shanmonster | Not Quite Ivory Pure

I can understand why someone would want to be a dance purist. It's like having scholastic pride. It's the desire to keep a tradition alive. However, I can't understand why a dance purist would sneer at dancers who aren't concerned with tradition, but with the concept of movement as art. Similarly, I can't understand why fashion police would nail dancers for wearing something nontraditional when the oddly-attired dancer isn't even claiming to be dancing traditionally.

I have great respect for dedicated dancers, whether they're traditionalists or experimenters. I'm firmly entrenched in the latter camp, but that doesn't stop me from studying traditional dance forms and assimilating the movements into my own philosophy. Similarly, I don't feel restricted by traditional attire. If I'm going to be advertising myself as dancing raqs sharqi, I will wear something appropriate, but if I'm in an experimental venue, expect me to cut loose. I might wear tribal attire, metallic spandex, body paint, or leather. The only restriction I give myself is whatever I wear must give me freedom to move.

My only restriction is freedom, and it's a big restriction.

Although the biggest part of my movement education has been rooted in Middle Eastern dance forms, I don't call my preferred style of dance Middle Eastern. It would be a lie.

When I teach my Middle Eastern dance classes, I do my best to explain the origin of particular movements. I talk about how the wild dance of the Hagalla gave birth to the delicate 3/4 shimmy isolations of the classical raqs sharqi dancer. I talk about the advent of "belly dance" in North America at the Chicago World Fair in the Victorian era. I talk about the tahtiyb--the Egyptian men's martial stick dance--and how it is an ancestor of raqs assaya: the cutesy women's cane dance. I do not teach my students how to emerge from a tumbling forward roll doing a shoulder shimmy.

When I dance for myself, I mix these elements together. I might do a cutesy dance with a cane, but I also tie in my own martial arts training. I claim both the arts of playful mockery and of war and mould them into something my own. Sometimes I tell a story, but mostly I gorge myself on the experiential nature of movement and emotion. How does a long tight skirt make me dance as opposed to one of my giant skirts with its 54-foot bottom tier? How does a head circle go to a rib circle to a hip circle and back up again into a seamless corkscrew? How does a flirtatious smile and sassy head toss suddenly turn into a predatory and frightening glare, and a totally relaxed body suddenly tense with barely-suppressed violence so that tendons and muscles jump up as if of their own volition?

These are questions my theatre, dance, kinesiology, and martial arts training have led me to ask. Through the avenue of "impure" dance I'm give leave to explore the answers. I've done jumping front kicks with a layered shimmy in mid-air. I've done spinning kicks while flipping my head around, zaar-style. William S. Burroughs did cut-up literature, putting together words and sentences from various sources. I do the same with my own brand of dance.

I guess that makes me a dance impurist.