” And
I said, “Yes, if you actually practice, you come to class every
week – the odds are very good that you will be able to do this." Even
people who don’t get it right off usually get it within a couple
of months. By the last class, everybody could do all the stuff.
VW: Tell us what music you use.
AT: I use mostly – I’m going to say authentic – music.
A lot of it is traditional, but I also use a lot of modern music; mostly,
it’s Arabic music from over there. I have used American music – I
like blues; I like the really dirty kind – it works really well.
But for classes, I like to keep it to Arabic music -- it feels right,
it fits the dance, it goes together: the dance is a visual representation
of the music.
Maqam.com and rashid.com are my two favorite online music sources. Rashid's
is actually a store in Brooklyn that I’ve like gone to all my life.
They’re both very reasonably priced and you can listen to the music
online.
VW: Does the dance have choreography, or is it made on the spot, like
jazz?
AT: It’s a good analogy, because they’re both about improvisation.
The musicians don't play songs the same way twice. A lot of jazz comes
from the same place Middle Eastern music comes from – a similar
part of the world. There can be a lot of choreography, even over there – I
went to this festival, and almost every class I took I was taught a choreography.
It’s a good way to teach; people learn how steps are combined,
and oh, here’s an appropriate step for this part of the music.
But the heart of the dance is improvisation. So I teach a lot of music
interpretation – how you listen to music, what the classical conventions
are – when the oud plays, you shimmy; when a clarinet plays, you
may do really liquid movements with your upper body; with the violin
you’re going to use this part of your body; when it’s the
singer you’re going to do this or that. You make a visual representation
of the music.
VW: Do any of your students go on to perform?
AT: My students perform a lot because we have a lot of recitals. Nobody has
to perform; but when we have a recital coming up we’ll do a group dance
that’s choreographed and members of the class are encouraged to come
up with their own solo pieces which can be choreographed or improvisational,
whichever works better for them.
VW: Where do your dancers in the Northeast Kingdom get their performance
wear?
AT: You can buy costumes online. A lot of people make their own. I encourage
people to go to workshops in other areas where vendors come. I took one
of my students to the eastern Rakkasah, in New Jersey. I said, you’ve
got to try on costumes while you’re here. She could never find
anything that fit her shape. So she turns up in this beautiful costume,
and she comes over and says, “It fits me! Look! It fits
me!” And it was $700! And she says “I’m buying it!”
VW: Are there a variety of costumes to choose from?.
AT: There are a lot of different options for costuming. At a recent
performance I wore a dress, very fitted, with a slit up the front to
the middle of the thigh; plenty of people wear less than that for daywear.
I have another that’s more covered, with a high neck, but also
a little more risqué because it’s made of net, and it’s
got slits up the side. You can wear not very much, or things that you
are totally covered in from head to foot, with a hip scarf on. I see
wonderful costumes that people invent to suit them and it’s legitimate
to do that. Some of this stuff you might not go dancing in Egypt in,
but for here, it’s fine.
VW: In Egypt, is it more conservative?
AT: It’s a funny mix of things. Certain things are illegal. The
skin of the midriff may not show. It must be covered at least by a net.
It can be a sheer net – I have a costume that’s got pretty
big fish-net -- and that’s legitimate. And the upper thigh can’t
show. There are some interesting costumes that have come out of Egypt – there's
a whole bike shorts thing coming into fashion. If you’re a professional
performer, then it’s a whole other kettle of fish: you’re
already off the scale of shame.
VW: So even though this dance is ancient and revered, and everybody
accepts it, it still has an aura of shame?
AT: The Arab personality has got this schizophrenic division – they
love wine and parties and poetry and art and beauty and all this lovely,
voluptuous stuff, and dance -- they love it! At the same time, they have
this almost Puritan "No! Bad! You mustn’t do that" thing
happening. I have a friend who’s a musician, a Muslim. He went
on the Hajj (pilgrimage to Mecca) and his family said to him, "So
now that you’ve gone on the Hajj, you’ll give up music, won’t
you?" It was a bad moment. He said to himself, “Music does
such good and is so beautiful – it can’t be a bad thing.” So
he didn’t give up music, which is nice because he’s a really
good musician. But it’s a split personality and I think it causes
an awful lot of trouble. In Islamic culture to be a woman who performs
publicly in front of men is not okay.
VW: In the Middle East when women perform – do women ever go to
the shows?
AT: Yes they go, but they wouldn’t go by themselves. They would
go with their husbands. A woman alone in a nightclub is regarded as a
prostitute.
The dance scene is having a hard time in Egypt – in the 70s, 80s,
even the 90s it was much more thriving. It’s sad – but it’s
also true that in our own culture it was déclassé to be
an actress or be a dancer or anything like that, up until relatively
recently. And we have our own problems with fundamentalism. Over time
the odds are good that those things will change.
VW: Tell us about your upcoming show, on January 21 at the FlynnSpace
in Burlington.
AT: I applied for a grant. I wrote answers to all of their criteria plus my
own, which was doing our thing for world peace, because dance is peace.
And we got it! Ten weeks of rehesarsal space, and a show.
The Flynnspace show is going to go from really, really traditional stuff
to real fantasy fusion. My dance partner and I will be doing a
duet to a Cuban Rhumba, for example. We have Bedouin music; a piece that’s
specifically Bedouin dance. We bring in music and we say “Ooh,
we like that piece – let’s work on something with that.”
VW: Who’s in the show with you?
AT: My company has seven dancers: Treza Giventer, Stewart Hoyt,
Victoria Kelly, Erin Narey, Rose Murphy, Barb Whitcomb, and me. Some
are students and some are dance friends – they’ve been with
me for varying lengths of time. I picked people I could work with really
well, and who would be able to commit to this project. I wrote the grant
to develop this collaborative improvisational process which was really
scary – none of us had ever done this before.
We’ve been really staying in the place of process for a long time;
the longer we stay in experimentation, the better the product will be.
I want this to be something that people see, that goes straight into
their heart and haunts them. I figure – my place in life
is as a beacon of love and peace and joy and happiness, and this dance
is a perfect vehicle for that. You do this dance and you feel beautiful,
and you feel happy and content with yourself . You don’t need anybody’s
approval, but you are so kind and generous that you are sharing. It’s
like a blessing, like giving offerings to the gods: the gods don’t
need it, but they accept it because it’s good for you. So here
you have this dancer who is kind enough to invite you in – it’s
a gift that you give the audience, not something that you get from them.
It’s a shared thing and that’s why the Flynnspace is nice;
it's an intimate space. You need to be close. Ideally the audience is
on a couch or on the floor so they’re looking up a little bit.
You want to be close enough to actually look at people, and see their
faces.
VW: We can’t wait to see the show. We're going to bring the kids.
AT: Kids love it! Some people think it’s going to be inappropriate – but
I wear more than the Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders. Kids understand the
concept of goddess, and they never forget. I have people come take classes
and they’ll say, "When I was little kid I saw this once," and
all their life they’ve been waiting to be that.
VW: Tell us what it means to be the dance of peace.
AT: When you dance, especially for an audience, especially this dance,
you’re creating a bridge of love between you and the audience.
You’re creating a place where everyone is beautiful, where everyone
is sufficient, where everyone is happy and content -- certainly
that’s the definition of peace.
War and disagreement are the product of fear and misunderstanding, suspicion
and greed, and a poverty mentality where there’s not enough so
you have to get yours. Dance is really about abundance, that there is
plenty and that we can all be happy, and we’re all here having
a lovely time, and we have something to eat, and everything is great.
People are terrified about a lot of things - by people enjoying their
bodies. I’ll come out, and I’ll sometimes see someone with
a look on their face as if they’re about to be subjected to something
really awful; they’re all tensed up because they’re going
to have to live through this – and the most fun is that at the
end, they’re happy and smiling.
In this country people are terrified of the Middle East – terrified.
It’s like this dark region of terrorists, extremists, lunatics,
and nuts and they don’t get to see any of the good side – good
news doesn’t sell. Before I went, all the people I knew who'd never
been there told me, "Oh, I'm so worried about you! Do you think
you'll be safe?" The people I knew who'd been there said, "Oh,
you'll be fine." They were right. It’s full of lovely places,
beauty, music, art; and it’s wonderful and it’s warm!
The more you focus upon good things the more you can see good things.
So, I’m giving somebody good things to focus on.
VW: Can we dance our way to peace?
AT: That’s what I’m doing! Dance is a stone in
the shoe of religious fundamentalism of every stripe. I am
that stone.
I want to tour this show, bring it around a lot of places, and then
I would like to take it to the Middle East – to go there and bring
our show as a gift.
I want a sticker for my trunk that says, "U.S. Department of Peace." Every
country needs a department of peace; and however much they put into their
department of war, they should put that much money into their department
of peace. If you don’t invest in it, it doesn’t happen. So
I’m investing in peace. My self-proclaimed mission is to be an
ambassador of peace and love.
For more information on Alia Thabit, visit http://www.earth-goddess.com/menu.html
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