There are different versions of Belly Dance “history”,29most of which describe narratives of the development and impact of Belly Dance in America (Sellers-Young 2005, Shay & Woods 1976, Carlton 1994, Monty 1986, Franken 2003 and Dox 2006). Efforts abound to describe the genesis and relationship of Belly Dance to ancient and modern Egypt (Helland 2001 &
Buonaventura 1989), presenting selective, anecdotal and anachronistic versions of a Belly Dance past. These narratives describe Belly Dance performance and styles as different cultural
embodiments and codifications of their own histories, economic value and socio-politics. It is important to point out that as much as different Belly Dance performance and styles may be seen as complementary and sharing something essential, they are also in constant economic and cultural competition with each other. Therefore, each style claims authority and authenticity of some sort, and implicitly asserts a different version of history, rejecting and reacting against the claims of other styles: consequently they are not just pieces of the same jigsaw puzzle. For
28 I use and capitalise the term Belly Dance in place of any other method of spelling and presenting the name of the dance. For example Bacon uses the term Arabic Dance (2003), because it represents the most well recognised generic name for the dance genre found in her case study. By using a capitalised noun and western name for the dance I am announcing the complex neo-colonial issues concerning England’s specific neo-colonial past with Egypt.
29 I reference Amy Koritz’s “Re/Moving Boundaries: From Dance History to Cultural Studies” in Moving Words, Re-writing Dance, ed. Gay Morris (London: Routledge, 1996) and a collection of cultural and the historical texts concerned with dance found in Moving History/Dancing Cultures: A Dance History Reader, ed. Ann Dils and Ann Cooper Albright (Connecticut:
Wesleyan University Press, 2001), all of which are dedicated to the “cultural turn” in dance history during the turn of the twenty first century, exposing previous hierarchical evaluations of the past in favour of a more plural and narrative driven continuum of both past and present practices.
example, Dox’s (2006)30 well-known article offers a narrative of Belly Dance in American popular culture as a complex interweaving of commercial, artistic, contextual readings and narratives of the dance within a relatively short time frame:
Belly Dancing's history and popularity in the United States can be traced to the late 19th century. For the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair Midway Plaisance, Sol Bloom promoted versions of Egyptian, Persian, Moroccan and Tunisian dances, which gave rise to the then-scandalous danse de ventre performed in vaudeville houses, burlesque shows, and on film. By the 1920s, variations of Middle Eastern social and folk dances, with the addition of veils, had entered the private sphere of Western salons as a form of exotic artistry and self-expression, a vision reinforced by stage performers such as Ruth St Denis and Maud Allen.
(2006: 53)
The above is a global picture but one that is also played out in a location like England. There is no single narrative published that recounts the development of “English” Belly Dance, yet there has been an identifiable community of practice in England since the late 1970s, which by definition has required (and created) its own claims to authenticity, ownership, form and
tradition: in short, its own narrative(s). Indeed, there are key publications and bodies of work that have been influential and defining in England from the 1980s until the present. They are Suraya Hilal’s school of Raqs Sharqi (established c.1985 and now the Hilal Dance international
trademark and training programme 2001) and Wendy Buonaventura’s internationally popular text Serpent of the Nile (1989, reprinted 2011, translated into 21 languages). Both Hilal and
Buonaventura assert their own versions of Belly Dance history, and implicitly the authenticity and value of their own work. They creatively select, reject and react against other narratives of
30 Dox’s text (2006) “Dancing around Orientalism” is a key reference for this chapter, one that critically assesses American Belly Dance past and present practices, exposing the ideological and aesthetic undergirding principles which have formulated the Western Orientalist mythic construction of Belly Dance exported worldwide.
Belly Dance history. They compete against each other in an almost binary fashion, but
immanently Hilal and Buonaventura establish the English Belly Dance tradition. Our question, however, is how to describe that tradition and to understand how it helps define and authenticate current English Belly Dance, including its relationship to “global” forms of Belly Dance.
Belly Dance in England is a community that shares an international practice which helps form a specific or local identity-in-practice (see Holland et al: 2001). To begin to understand that identity and its tradition, as per Appadurai’s (1996) ethnoscapes concept, it would be useful to consider the community’s identity and tradition in terms of the “changing social [and economic], territorial and cultural reproduction of group identity” (Ibid: 48). Also, Wenger’s (1991 & 1996) community of practice model offers key developmental and heuristic processes detailing a community member’s transition from peripheral (see Lave and Wenger: 1998) to core
membership, building a sense of self-in-practice and self in relation to a community of shared practice. Thus, by considering the social and cultural milieu of the 1980s against which Hilal and Buonaventura reacted but from which they emerged, their narratives of authenticity, their
personal heuristic processes, the creative tension of their perhaps necessary and binary
opposition, and considering how they sustained an impact for over twenty years, we will be able to identify the key characteristics that constitute a continuing English Belly Dance identity locally and on a global stage.
Hilal and Buonaventura emerged as leading artists in England when cultural diversity policies and multi-cultural issues dominated the political and arts landscape of Thatcher’s Britain. During this Thatcher era and in the changing cultural landscape, Hilal and Buonaventura’s prominence in the English Belly Dance community signals a formalisation and codification of Belly Dance teaching and performance practices, which in turn trained a new generation of Belly Dance
performers, artists and instructors. I argue that Hilal and Buonaventura’s ambition to present the
“art” in Belly Dance whilst also resisting the “exotic” associations of the dance genre produced a new paradigm operating in the community which still persists. Both practitioners were more often than not in competition with each other, and their activities and profiles raise questions about the role of individual ideological, political and economic proclivities during the emergent years of Belly Dance in England. Each dancer also expressed a different politics of
representation through her understanding of the form, offering competing opinions on
Orientalism, nationalism, class, and gender identity. How Hilal and Buonaventura portrayed their choices discursively held as much significance to this inquiry as the choreographic decisions themselves. As such, their public representation of such points and how they had approached them in a teaching context factored into the investigation more than how they thought about them privately.