UCLA Electronic Theses and Dissertations
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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 eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library 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 bellydance history from the mid-19th century to the mid-20th 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 ii 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. iii The thesis of April Rose Burnam is approved. Susan Leigh Foster Anurima Banerji Janet O’Shea, Committee Chair University of California, Los Angeles 2012 iv 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 v 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. vi 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 1 pioneer of Egyptian staged folk dance, Mahmoud Reda, among others.1 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 Western Asian2 performance traditions as a model, many styles of bellydance in the 21st 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