Dance Emotion

by Najia El-Mouzayen
November 3, 1998

"The place of dance is within the heart."
--Tom Robbins

After a few years into my dance career, perhaps about 1984 or so, I found Tom Robbins’ quotation and embraced its meaning because it struck a note of truth within me and expressed it tersely. Until then, I had been telling my students many, many words with which I tried to explain that dancing was a communications art and that it had to have content as well as form.

While I am certain that Tom Robbins was not speaking about belly dance at all but, none-the-less, the quotation expressed then, and expresses now, the way I approach the teaching of dance. My own teacher, Bert Balladine, often stated in class (for me, that was late 1970) that dancers had very little life experience to dance ABOUT until they were in their mid-thirties, but, until then, they could apply themselves to the tools of presentation and the refinement of their dance technique. That sounded reasonable to me because at that time I had just become thirty and seen myself survive the 1960’s with only the remnants of a twenty year marriage and no concrete aspirations for ever having a family or much of a life outside the arts in which I was then indulged. I became a "renaissance woman" and studied a little in the graphic arts and design, a little harpsichord playing, a little poetry writing, a little tapestry weaving, a little antique repair with beadwork, and a little dance. I was busy and unfocused until I began to live mainly for the dancing. I was a thirty-year-old teenager with a shattered dream and self image. My emotions came pouring from my heart into the dance, and I found great power in performing as often as possible so that I could express the emotion so denied me by my then husband. I had a dream about this time--well, two important dreams actually.

The first of the two dreams was of me sitting on a huge chunk of ice silently sliding downhill slowly, watching the world--all of life--pass me by. Later when I began to learn Bellydance from Bert Balladine, a magazine reporter came to class and interviewed him and he sent him over to me. While answering his questions, I related the second dream which was at that time the answer to the first dream. It was reported in the PAGEANT Magazine October 1973. I told the reporter that I had had a dream that an archeologist had made an important discovery while on a dig in the dessert, and that emerging from the sands of time was a portrait of myself, looking very much like a Vermeer painting, revealing myself as a beautiful woman. It sounds like so much made-up poppycock now, but it was the truth of my being at the time. Vermeer’s women, though lovely, still were far from the passion, sorrow, and terror I was to experience as my marriage completely disintegrated. With each step toward personality growth and maturity, the chasm between us grew as he sought out women who were weak and who "needed him". My emotions roiled and I healed my heart a little with each dance. Needless to say, I did not really understand what I was doing to my audiences, nor how I did it. I can only tell you that it was not unusual for women to tell me in whispered tones that my dance had brought tears welling up in them. I greatly liked that response because I was, at last, able to get an emotional response out of somebody--anybody-- whereas my husband appeared to have had an impervious heart of stone. As I grew more and more defiant in my personal life, my dancing became ever more subtle as my understanding of the content of the music developed. Since I had been teaching Yoga, and various forms of physical fitness, my body was, at that time flexible and it was easy to extend my knowledge of the other arts into dancing much as I had previously created drawings on paper and compositions with words. My husband, who hated my dancing, encouraged me to open a dance studio and teach dance so that I would "stay out of [his] hair".
When the final dissolution papers arrived in the mail from the county after a two year wait, I celebrated the sadness of the death of the marriage with a new love who brought me a huge white orchid and who told me that I now had to make my own world though dance, and for a good many years I did just that.

"Dancing is not taught as an art in any university. There it is still in the gymnasium."
--Agnes De Mille

"Dancing is not an academic pursuit; it is an emotional pursuit."
--Bert Balladine

Meanwhile, back at the dance studio, I had hundreds of students over the nearly ten years it was open and running successfully. Yet, I remained puzzled by my inability to transfer my dance passion to others. I had been led, by my professors in the school of education at the University of Washington to believe that if the instructor just "broke down the subject into palatable segments, then anyone with intelligence could teach anything to anybody." It was about then that my frustration found a bit of relief in the Zen idea that one had to be a (fill in the blank) to learn how to (blank). In other words, you had to have the heart of a dancer to be taught how to dance. That did, and still does, assuage my guilt at not being able to reach everyone who expresses a wish to learn Bellydance.

However, one morning I awoke to the realization that the college professors were not totally wrong and that there had to be a method which I could devise which would help put dancers in touch with their emotional treasure-hold and to convey it to others.

What follows is a brief explanation of the method I then devised.

I noted that most Belly Dance students had not devoted very much time or effort to their instruction before "going professional". It was also apparent that they generally placed a very high value upon proving that Belly Dance, or Danse Orientale, was as good as other forms of dance such as Ballet, and Flamenco, Tap, or Ballroom, by attempting to codify, and "break down" the movements. They stretched to define, yet not refine, technique as if it had somehow been a formal study on it's own turf in the Middle-East. What had formerly been accessible to all as a spiritual dance of the feminine psyche and a celebration of the female form in the Berkeley 60’s began to take on the plastic glasses, nose, and mustache disguise as an academic art form that ought to have stringent certification of teachers, and be based on set choreography just like "the real [read western] dance forms". Inevitably, the dancer thenfelt herself becoming responsible for educate her public about her fascinating, if obscure, art form. It almost seemed that western thinking was hell-bent on diminishing the very strength and soul of the Danse Orientale by piling upon it the weight of academia.

It occurred to me that Martha Graham and Agnes de Mille both had the essence of dance in mind when they both repeated at various times in their careers "The body doesn’t lie". Agnes de Mille reported in her biography of Martha Graham that early in her formation as a dancer she was given the notion by her psychologist father that one could read the feelings of others by the motions they made with their hands and other positioning of their bodies. I became aware, from reading a book titled The Arab Mind", that Arabs believe that truth (or lack thereof) is revealed in the eyes. It was then that I devised my scheme of presenting student dancers with a set of ways to approach the communication of emotion though dance.

Martha Graham’s dance grew from "dance center" in the solar
plexus radiating up and down through the spinal column. It was
transferred, or projected into space by use of the extremities--the arms and hands, and the legs and feet. I added into this mix the windows of the soul, the eyes and head, as yet another extremity. I re-invented that which probably had already been invented by others; namely, a way of thinking about projected space specifically for belly dancers. Energy of the dance movement had to be projected into two kinds of space by the antennae of the body--all of its extremities. The first kind of space, as I saw it, was a soft, amorphic space surrounding the body or "personal" space of the dancer. Its nature utilized the Fascinators (as I thought of them), or the hands and arms in spare air-kneading motions led by a focus, or gaze into the space where the hands were to travel next. This would telegraph the intention of the dancer and direct the audience where to look for the content. This was the basic method I devised for setting up the scenario much as the clowns in the circus learn in clown college to set up their visual jokes. Bert mentioned in class on a number of occasions back in the early 1970’s that one could do well learning from circus performers since they were masters of visual audience communication.

The second type of projected space was not the finite space that one could touch but the infinite space into which one could gesture and gaze. I saw this as stronger and more purposeful when one practiced as if projected space were geometrical and in a "box" shape utilizing straight up and down, forward and back,
and all diagonals. The energy was to flow from dance center outward into this distant direction with a quick and subtle release gesture of the fingertips or toes, focus, or secondarily by a gesture of the elbows, knees, shoulders, or any manipulatable part of the torso. It wasn’t hard to do and it wasn’t difficult to state in imagery for the dance student. Best of all, it seemed to work.

Taking heart from this technique’s success, I thought further about emotion and how it is conveyed to us by others. Watching the breath or life motion is so basic, yet over-looked by many dancers. I studied musical structure fleetingly several times in my youth, and those studies left me with a subliminal understanding of the ebb and flow of music that is emotional in content. This is conveyed to the listener by loudness and quietude, busyness and sustained notes, and other musical contrasts. When I taught veil dancing, I spoke constantly of the surges and suspensions in the music as "the breath" of the music and that the dancer could use her veil to enhance its affect by surging with it and sustaining with it rather than concentrating on the incessant rhythms of the percussion section of the orchestra. I taught the veil as an extension of the hands and arms and tried to keep the cute "tricks" of veil movement to a minimum.Because Bert Balladine was teaching veil dance at that time as a series of tableaux, I began to see it as a moving sculptures, relating it to my studies in the field of art and Art History. In the hands of an amateur performer, the veil can be a tiresome repetition of deadly cute tricks that, believe me, never saw the light of day in any part of the Middle East. Veil manipulation, too, has to relate to some perceptible meaning.

My most profound discovery in the pursuit of emotional content in dance has been what I think of as "the re-integration of the dance center" or training the dancer not only to move from the upper torso, but also to refer to the dance center with the hands many times when weight changes are made or when some change has occurred in the music. Back in the days when I was first teaching, I attended many dance lessons by teachers other than Bert Balladine so that I would have some idea what and how others were being taught Bellydance. Over and over again I would hear one instructor after another claim that Bellydance was a dance of "body part isolation" or "muscle group isolation". Though that may be true on one level, what generally happened was that the instructor, in her earnest attempt to help the student "break-down and isolate" the movement, never really took the opportunity (if she even ever thought she needed the opportunity) to re-activate the upper torso into the layered movement which gives emotional depth to the dance. Many of the new dance teachers began their teaching still frozen in the upper torso--just as their teachers had taught in their beginners’ and intermediate levels in order to reign-in the extraneous movements that un-accomplished dance students frequently make. An extreme example of this phenomenon is the hands and arms constantly waving about in the space above the dancers head, useless to expression, framing, gesture, line, projection, release, and balance--all the things hands and arms must do to complete an idea of emotional content. No, long ago those hands and arms were "put in park" position and never re-integrated, never reclaimed! Like a bad rumor, the arms and hands were sent forever skyward, menacing the air, lost as powerful, expressive parts of the human form.

It does not take keen observation to note that the feet and hips are less expressive of emotions than they are carriers of the beat and rhythms contained in the music. Since this is part of our own culture in our own folk dancing, it is more easily accessible and accepted by our dance students than are the exotic torso movements accompanying the strange quarter tones of Arabic and other Middle Eastern music. We tend to want to make it into a highly mobile dance-form progression from here to there by the weaving together of both complex and simple dance steps with the feet rather than standing in a relatively small space and dancing the music with the entire torso. Dancing is not learned by collecting steps and step combinations. Yet that is overwhelmingly what is taught in whirly-gig dance workshops as round-and-round we go, picking up on transition tricks from this step to that. This is not figure skating, and the audience is not going to care, or even notice, that you did a high-stepping Fandango Walking Step overlaid with a Soheir Zaki Head Tilt and a really fine cock-of-the-walk Feather Shimmy and followed it with a nearly impossible one-foot leftward Spin backwards!

"The belly dance uses swirling, stationary movements and forms rather than glides across wide spaces..."
--Roman "Bert" Balladine

I see the dancer’s mission as choosing what to enhance for the audience in the way that a graphic artist chooses essence of color, line, texture, and use of space to bring meaning to the viewer. Her instrument is her body and her message is contained in her perception of the music.

I currently teach my dance students that the body parts have their own distinctive, sometimes subliminal, use in the portrayal of meaning. The lower torso, legs and feet are used for percussive movement though space while the upper torso is to express the emotion of the music through breath-like motion--all motions possible similar to the hips such as circles, slides, and percussive accents, to mention a few. The hands and arms, then, are to complete line, make gesture, frame, fascinate, and act as antennae to release energy.

This is the western thought process I have devised to communicate to western dancers how to extricate their bodies from culturally inculcated lack of use of the torso. This is movement which, in Middle Eastern cultures, has not been denied to their women--perhaps preferring to control them by keeping them hidden under heavy, shapeless, material, covering their faces, sometimes eyes (remember the window to the soul?), behind screened windows, cloistered, covered, and fettered while claiming to honor them.

How then, can it be that Middle Eastern women also dance this sensuous dance? The "honorable women" (sitt) dance for each other for amusement, while the Raks Sharqi dancers are generally not considered worthy of any more respect than a village whore. That fact is the major obstacle westerners have to face when trying to turn belly dance into an academic, respectable pursuit. Western Oriental dancers need to remember that an Arab will usually go out of his way to tell you, the dancer, what you want to hear as that is his understanding of common courtesy. He will tell you that Bellydance is a beautiful art form, but out of earshot he will say your husband doesn’t care about you because he allows you to dance, that nobody would want to marry a dancer if he had any self-respect, and that all dancers and westerners are morally corrupt. Now, go, and be spiritual with our dance discovery of this century--Raks Orientale!


Reference Sources:

"The Arab Mind", Raphael Patai, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1976, 376 p.

"The Secrets of Belly Dancing", Roman "Bert" Balladine and Sula, Celestial Arts Publishing, Millbrae, California, 1962, 96 p.

"Martha, The Life and Work of Martha Graham", Agnes de Mille, Vintage Books--a Division of Random House, Ind., New York, 1992, 567 p.

"The Dance Notebook, an illustrated Journal with Quotes", Running Press, 1984.

"How to Be a Belly Dancer",  Troy Garrison, PAGEANT Magazine, Vol. 29, No. 4, October 1973,  pages 66-73.

Original Photos by Jeanine Brandi

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