The ancient way of dancing in the Orient has come from immemorial times. It is an art
that women have experimented in since antiquity preserving a wisdom we directly need in
our hectic ways of survival today.
Women follow Oriental Dance courses to boost their
self-image, gain allure, and
reinvent their personality to suit their dreams and hopes for personal
fulfillment.
Oriental Dance has become a means for self expression to emancipate introverted women
who dare not exteriorize their sexuality. Oriental Dance in the form of Belly Dancing
makes them feel beautiful, desirable, attractive, but the concepts of Body placement and
artistic mastery are never stressed beyond wearing a scintillating costume and parading
half naked up and down a platform pretending to incarnate Cleopatra dancing for Mark
Anthony.
Body placement for stamina and extension of the
spine, are usually mentioned as titles,
Focus on precision is never stressed for foot work, Tempi and follow through of hard and
soft arms, to harmonize coordination of hip and head agility, are never explained as the
mainstays of Oriental Dance Technique. From the beginning the student's execution should
be fluid, never choppy, end-stopped, strained, and lacking continuity. Jerked gestures are
caused by seamless transfers of weight.
The dancer must learn to stay aloof and dance beyond the struggle between undetected
difficulties and insufficient training. Insecurity clenches the body and blurs the
mind.
Physical Orientation should become second nature, basic body rules should be assimilated
to the extend of automatically responding to the music with instantaneous
reflexes. In fact
those are the elemental sources on which spontaneity relies. True physicality is linked to
spontaneity. But spontaneity is a primitive instinct that modern artificial ways of living
have murdered and buried since long ago. Reeducation for osmosis between body, mind and
spontaneity is the sine qua non of Dance studies today.
To dance and feel as if the body is continually crying out for help is a situation
belonging to all neophytes. Maybe this is the reason for which beginners in Oriental Dance
dislike technique and prefer to stand in a 30 centimeter x 30 space doing belly rolls for
2 years. The teacher's office is to reassemble the separated parts of the body that have
gone astray by the psychological momentum of Western idiosyncrasy. It's the teacher's
responsibility to reinstate unity of the body with the rest of the self. When the gap is
bridged by applied technique, consciousness of aesthetic line will circulate naturally
once more permitting spontaneity to reconnect itself to freedom and ease. The teacher is
bound to find resistance in the beginners who want only to dance around as they please
believing they can discover the true meaning of their femininity without plunging
deeper.
Dance experience without a fare amount of basic training may be interesting for very
beginners who want to be satisfied by aimless group-participation. But the release of
their libido will not occur by just pretending femininity.
It is natural that many women are fully satisfied with having fun
only, and do not care
for more, But what happens when money is spent and time given to a hobby for a
long, long time? It's obvious that most women expect to get something substantial after many years of
training. They are exasperated when they cannot follow the pace of advanced
classes. They
can hardly move when they have to cover spaces while shimmying and are angered when they
can't coordinate several parts of the body simultaneously. They feel cheated, and this is
not good.
Amateurishness has a superficiality about it that disparages quality and pushes teacher
to satisfy the consumer's caprice at the cost of cheapening the purpose of artistic
values. Professionals should resist such trends by not being tempted to stand between
ethical leniency and moral duty. From the very start pupils should be brought to
understand that meaningless recreations are a great loss of time and money, inevitably
leading to regrets. Bad seeds, grow quicker than good ones, and when they invade the
person's mentality, it's too late to get completely rid of them even when the resolve is
aimed at learning better. There's always a part of pain or part of joy we have to
sacrifice for what we wish to become.
Now, after fifty years of continuous Dance
Teaching, I realize the stupendous
importance of my years as a novice, how they paved my formation and gave me the
fundamental outlook of respect and consideration for correct basics and genuinely pure
training of the body. They have kept my physique in shape and mind in focus for the last
half century and plus .......
So be objective to the acceptance of what your heart
wants. Assess the willingness to
go all the way and come out of the experience enriched and grateful to have done it
honestly, profoundly and well.
When your body become a flute able to interpret in
movements, the song of Life, and Womanhood, then you'll know what Liberation
means.
Copyright ©Nelly Mazloum, 1997
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