Make New Friends & Keep the Old

Well said! I agree with everyone you’ve said…it is first and foremost entertainment

As one who for years has lamented the inability of belly dance to grow out of a niche performer-based audience into a mainstream audience I appreciate the reality of what Miles has to say. I’ve put a lot of time and money over the last 10+ years into organizing shows and tours for a troupe and never made a dime. It feels good to support the dance and my wife but as a business its a bust. Miles has done us all a service sticking with growing the audience for belly dance for as long as he has. I know it must not have been easy. Thanks Miles.

I would like to know why it is that, despite this “successful” model targeting the GP, the BDSS machine is only still turning over by tying itself to local bellydance communities and getting those communities to do all the work of publicity, ticket sales and backup performances. Surely the success of this non-traditional dance model should have no need of stick-in-the-mud bellydancers and folklore fans?

I think of Yasmina Ramzy’s wonderful artistic shows, deeply rooted in folkore and the Middle Eastern context but with a powerfully individualistic take on the base material – and yes, with a band – and of similar creative works produced by other members of our community like Cassandra Shore, and I know which I’d rather shell out to see.

I need to disagree with one point Miles has made in his article. Bellydance definely has a folkloric root. Throughout the 20th & 21st centuries many other influences have shaped the modern performance art but the dance did not appear out of nothing. Growing up in the 50’s and 60’s I attended family parties where Debke predominated the celebrations. Women would get up individually and dance with their hips, pelvis and arms. My maternal grandmother, born in a village in Lebanon in 1900, was the ‘queen’ of dancers. When I asked about this beautiful dance, I was always told it was the woman’s solo. I trained and performed in modern dance for 10 years before taking up bellydance as a performance art but I always retained the expression of that folkloric root. Since that time, this root has been demonstrated to me  through attendance at Arab parties and Tunisian weddings where the very young children are the first to get up and dance, imitating what they have seen adults do.

I can’t decide which is greater: his arrogance or his ignorance.

I disagree with Miles view of “boring” folkloric dances, but I certainly do appreciate the fact that he’s obviously popularized bellydance WAY beyond what “the community” had been able to do all these years –

I TOTALLY disagree with Milers Copeland about the dance not having folkloric roots. The dance comes from a dance that is called “Raqs Sharqi”, which is a folk dance. For Miles to discredit the folkloric styles such as the Ouled Nail, Berber dances, Ghawazee, Banat Mazin, Saidi and many others is disrespectful. This is why I personally don’t attend BDSS shows. I think until he includes men and folkloric genres he will be more successful in innovating the dance. It seems like Miles has one impression of the dance which seems to be common in the Western world. At least Sol Bloom acknowledged the Ouled Nails and folkloric forms before Little Egypt was brought into the World’s Fair. Also, belly dance is up to one’s interpretation. What makes Miles Copeland an expert in the definition of it? Yes people have associated it with prostitution in the Eastern countries, but that is why BDSS needs folkloric dance in there. Instead of a “sex sales” attitude, he needs to be thinking about a few things……. Am I doing justice to these dancers and people in the East where this originated from? Am I being fair to EVERY aspect of this dance?…….. I think he needs to think about the culture and not the money. Folkloric will sell if it is done the right way, but it will take the dancer’s to work hard in making the dances work. I hope one day BDSS will incorporate all styles of Middle Eastern Dance and not just ones that just “sell well”.
 

I will echo those who have chided Miles for his unwillingness to incorporate folkloric dances into the BDSS shows. NO it is NOT boring at all. My troupe, Troupe Ta’amullat in Ann Arbor MI, which uses as its base, Egyptian orientale, performs folkloric dances, obviously adapted for stage presentation, from the Maghreb in the west all the way to the Silk Road and it’s anything but boring. We get kudos from the native populations we perform for, whether they’re Moroccans or Egyptians or Persians.
It’s BORING to see ‘Bellydancer after Bellydancer after Bellydancer’ in cabaret style with other styles thrown in, and don’t get me started on what I think of Tribal. Groups like Cassandra Shore’s of MN and Laurel Gray’s Silk Road Troupe in DC also get raves for their folkloric dance.
So it just appears to be an excuse to put very modern style cabaret smashed together with acrobatics, tumbling, ballet (no chene turns in Orientale, hate to tell ya, fella) Vegas fan showgirls out there to bring in as much of the public as possible. Guess ya gotta do what ya gotta do,
but don’t dismiss folkloric as boring. It’s anything but, and it would be
a breath of fresh air in the cabaret/tribal recipe now being used.

Every year, at the S. F. Ethnic Dance Festival, we see various demonstrations of folkloric dance from many traditions. They are very interesting for me to watch. I think we are seeing adaptations of a particular culture/tradition/ethnic group’s dance forms designed for a modern stage and a modern audience. From this perspective, folkloric dance is exciting for me to watch and definitely not boring. When I watch these presentations, group dance is far more interesting (in general) than soloists–unless those soloists arise from my own Middle Eastern dance tradition. Bottom line: Folklore, done well on a modern stage, has excitement of its own.

Miles says: (paraphrasing)
– Folkloric is boring to most uninitiated audience members: OK, perhaps he’s right.
– It’s too expensive to have a live band at every performance: OK, I’ll buy that
-If you’re going to tour the world and perform on the big stage, you should be able to chaine across it: Ok, I’d say that’s a pretty reasonable requirement.
-Many Arabs are rejecting belly dance these days because of religious conservatism: TRUE, but does that change the fact that it’s Arab in origin?
-Dancers should have a varied skill set beyond “been there, done that” Raks Sharki to keep the BDSS show fresh: allright, but…WELL…. Don’t you think there are some LIMITS?
With stilt dancers, contortionists, etc., BDSS might as well stand for the BELLY DANCE SIDE SHOW!!!
 
 
 
 

I have been skeptical about the BDSS for a while for various reasons, but willing to give them a chance should they happen to be in my part of the world. However, this article has turned me right off the whole project. The entire attitude is one of remarkable arrogance, and not much respect towards the amazing cultural dances of the Middle East which Miles claims to know so much about and yet dismissed as ‘boring’. How come Saiidi or Turkish Romany is boring, but Hula is exciting? Is it somehow more exciting purely because it is not Middle Eastern? And if Middle Eastern culture is so boring, why produce a bellydance show at all?
 
The last show I went to for a GP audience was the Arabian Dance Theater company in London, who included Iraqi dance, Debke, Saiidi, Tannoura and shaabi dance with knives, as well as traditional bellydance, breakdancing and  contemporary dance fusion in their show. The majority of the audience seemed to be members of the local general public rather than dancers, the theatre was packed, and the audience were on the edges of their seats throughout. It is possible to put on a thrilling show for a general audience without writing off the culture from which bellydance originated as ‘boring’, and the fact that Miles isn’t able to says more about his attitude than about the dance itself.

So – you won’t do folkloric, but you’ll put in stilt walkers, gymnastics, Hula and other south sea FOLKLORIC dances, and Goddess only knows what else; and call it Belly Dance?

 Right.

-Zorba

(posted by admin for Zorba)

I do agree that having a live band on tour would be way too forbiding.   As for the rest, well, I can only agree with those who disagree with you and your other opinions in this article. 
You may have many years of experience that many of us don’t have in Show Business.  You are not a dancer, you produce them, like you produced other artists before, and that’s fine.  But not including the more traditional forms of Middle Eastern dance is a choice YOU have made as a businessman, not as an artistic director.  You want to bring Belly Dance to a more general audience and make it more mainstream.  That’s a noble thing to do and people have appreciated it for years (as I have).  However, times are changing and now it seems that you want to produce more and more BDSS shows to bring it to even more people, except that you find it necessary to leave behind the gold in exchange for more silver and glitter. 
You have chosen to go the route of Cirque du Soleil style shows instead of continuing to educate the GP about what the many styles of Middle Eastern dance (Raqs Sharki, Saïdi, Debke, Rom, etc, etc) are.  That’s your choice and I don’t question that, however what is/are the need(s) you were trying to fulfill by excluding other arabic nations traditional dances and going towards more “modern” and fusionistic shows? Comparing what people want to see in a belly dance show with what is being done with Cirque du Soleil is not a very good choice according to me because they are very different in nature. 
And let’s be honest here…I’m sure that the majority of the audience in those 800 shows were already dancers of the local BD scene who invited friends and family to see the BDSS shows.  If you had said to the venues to sell tickets only to the GP who knew little or naught of belly dance, you would not have survived the first or maybe the second year as a franchise!  So what’s disturbing about your comments is that it feels like an insult to those who are in the “belly dance” community (the GP would probably not be reading this article unfortunately).  And thus, it is with incredulity that we hear you saying all of this about what should be a successful BD show!
So why did you mention the Cirque du Soleil?  Wouldn’t it better fulfill your needs to produce Cirque du Soleil shows instead of trudging through BDSS shows which are not as successful as you wish they would be (I am referring here to last fall’s series of cancelled North American shows and this spring’s and even last summer’s cancelled Australian tour)?  It may have been working for you for many years, but it doesn’t seem to be enough now.  Do we still need the BDSS?  I don’t know; the quality of local belly dance shows everywhere has gone up and the GP in many localities can have access to top notch performances.
I, for one, am not going to any more BDSS shows and many people I know aren’t either because we have seen better, much better, “bellydance” shows, with or without live musicians with an excellent balance between the folkloric aspect and the modern-fusion aspect, and that’s despite the talent and hard work of the dancers of the BDSS troupe, past or present.
If you plan on continuing to want to bring belly dance to the GP and choose to ignore the origins of the dance, so be it.  But I feel, and I’m sure MANY people feel this way too, that it will be at the expense of what the dance style is.  Unless you decide to change the orientation and call it something else!
Best of luck to you!
Sincerely yours,
Patrick Duclos

I appreciat ethe honestly of Miles in this article. Entertaining an american audience is very different than entertaining an Arabic crowd and eh touches on certain key points about that I appreciate.
I disagree with a couple details but all in all from a business standpoint here in America I completely see where he comes from. America is different, and while we all want to change certain negative connotations surrounding the dance, it is a step by step process.

While Miles might not have every belly dancers ideal “authentic” show, it is an entertaining show that has brought belly dance to the main stream and for that we should all be thankful.