5 Values

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This week I celebrated my tenth anniversary of teaching and while I was thinking about ways to celebrate, I got to thinking about what it is that I value in the dance. And I came up with a really long list and three different outlines for this episode. And I realize that I can’t include everything that I’d like to say in one episode. So instead I pared the list down to the five things that I think are the most essential. Now I left out a lot of things that are really important in this list, but these are the things that, without them, I wouldn’t want to keep dancing. So they are the moment, individuality, connection, lineage, and the beauty of imperfection.

So let’s start with the moment. When you perform, you, the musicians, and the audience are creating a unique moment in time. This moment comes into being, it shines, and then it’s over. That exquisite moment will never come again. And to be fully present for that moment is to really live. That’s art. And that’s one of the reasons why I feel improvisation is so important even if you don’t access to live music. Being fully in the moment is just a lot harder with choreography. And research done on musicians have shown that you literally use different parts of your brain. It’s the difference between walking across a bridge and leaping across a chasm. So give yourself permission to be fully present. It’s tough. Especially when that critical voice in your head is telling you all the things that you’re doing wrong. But you deserve to have that experience and you’re a better performer when you do.

The second thing on my list is individuality. There’s a dancer here in Boston named Amina Delal who took me under her wing when I was a newbie. And one of the things that she told me is that a dancer is never just a body. Remember that you are not a commodity. You are not a robot. You are not a tool for expressing somebody else’s artistic vision. You’re a human being with something to say. So when you dance, share what you hear in the music, how it makes you feel, and how you like to move. Trust that you have something to offer. And if you’re a teacher, make sure that your students know that too.

Next up is connection. The word entertain literally means to hold together. And this dance has always been about bringing people together. Whether that’s people social dancing in a group, hiring a performer to help celebrate a wedding, or gathering together in night clubs, dance creates a shared emotional experience. And as the performer, we are the MC of that experience for our audiences. So remember that above all, your audience wants to feel something and to accomplish that we need to make a personal connection with them. That is a core value of this dance. We don’t just present something pretty for them to consume or to watch later on YouTube, we tap into our joy, our sorrow, our longing, and we invite them in to experience that with us.

Fourth is lineage. Sometimes we try to understand all of the variety in the dance world by putting the dance into different boxes that we label as one style or another. Egyptian style versus Turkish. Classical Egyptian versus modern Egyptian. And I think that those boxes help us understand what we’re looking at. Especially us outsiders to the cultures and especially when we’re looking across groups of dancers who have really wildly personal styles. But I also think that when you look at a single dancer, it’s more helpful to think in terms of lineage. The biggest influence on my dance was my family tree. The mother of my dance was my teacher and her teacher is my dance grandma. The father of my dance was my primary venue including the band that played there and the audiences who patronized it. The grandfather of my dance was the specific mix of middle eastern ethnic communities that settled in Boston and the reason that they came here, which date all the way back to political friction in the Ottoman Empire and the Industrial Revolution and how it played out in New England. And when I look at my classmates and the other dancers who performed in those venues, I see a group of individuals who have worked hard to develop distinctive personal styles. But I also see a family resemblance and I know the artistic values that we share because I know our family’s story.

And last up is the beauty of imperfection. There’s a Japanese aesthetic concept called wabi-sabi, which is kind of hard to define, but one definition that I found is the beauty of what’s imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete. A lot of us feel like if our dance isn’t perfect, than it’s worthless, and by extension we’re worthless. But the reality is that perfection is not interesting. It can be pretty and it’s definitely impressive, but it doesn’t move us. So when you get up on stage, don’t apologize for your imperfections or put on a mask to hide them. Offer them up as a gift. Vulnerability is a universal human experience and when you offer it up to the audience with an open heart, you’re saying, “I understand you.” I feel this too. And that is moving. That is beautiful. That is art and it is a gift.

So those are the five values that I feel like are absolutely necessary for me in the dance, but I would love to hear about yours. So if you’d like to share those, you can leave a comment on the episode page for this podcast episode, or better yet leave us a voicemail at bellydancegeek.com/voicemail. I would love to hear from you and maybe I’ll even play that on the show.

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