At Santa Monica’s Highways Performance Space, the walls
drip with bold red and black fabric ““ it envelopes the beats
of an Oriental jazz band, creating a steady rhythm for three
dancers to languidly rise after slowly pounding and stretching on
the ground. The music, movements and theatrics intensify with the
dancers’ flailing arms, flying hair and elaborate costumes.
Just before it gets out of control, the choreography slowly returns
to a steady rhythm.
“People hear belly dance and they think you’re
dancing for a bunch of guys,” said World Arts and Cultures
graduate dance student Tamra-henna. “It’s not for this
purpose. There are lots of things involved in the dance.”
Tamra-henna believes that most people tend to simplify and
stereotype belly dancing, and fail to understand the technical and
emotional importance of it. From tonight through Saturday, she
plans to use her M.F.A. final project “Tarab: A Journey Into
the Ecstasy of Arabic Music” to help the dance style earn
some respect.
After a friend introduced her to belly dancing as an
undergraduate, Tamra-henna decided to pursue the dance
professionally. She moved to the Middle East for seven years,
performing throughout Egypt and the Arab world.
The Highways performance will feature a solo with Tamra-henna,
and a piece with fellow belly dancers Aubre Hill and Eden
Lighthipe, who graduated from UCLA’s WAC program in 2000. The
title of the show describes the essence of raqs-sharqi (eastern
music), which is the school of belly dance at which Tamra-henna
performs.
“Tarab is the experience, the ecstatic experience of
Arabic music and bringing in lots of different intense emotions. It
could be pain, or absorption, or delight, happiness, sadness,
everything. It can be either way, but it’s an intense
experience,” Tamra-henna said.
In her showcase, Tamra-henna revamps the traditions of the dance
by bringing it into a theater. She uses theatrical elements to
gradually translate the idea of ecstasy to the audience, and adds
fusion music to enhance the nontraditional element.
Hill explains that the stereotypes of belly dancing have emerged
and are encouraged by people’s fantasies of orientalism.
“It is not seen as an art form in people’s minds.
They think it’s like stripping or like a goddess dance form
that connects people with their inner goddess. All of these ideas
are just fueled by people’s imaginations,” Hill
said.
In reality, belly dancing is traditionally an Egyptian
celebratory dance performed and practiced by women at nightclubs,
weddings and anywhere dancing is called for. It may seem
provocative here in America, but Tamra-henna considers the dance as
serving more of a recreational purpose.
Because more dancers are teaching and performing belly dance,
Hill said, people are becoming more educated on the ecstatic dance,
and according to Tamra-Henna, the dance community is embracing the
form.
“It’s a life-long art form,” Hill said.
“You can do the movements from the day you are born until the
day you die.”
For Lighthipe, the allure of belly dancing is not its
goddess-like movements, but rather how natural it feels.
“It is such an old dance form that it’s the way your
body wants to dance as opposed to ballet, where you have to force
your body for it to become natural. I feel like it’s made for
a woman’s body – it’s kind of curvy, a circular dance
form,” Lighthipe said. “But as time goes on and people
become exposed to things like Arabic jazz, the dance will
evolve.”