Pt. 2: Belly Dancers Should Be 🔥HAWT!🔥 (don't you dare be too hawt.)

Kismet: I'm destined to become a dance innovator--by necessity, not by my original choice.

If you haven’t read IRON WILL: THE MOVIE I WAS ALMOST IN or PART 1 of this post: HOW I BECAME AN 8-WEEK WONDER, this one won’t make nearly as much sense.

---

Is it good that my first teacher and I cut ties as permanently as that belly dance scene was cut from Iron Will?

Definitely, given our personalities.

But alas, Houston, I suddenly had a very big problem. I had just been hired for this new job as a belly dancer — a job I was utterly unprepared for. In fact, I was so unprepared for it that I couldn't begin to fathom just HOW unprepared I was.

I had been hired to dance a pair of twenty-minute sets, twice a weekend, every weekend, which I did for the next four years to the gushing, ranting, raving, and adoring of my restaurant owner, staff, and patrons. "We’ve never had such an amazing dancer!" they told me, and they weren’t just blowing smoke up my skirts. I was in the fledgling state of becoming who I would become.

They named me Kismet — "Destiny" — and I was their darling.

Kismet

Those were some of the most enjoyable dance times I've ever known, back when ignorance truly was bliss. For four years, I lived for those weekend nights, for practicing my twenty-year-old tushie off, and making costumes out of scraps, tiny precious treasures, and thrift store steals.

My dance partner, Diana, didn't stay much past the first year, so I wound up covering the entire gig every weekend with only a smidge of belly dance instruction under my belts. Thankfully, I was able to draw on a wide variety of experiences in putting together an entertaining show, my college degrees in History & Dance, and my ginormous heart and smile. Also, the majority of people watching me knew even less about belly dance than I did.

Which was...like...

Yet I remained as diligent and hopeful as an archeologist, turning over the tiniest pebble and dusting off anything that might be another dancey clue that could bring me a millimeter closer to my new passion.

You have to remember, there was no such thing as YouTube or learning this dance form online. There was no Amazon from which order videos. Heck, I didn’t even have email yet!

For the first two years after Hala and I cut ties, the only belly dance materials I could get my hands on came from the library:

1. One invaluable instructional VHS tape from 1985.

2. One unhelpful, black-and-white paperback about technique, and especially about Seducing Your Sultan, from the 70s.

3. One gorgeous, inspiring, but highly misleading coffee table book from 1989.

After my restaurant owners gave me a cassette tape of their favorite album, Belly Dancing at the Cafe Feenjon, and asked me to perform to it, I managed to track down and special order three CDs — more like 3.5 because half of the fourth was a duplicate of the third. Woe unto the newb, I had no way of knowing what on earth the musicians were saying.

Although not the first edition from 1989 that I pored over for two weeks and then renewed as many times as they’d let me before I had to send it back to the Minneapolis campus, this is still the original version, before this book received a major overhaul for accuracy.

In another feat of divine intervention from Terpsichore, Muse of Dance, I discovered the Society for Creative Anachronism in my junior year of college. Through this medieval reenactment group, I learned that:

1. Some belly dancers danced with fire and swords around big bonfires out under the stars. Fire and swords and stars?! Sign me up!

2. Swords were not merely for the dance rugs. I, too, could put on Medieval armor and learn how to bash the snot out of my buddies. I would eventually use these moves in my dancing, once a fighting mentor gifted me a dance sword. This gave me a unique sword dancing style nobody around me had ever seen before.

3. The folk dances I had read about in Serpent of the Nile were real living, breathing dances, and some of my new SCA she-roes knew how to do them, in addition to the glitzy styles descended from these ancient traditions.

4. Some of these women were students and troupe members of the revered Cassandra in Minneapolis, whom I had heard about since Laurie first described her belly dancing adventures while we sat on the theater steps during Twelfth Night rehearsals.

5. Some of them had been dancing for many years, or even decades, and one of them was willing to travel to the Northland and give occasional workshops.

6. There was a second belly dance teacher in my town.

Wait...WUT?! How had I missed that?

I dunno.

Well, hot-diggity-dog, I hightailed my blingy butt straight to her class. By then, the ever-growing and experimental contents of my dancey cauldron were a blend of: ¹

• my lifelong obsession with any dance I could get my hands, feet and hips on

• eight weeks of belly dance lessons

• that Polynesian choreography I'd learned for Twelflth Night

• those scarce and questionable library materials

• a National Geographic special on Madame Lucy, Egypt's reigning belly dance queen that I'd recorded onto a VHS tape and watched so many times I destroyed it

• my continuing university education in Dance and Theater²

My Second Belly Dance Teacher

When I arrived at this other belly dance class, my second teacher didn’t show us any moves that I hadn’t already spent two years honing. But she did clean up my technique and taught me more efficient ways to do the things I had hacked and pieced together in front of the mirror with my tongue sticking out and my eyes crossed.

Hallelujah!

I asked her a gazillion questions and soaked in everything she offered like an overjoyed, shriveled-up sponge.

At the end of the three month session, plumped and reinvigorated, I asked if I could take her next-level class. I'd seen her troupe practicing the advanced choreographies and they were so gorgeous. My new teacher had been belly dancing for almost as long as I'd been alive, so I couldn't wait to finally—truly—learn!

Alas. What I learned was that Ye Olde Belly Dance Adage (“Belly dancers should be sexy; don’t you dare be too sexy!”) had many iterations, and many, many interpretations.

Alas. These iterations all came with a pop on the nose and a disapproving glower. Some more caustic than others.

Alas. My new teacher told me that, NO, I could not take her more advanced class. Instead, she said I could retake her beginner class for another three months. In other words, I could go all the way back to the start with the newcomers.

Again.

The way she said it made it very clear: she hoped I wouldn't do that.

So I didn't.

Some months later, I spoke to the man who had introduced us and asked his insights about why she had turned so cold with me when, at the start, she had seemed so enthusiastic to teach me. Another round of cringing ensued. "Well...you're a restaurant dancer."

I blinked. Furrowed my brows. Lifted one of them. "Yeah...?"

He shrugged. "She only dances onstage in festivals or for nonprofit events. Her opinion of what you do is..."

"Is what?"

"Well, restaurant dancers wear skimpy costumes and accept body tips, so she considers them to be..."

He wore the same expression my restaurant owner had worn while trying to come up with the polite way to call my first teacher, "Slutty."

"Oh.” I smashed my lips together on all the things I wouldn’t say in front of other human beings. “Got it."

What I didn't get was a mentor in the years when I most desperately needed one.

And I'm not just talking about dance. Not remotely.

In my early twenties, I was starved for big sister or maternal modeling. I was estranged from my own mother because she had gone further into Catholicism just as I shucked it from my life. Many dancers at the university disparaged me because I was a belly dancer (a.k.a. hoochie). I had left the Theater Department when I realized that I don’t have the ability to play that world’s kiss-ass suck-up games. I was really close with my history teachers and my university advisor, but they were men.

In contrast, my discovery of belly dance had seemed like a vivid, liberating, expressive haven where My Kind flourished. It had been hailed as a sisterhood free from the shackles of judgy conservatism.

Hah.

When all that crap came down with my first two belly dance instructors and my first dance partner, I was left with no feminine roadmap. My dance-sister support was scarce and sporadic. Too often it turned out to be more damaging and lonely than floundering around on my own. The most encouraging of them lived 2.5 hours away, so I was constantly left with little-to-no guidance to help me discover the kind of dancer I wanted to become, much less the kind of woman I wanted to be when I grew up.

So I said screw growing up as I dove into playing wholeheartedly with my new toys. I also kept scouring my sparse world for any information I could find about these things that had moved me so deeply, and sparked my initial journey of healing and self-discovery.

Beyond that, I filled in the blanks any way I could.

And now…drrrrrrumroll…for my next great feat of dancey chasm-bridging, I will attempt to rectify my abysmal dearth of belly dance education by throwing myself into Medieval reenactment. Yessssss, in a full-body fling off the cliff, this small-town girl will learn on the fly how to drive cross-country and navigate big, scawey cities like Minneapolis.

Oooooh…

Of course, I was still on a college student’s budget, and SCA events were mostly on the weekends. I was the Greek restaurant’s only dancer, so I found myself in a pickle: Be responsible. Be reliable. Earn much-needed money by continuing to do a good job at my job—or finally go learn how to actually do my job from dancers who had been taught by The Biggies, both here and abroad.

Before the Greek restaurant finally closed in 1996, I straddled that divide…ermmm…not well. Taking two weekends off in a row to go to my first Pennsic (the biggest SCA event in the world) was NOT met with approval from the restaurant owners.

I did not blame them.

But something in my guts told me I HAD to go there, and it wasn’t only because of belly dance.

My guts were right, so I did.

---

In case you missed this one, this is the other thing that led me so deeply into the SCA and changed the trajectory of my life:

© 2021 Hartebeast

1. My original belly dance cauldron:

• eight weeks of belly dance lessons

• that Polynesian choreography I'd learned for Twelflth Night and that introduced me to my first belly dancer

• those scanty and questionable library materials

• my continuing university dance instruction

• the National Geographic special that introduced me to Madame Lucy, in two parts.

2. The DanceStory Section of Tinkerings that outlines my dance history, and that of the people who taught and inspired me.