Late March, 2000, around 7pm. My mom and I, after some searching, find the narrow door leading to a basement space with a tiny changing room and a small, black-walled dance room with a cassette player and two standing mirrors.
The teacher distributes hot tea in plastic cups, and goes on to read a few paragraphs from a book describing women who dance, women who move their hips in ways that sound entirely alien to me.
A more shocking but also very much expected surprise is to find my friend in there – you see, she’s the reason I’m here at all.
This friend has talked about nothing but “belly dance” since the beginning of the year if not longer, and how much she wanted to learn it. Over the course of a few months, her idea of “I’ll find a dance class” slowly became “let’s find a class together next September”, and I hadn’t picked up on how much it rubbed her the wrong way until a week or so before, she announced she’d started attending a class.
But that sadly, it was sold out.
At that point, I understood that she didn’t actually want to start an activity with a friend: she wanted to be the only one in class who does this cool new thing. But I’d been listening to her going on and on about bellydancing for ages, and wasn’t going to be left out after all that, so I recruited my mom, who found this class, Wednesday evenings from 7pm to 8:30 in the city centre, and very much not sold out.
My friend acted very happy to see me, and we never mentioned the issue of the course being sold out.
We drank the tea, listened to a few paragraphs from the book and discussed it, then proceeded to warm up to what I now know is an instrumental part of the great classic Daret el Ayam. In that small, dark room, I imagined myself dancing under the sun of Egypt, and felt, for the very first time in a long, long time, good in my body.
I was a fat kid with undiagnosed asthma who started dieting at age 8 and doing sports for the explicit goal of losing weight at 9. Sports class at school was torture and humiliation; ballroom dance classes awkward as time and again I’d be left alone on the parquet, what with there being more girls and boys wanting to dance with the pretty ones (then being absolutely shocked when they did dance with me that I was actually quite good at it). Moving joyfully in dance class, without it ever becoming punishment for the food I ate, a tool to lose weight, or triggering the asthma we didn’t know about yet, was a breath of fresh air.
We wore long skirts and crop tops, the only place ever where I would let my belly be seen. A few years later I’d learn that my being fat was still unforgivable if I wanted to be seen dancing outside of class, but that was yet in the future; then and there I was safe. It was okay to be me, fat, talented, over-enthusiastic and loud, for a while.
We would dance in a circle, women and girls, learning to slide our hips side to side, to draw circles and figure 8s, to hold our arms in a graceful curve. There were only two narrow mirrors, so we took turns checking our forms witht he help of the teacher, going back to dance with eyes closed, or looking at eachother, dancing together.
I savoured the melodies that at first sounded weirdly out of tune yet came together into something beautiful. I didn’t quite know how microtones worked, in fact, I’d already spent years eliminating them from my singing and my music. I couldn’t quite sing these tunes, but I could bathe in their beauty, the joyful, the melancholic, the moving. My teacher would give us cassette tapes, copied several times over – in time, I had them digitised and now I keep them in my hard drive, having bought original copies of what I could find, still searching for some of my favourites.
I still use almost the same warmup music and movement sequence in the classes I teach now, 25 years later and half a continent away, imagining myself dancing under the sun, thinking about ditching the mirrors so that my students can also get the experience of learning to dance in a circle, feeling rather than seeing the moves in their bodies, with their eyes closed, or looking eachother in the eye
– but whether with mirrors or without, Ihope they always know that here and now, it’s okay to be them, as they are.