Sophia Maria
New member
We have dancers who are not connecting to Arabic music and aesthetics and not willing to try to learn. If you don't like Arabic stuff, and never intend to, why choose belly dancing? I'm not trying to be a bitch, I'm sincerely baffled by this thought process.
Exactly. This is exactly my thought process; I really don't intend to insult anyone's dancing choices, far from it, actually. But I think it's just illogical. To me it would be like saying you are a hip hop dancer and at the same time not listening to rap or at least popular hip hop music. Or a salsa dancer that can't stand salsa. At least these dance forms avoid some ambiguity by being directly named for the music that the dancer is interpreting. That why I kinda like using the term "Middle Eastern" dance, because I dance to Middle Eastern music.
This is not meant to be a complaint against Tribal or Tribal Fusion, although this was one of the reasons why I couldn't really get into those styles. This is more a complaint against "bellydance" being used as a catch-all bin for everything you want it to be (most ancient dance in the world, sacred priestesses, goddesses, women power, my personal spiritual journey etc etc), and treating it like it's not a dance with specific structure and guidelines. This dance is like any other art form: we have specific structure, rules, music, behavior, culture, etc to obey. Once you've got these down and sort of, paid your dues to the art (I guess you could say), THEN you can do what you want with it. I guess I'm still trying to wrap my head around why BD, more than many other dances I've seen, is misused and misinterpreted in so many ways. Why do people lay claim to it so much?