Bellydance in America: Strategies for Seeking Personal Transformation

170 Pages·2012·1.1 MB·English

by  April Rose Wilson

UCLA
UCLA Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Title
Bellydance in America: Strategies for Seeking Personal Transformation
Permalink
https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7c06j7fs
Author
Burnam, April Rose
Publication Date
2012

Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation
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University of California
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA
Los Angeles

Bellydance in America:
Strategies for Seeking Personal Transformation

A thesis submitted in partial satisfaction
of the requirements for the degree Master of Arts
in Culture and Performance

by

April Rose Burnam

2012
© Copyright by
April Rose Burnam
2012
ABSTRACT OF THE THESIS

Bellydance in America:
Strategies for Seeking Personal Transformation

by

April Rose Burnam

Master of Arts in Culture and Performance
University of California, Los Angeles, 2012
Professor Janet O’Shea, Chair

In this thesis I argue that bellydance serves as a site for practitioners to
transform their sense of self, transgress social boundaries, and build community, but
that this transformative potential is compromised when the Orientalist assumptions
that have historically been embedded in the practice are not recognized or challenged.
I begin by highlighting particularly salient moments in Egyptian and American
th th
bellydance history from the mid-19 century to the mid-20 century, emphasizing the
intercultural exchange and sociopolitical factors at play during the form’s
transnational development. I then examine the choreographic and rhetorical strategies
American bellydancers since the 1960s have employed in their attempts to access the
transformative and transgressive potential of the dance. I show that these strategies
have given rise to new genres that either uphold or combat the tendency in bellydance
performance to represent essentialized notions of gender and ethnicity, ultimately
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revealing the form as a heterogeneous complex of practices that grows more self-
reflexive and critical throughout its various formations. Through choreographic
analysis of foundational bellydance movement vocabulary and the organizational
structures of Improvisational Tribal Style I explore how engaging with the physical
practice of bellydance can allow people to expand their sense of self beyond societally-
imposed boundaries and to form inter-subjective community. I conclude by raising
concerns about issues of representation in American bellydance, questioning the
discourse of authenticity, and offering some considerations for charting a course
ahead.

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The thesis of April Rose Burnam is approved.

Susan Leigh Foster
Anurima Banerji
Janet O’Shea, Committee Chair

University of California, Los Angeles
2012

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS vi

INTRODUCTION 1

Literature Review: American Bellydance as Arab-Face 5
The Transnational Development of Bellydance 11
Strategies and Styles of American Bellydance 14
The Role of Bellydance in Identity and Community Construction 17
Critical Engagement with History and Politics of Representation 18
A Note on Terms 21

CHAPTER ONE: THE DEVELOPMENT OF BELLYDANCE IN AMERICA

Introduction - Myths of Origin and the Importance of Historicity 25

Colonial Egypt (1750s-1850s) 27
World’s Fairs (1876 and 1893) 35
Coney Island, Vaudeville, and Burlesque (1893-1917) 42
Early Modern Dance (1899-1922) 48
Hollywood, Egyptian Film, and Bellydance in Cairo (1916-1950s) 52
Oriental Cabarets in America (1950s-1960s) 55

Conclusion - The Representational Frame of Orientalism and Objectification 58

CHAPTER TWO: STRATEGIES FOR SEEKING PERSONAL TRANSFORMATION

Introduction - Manipulating the Representational Frame 61

Tracing Ethnic Origins 66
Evoking the Spiritual 78
Classicization 83
Transgressive Community 89
Creative Expression 96
American Authenticity 107

Conclusion - New Strategies for New Possibilities 112

CHAPTER THREE: CASE STUDIES IN TRANSFORMATION

Introduction - Constructing Self and Community through Bellydance 115

Individual Bellydance Movement Analysis 117
Improvisational Tribal Style 124
Autoethnography 127
Group ITS Movement Analysis 132

Conclusion - Expansive Identities and Inter-Subjective Communities 146

CONCLUSION 148

Future Considerations for Bellydancers and Critical Scholars 149

BIBLIOGRAPHY 156
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I owe many thanks to Janet O’Shea for reading multiple drafts of this thesis and
for consistently offering new insights for me to consider at every step along the way.
Thank you to Susan Foster for helping me identify and analyze the choreography of
bellydance and for your encouragement to accept employment with Bellydance
Superstars during the course of my degree progress. Thank you Anurima Banerji for
suggesting theoretical frameworks and offering cross-cultural comparisons to help me
understand this work. Emphatic thanks to Vic Marks for your efforts in helping me
develop an in-depth practical understanding of bellydance movement values and how
to access the realm of choreographic possibilities within and outside of this form.
I would also like to express gratitude to my first bellydance teacher Daleela
Morad and to my friend and mentor, Amy Sigil. Thank you to UNMATA, Hot Pot
studio, and to all of my students in Los Angeles who have been amazing sources of
familial support and rich ethnographic data. I am grateful to the bellydance
community in general for imbuing my life with purpose and meaning and helping me
to form my own concept of self. Thank you to Ron Houston at the Society of Folk
Dance Historians in Austin, TX for letting me comb through the bellydance LPs and
magazine archives for a whole summer. My research benefited greatly from dancers
and scholars before me, especially the late Paul Monty and authors of archived articles
of Habibi, Gilded Serpent, and Fuse magazine. Thank you to my parents for supporting
me in dance and in school all my life, I owe the completion of my degree to you. Lastly
and most gratefully, thank you to my husband Reed for endless hours of proofreading
and idea sharing and for your unending support in my academic pursuits and dance
career. I cannot thank you enough.
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INTRODUCTION

In the San Francisco Bay Area town of Sebastopol, California one of the largest
tribal bellydance festivals in the world, Tribal Fest, has been attracting fusion
bellydancers since 2000. At this alternative bellydance festival, and others like it that
have sprung up all over the world in places like Croatia, Hungary, Russia, France, and
Spain, women and men gather to perform their interpretations of bellydance.
Participants take workshops from pseudo-celebrity American and European dance
teachers and they come to buy handmade tribal bellydance couture and reproduction
antique jewelry. A first-time viewer might be baffled at how different the
performances at Tribal Fest are from the type of bellydance that exists in most
people’s imaginations, which usually looks more like the dances performed in Golden
Era Egyptian films of the 1940s and 50s or “Oriental”-themed American cabarets of the
1960s and 70s. Performances at Tribal Fest in Sebastopol vary greatly, from burlesque
and vaudeville-influenced American cabaret throwback, to gothic bellydance, to a faux
folkloric style called American Tribal Style, to modern-dance-influenced performances
with minimalist costumes and angular lines. A lay viewer would hear non-Arabic
music and see performances and costuming that would perhaps bear hardly any
resemblance at all to their ideas about bellydance.
One month before Tribal Fest, the bi-annual International Bellydance Conference
of Canada, also called IBCC, is held in Toronto, Ontario. At this conference,
participants come to take workshops with local North American instructors and
witness lectures and panel discussions on bellydance-related topics, but the main
attraction for most is the cast of famed Egyptian instructors. In 2012, the instructors’
roster featured one of the last living ghawazi dancers, Khairiyya Mazen, and the
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pioneer of Egyptian staged folk dance, Mahmoud Reda, among others. The
performances at the IBCC gala evening show are typically Oriental or raqs sharqi style
Egyptian bellydance and staged North African folk dance performed to recorded and
live Arabic music. The movement quality, costuming, and music of most
performances, which tend to reflect an Egyptian bellydance style, would be more
recognizable to a lay audience than those at Tribal Fest in Sebastopol. The difference
between these two North American events demonstrates the wide range of practices
that are called “bellydance” today in North America and the differing extent to which
the Middle East and Arab culture is either referenced or not present in bellydance
performance and pedagogy.
While many permutations of American bellydance look to North African and
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Western Asian performance traditions as a model, many styles of bellydance in the
st
21 century do not draw explicitly on Middle Eastern nightclub, film, or folk dances or
Arabic music. Whether a bellydance performance references Arab performance
traditions, American performance traditions, both, or is presented as an experiment
with very little reference to either, in my research I found that the majority of
bellydance-identified practices in the US, Egypt, and around the world have developed
synchronically and in many ways, interdependently. Bellydance practices that are
considered traditional are in many ways modern inventions, and practices that are
considered newly hybrid or experimental actually fit into a long transnational tradition
of hybrid experiments. Typically, the movement in practices that can be defined as

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The ghawazi and Mahmoud Reda troupe will be discussed in more detail in chapters one and two. Due
to a last minute immigration issue, Khairiyya Mazen was not able to attend the 2012 conference, although
many students attended in the hopes of studying with her.
2
I recognize that the terms “North Africa,” “Western Asia,” and the “Middle East” refer to the same
geography but are ideologically distinct labels. I use the terms interchangeably in this thesis as well as the
term “Middle Eastern/North African” (sometimes referred to as MENA).

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