By Adrianne De Castro
Daily Bruin Contributor
It conjures images of colorful veils, clanging cymbals and
beauties bowing at the feet of great sheiks.
Yet few people realize that belly dancing is rooted in religious
rituals celebrating
femininity and womanhood.
“The big misconception is that belly dancing is like
stripping and hoochie-cooch,” said Elissa Kyriacou, a belly
dance instructor at the John Wooden Center.
Class participants such as Pauline Borderies, a second-year
international development studies and comparative literature
student, reflected a similar sentiment.
“A lot of people have the idea that belly dancers are like
strippers, but when you do it, you realize that this stereotype
doesn’t reflect what the actual culture of the dance
is,” Borderies said.
According to Kyriacou, belly dancing has its origins as sacred
form of dancing that is thousands of years old.
The art of belly dancing began amid ancient matriarchal
societies. Kyriacou said the dance was used to praise female
deities as well as celebrate fertility and the female body.
A book titled “The World’s Oldest Dance: The Origins
of Oriental Dance” by Karol Henderson Harding confirmed
Kyriacou’s comments.
Harding wrote that fertility was highly celebrated in regions
such as the Middle East, West Asia, Greece, Egypt and North
Africa.
“Sacred dancing would have been an integral part of
(women’s) duties, particularly a type of dance which featured
the abdomen, source of the goddesses’ fertility,”
Harding wrote.
Today, Egypt continues to celebrate a custom for the bride and
groom to hire a belly dancer for their wedding and take a picture
with their hands on the belly dancer’s
stomach as a sign of the dance’s relation to
fertility.
This connection between fertility and belly dancing is also
present in Saudi Arabia, where a Berber tribal birthing ceremony
consists of an expectant mother being encircled by women who dance
with repeated abdominal movement while she gives birth.
Kyriacou said belly dancing acquired a derogatory connotation
when dancers were forced to serve as entertainers and prostitutes
of sheiks.
“Belly dancing began as a dance by women, for women and
praising women,” Kyriacou said.
“Then it turned into a seduction and titillation for men
that it was not supposed to be,” she continued.
The dance is traditionally performed barefoot. One basic move is
the shimmy, which consists of a shake of the knee that results in
the quick movement of the hips.
“Physically what’s really hard is learning how to
control different muscles. You’re body just wants to move but
you have to tell it to move in a certain way,” Borderies
said.
Instrumentation and music play as integral a part of the dance
as movement though.
“Earlier, gypsies felt no need for devices beyond their
own innate, rhythmic hand clapping (palmadas), finger-snapping
(pitos), clicking of the tongue, and often tapping of a
stick,” Harding wrote.
Today, dancers use rhythm instruments including finger cymbals
or “crotales.”
During sessions at the Wooden Center, the clang of the small
metal instruments bounced off the walls of the Gold Room as artists
from West Africa and Armenia provide background music.
Though students could be found dancing in sweatpants and
T-shirts, traditional belly dancers wear long skirts fitted below
the waist with a shawl or scarf tied around the hips. The costumes
may also be designed with “dowry” coins that signify
classical Greek belly dance tradition when a woman dances in the
market place for her dowry.
Kyriacou is now part of an effort to return to the ancient
tradition of belly dancing.
“Belly dancing most celebrates a woman’s body.
It’s not like any exercise. There is something sacred in this
ancient legacy,” Kyriacou said.
Borderies, who began taking the class when a friend asked her to
come along, agreed.
“In our society, all you see is completely straight and
thin women. Belly dancing doesn’t stress that. It’s
about having hips, breasts and a belly,” Borderies said.
“Belly dancing makes you feel better about your curves and
makes you accept them,” she continued.
Kyriacou expressed a need to realize that every part of a woman
is beautiful. She further expressed that belly dancing helps many
women do this.
“Belly dancing is not tacky and vulgar. It’s fluid,
graceful, regal and sensual,” Kyriacou said.
Today, the most common place to see belly dancing is at
restaurants where people give the performers money, which Borderies
said is not what the dance is about.
“It’s more about learning the way you move and the
way you feel, not about what people who look at you feel,”
Borderies continued.
“Belly dancing is about growing confident about your body
and yourself.”