Men nationwide are learning the once-female exclusive artform of bellydancing
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Posted: 9/12/05
By Lauren Smiley
Dallas Morning News (KRT)
You've got to try pretty hard to stand out at Yaa Halla Y'all. Upon entering the Grapevine, Texas, Convention Center for a weekend of belly-dance performance and workshops, women named Phyllis and B.J. become "Soraya" and "Tambra." A guy hawking DVDs suggests the new release "Lights! Camera! Bellydance!"
Backstage, the bellies waiting their turn to shimmy in the spotlight run from smooth to cellulite-pocked, alabaster to cinnamon, surgery-scarred to roll-layered. There are so many you stop paying attention, until you see one that's hairy, sans hips and all man.
"Male belly dancers have to get past the stereotype that they're doing something girlish." -Jeff Halpin San Francisco dancer
Look up and there he is, the one the dancer in the lobby must have forgotten when she called the subculture a "sisterhood."
This is Drakon, what you'd call a male belly dancer. (He's really Danielle barAbba, 54, of Austin).
Drakon wears a fringed skirt, blue shiny pants and has curly red hair down his back.
Minutes before going onstage, he's stressing because a woman dancer before him is using the same drum solo he is. Another performer in a "Star Trek"-style dress assures him: "It'll look different." Different indeed.
When the 6-foot-2 man takes the stage, one hand on hip and the other twirling a cane in a typically female folkloric style, a few chuckles erupt throughout the audience.
Drakon executes some body waves, then throws in a couple of hip shimmies while gripping the cane above his head, smiling widely the entire time.
While two belly dancers from Oklahoma let out a tongue trill of appreciation, a wide-eyed woman in the back row looks as if she is witnessing a jig of the Antichrist.
No you are not at a male strip club, and you better not laugh: To the small and still-underground band of male followers, belly dance is about serious artistic expression.
Thirty years after Mikhail Baryshnikov proved that men could do ballet and John Travolta discoed his way into sex-object status, Drakon is one of the male aficionados who are putting an equal opportunity spin on the dance long associated with beaded bras, genie pants and coy femininity.
So what if women rave that belly dancing is great for toning childbirth muscles? Turns out some men like figure-eighting their hips, too.
The spectator reviews were mixed. One man used the word "fantastic."
But Los Angeles-based drummer Ziad Islambouli, who performed at the convention, said such theatrical dancing would not go over in his home country of Lebanon.
"In the Middle East, I wouldn't accept it. It's all about the woman and beauty, and it's a very feminine thing."
Actually, male belly dance performance has a long precedent in North Africa and the Middle East, says Anthony Shay, a dance historian at Pomona College in California, and co-editor of "Belly Dance," a book due out this month. For centuries, professional males dressed in a sexually ambiguous costume, working the same hip swivels as women.
They were even included in the 1893 Chicago's World Fair, where an American entrepreneur first coined the term "belly dance" to introduce the art form to the both titillated and scandalized U.S. public.
But colonial powers strengthening their dominance in the Middle East after WWI considered men's belly dance a scandal to Victorian morality and stamped it out (allowing women to continue).
But both men and women still "belly dance" at domestic social gatherings as they have throughout history, Dr. Shay says, although strict Islamic societies forbid women from dancing in front of men not related to them.
Dr. Shay said the West's "pink and blue syndrome" when it comes to dance moves isn't shared by other regions of the world, pointing to the similarities in female and male movements in salsa and Polynesian dancing.
"The idea that these movements are only appropriate to women's bodies is wrong," he says. "We think when a male articulates his torso he is somehow being effeminate, but that is really a culturally specific notion held by Anglo-Americans."
But guys aren't always welcomed in the Arab community, either. Marios Hedary, owner of Byblos Lebanese Restaurant in Fort Worth, Texas, said he hires a male folkloric dancer who "complements" the female belly dancers. But once, at a Thursday audition night in which amateurs can come try their talent on the restaurant stage, a man showed up wearing what Hedary recalls regrettably as an "I Dream of Jeannie" outfit.
"I was very shocked, very embarrassed. It was Cinderella. It was hip shaking. It was very, very weird."
Hedary said he paced the restaurant until the dancer's half-hour performance was over, after which the dancer asked him what he thought.
"I said, 'Listen, you are not a woman. You are a man. Do not dance like a woman ... that's not right.' "
Bring on the naysayers, say the dancers: Breaking out of expectations is part of the allure.
Jeff Halpin of San Francisco identifies himself as a "typical man." He said his donning a black cloak and gold headdress at the event is "no different than a Cowboys fan getting into their blue and silver dress" at a game.
Halpin said he was hesitant for years to start belly dancing, and when he would inquire about male classes, he didn't feel welcome.
"Just as female belly dancers have to get past the stereotype that they're strippers, male belly dancers have to get past the stereotype they're doing something girlish," he said.
Pull up to Isis' Star Dancers Studio in Bedford, Texas, on any given Tuesday night, and a Ford F-150 is parked outside the window display of bejeweled bras and harem pants. A sign hanging from the license plate reads: "Once a Marine, Always a Marine."
Yep, the instructor of the male belly-dancing class is James Brantley of Fort Worth, Texas, ex-Marine and current Air Force computer specialist, or as he goes by in class, Shadid.
Brantley started taking classes six years ago after he was pulled up onstage by the studio's owner at his wife and daughter's recital, and she said the hip-hop dancer and martial-arts student had potential.
Once he enrolled in class, he learned to adapt the women's movements into a more masculine form: stepping flat instead of tiptoeing, keeping his fingers together instead of "dainty fingers."
While women at the studio learn to embody emotions while dancing, Brantley learned the male personas: the powerful sultan, the regal pharaoh and the aggressive warrior.