the up side of exoticism
Nov. 11th, 2005 10:33 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
keryxI've talked before about my discomfort at playing to the exotic/erotic thing that people seem to respond to about bellydance, right. The godawful flirting with a veil, sitting on random dudes' laps at restaurants, the "please please put a tip in my bra" shimmy, that kind of thing - ew.
But there's another aspect of the exotic in the dance and drum form that I've been pondering - it's this notion that it's all about some kind of primal feminine beauty, that it represents this other culture (well, the tribal stuff doesn't, but the audience doesn't always get that), that it's inherently sexy because... you know, women moving their hips. Egads.
There are some advantages to that. Being a bellydancer makes you automatically beautiful because of this exoticism - and that's pretty cool when you're dancing in front of another woman who looks like you and didn't realize that humans can accept the whole range of body variation as gorgeous. [Sidenote: wow, lately I have been so aware of this - 99% of people I meet are insanely hot, I swear. The other 1% would be if they weren't so busy being asshats.] I imagine in a tiny way it saves every little girl who looks like she's having some kind of religious experience watching us - that is, she gets to see the dramatic range of bodies in the tribe as all these possible variants on pretty.
Of course, my inner feminist is all but what if that's all she thinks it's important to be now? - because everyone thinks they can just shake it (next time we go out to dance on the street, I'm totally taking a tip jar & demanding that people pay me to watch them drunkenly dance), they don't look at a dancer and think strong, they think pretty. We're both, yo. I want people to respond to the strength, too - not just playing with pointy things and setting things on fire, but the pure strength of dancing like we dance.
Buuuuut. The truth is the dancing is sexy, and audiences respond to that. It looks sexy, partly because we just don't see people move like that when they're not trying to be sexy most of the time - we know correlation when we see it (though of course, because people not projecting "Please Love Me" are compelling, the hottest dancers are the ones who could give a fuck if you thought they were hot). But it also feels sexy - it's inhabiting all of your body at once, particularly when the drums are really on, which I know I at least get off on more than I generally cop to(your mileage may vary). [EFC (edited for clarity) - I don't mean that the only reason I do it, or even a particularly important one - just that it is one & I want to own up to that.]
Puts the dancer in a really odd space, then. Here I am dancing in part because I think it's hot as hell (and, you know, art!), but I don't want an audience to just see this external "ooh, sexy dancing" shit. I don't want them to respond to it as just another female body for consumption. I want them to see the full depth of the athleticism involved, to respond to the community we are, to have their minds poked at least a little, to feel transformed a bit (spiritually, emotionally, however). Sure, they can still think it's hot, but in a feminist utopian way.
Not that audiences are controllable that way. You can't make them see anything your way - because you can't make people do that, period.
But there's another aspect of the exotic in the dance and drum form that I've been pondering - it's this notion that it's all about some kind of primal feminine beauty, that it represents this other culture (well, the tribal stuff doesn't, but the audience doesn't always get that), that it's inherently sexy because... you know, women moving their hips. Egads.
There are some advantages to that. Being a bellydancer makes you automatically beautiful because of this exoticism - and that's pretty cool when you're dancing in front of another woman who looks like you and didn't realize that humans can accept the whole range of body variation as gorgeous. [Sidenote: wow, lately I have been so aware of this - 99% of people I meet are insanely hot, I swear. The other 1% would be if they weren't so busy being asshats.] I imagine in a tiny way it saves every little girl who looks like she's having some kind of religious experience watching us - that is, she gets to see the dramatic range of bodies in the tribe as all these possible variants on pretty.
Of course, my inner feminist is all but what if that's all she thinks it's important to be now? - because everyone thinks they can just shake it (next time we go out to dance on the street, I'm totally taking a tip jar & demanding that people pay me to watch them drunkenly dance), they don't look at a dancer and think strong, they think pretty. We're both, yo. I want people to respond to the strength, too - not just playing with pointy things and setting things on fire, but the pure strength of dancing like we dance.
Buuuuut. The truth is the dancing is sexy, and audiences respond to that. It looks sexy, partly because we just don't see people move like that when they're not trying to be sexy most of the time - we know correlation when we see it (though of course, because people not projecting "Please Love Me" are compelling, the hottest dancers are the ones who could give a fuck if you thought they were hot). But it also feels sexy - it's inhabiting all of your body at once, particularly when the drums are really on, which I know I at least get off on more than I generally cop to(your mileage may vary). [EFC (edited for clarity) - I don't mean that the only reason I do it, or even a particularly important one - just that it is one & I want to own up to that.]
Puts the dancer in a really odd space, then. Here I am dancing in part because I think it's hot as hell (and, you know, art!), but I don't want an audience to just see this external "ooh, sexy dancing" shit. I don't want them to respond to it as just another female body for consumption. I want them to see the full depth of the athleticism involved, to respond to the community we are, to have their minds poked at least a little, to feel transformed a bit (spiritually, emotionally, however). Sure, they can still think it's hot, but in a feminist utopian way.
Not that audiences are controllable that way. You can't make them see anything your way - because you can't make people do that, period.