Announcing my new class BELLYDANCE FOR THE REST OF US

For several years now, friends and acquaintances of mine have asked that I create a dance class that can accommodate women with limited dancing abilities and relatively senior bodies. As I have struggled with increasingly ridged joints myself, I sympathized. I have had to drop out of a number of bellydance classes because it simply hurt too much to do the work. I know, I know…modify. But there is only so much modification you can do before you are doing an entirely different routine than the one the teacher is presenting. I wholeheartedly appreciate the core-strengthening value of a rigorous syllabus, and 20 years ago I’d have been all over that. But I have different needs now, and so do many of my friends. So, here it is, ladies: Bellydance For the Rest of Us.

We will learn the fundamentals of bellydance: shimmies, hip lifts and drops, choo choos, Arabics, Egyptians, and various other basic movements. While a certain amount of drilling (repetitions of specific techniques) is necessary, I hope this to be a stress-free practice. My main intention is simply to get women moving together in time. That alone is powerful enough to engender confidence and collective joy.

I think often of this description (fanciful or otherwise) of women dancing:

“Speaking only from personal experience, during lunch hours in the gym, we girls danced with each other in the middle of the basketball court, while the boys careened and vied around us. Girls were taught to dance by other girls, boys learned to dance from us...Is it possible to dance our way back into community, culture, and civilization, while the boys careen and view around us? Only time will tell, but dance we must—circling—doing a figure 8 through a maze of contradictions, dodging confrontation, tugging the hands of faltering sisters, the group rhythm transporting us round. Just that is our most practical, political strategy—for our greatest, tested strength is our collective spirit.”

This is a completely untested course. I have not taught it before; I don’t know how it will differ from other bellydance classes; I don’t know where it might lead. But dance we must, circling our hips, undulating our bellies, shaking our shoulders. And yes, we can dance our way back into community…this is my central goal for this class: to increase the community of women dancing together.

Class schedule:

Beginning AUGUST 25, 2009 @

Back in Touch Pilates Studio

4135 Portola Dr (@ 41^st)

831.818.9644

Tuesdays 5:30-6:30

$12.00 drop-in

$40.00 per 4-week session

beginning SEPTEMBER 10, 2009 @

Boulder Creek Recreation Center

13333 Middleton Avenue

831-338-4144

Thursdays 10:30-11:30 am

$12.00 drop-in

$40.00 per 4-week session

PS: look for me at Cypress Raks on Sunday. I'm performing to some Cuban Timba music at about 7:15

* Grace Shinell "Women's Collective Spirit: Exemplified and Envisioned" in The Politics of Women's Spirituality. Charlene Spretnak, ed. Garden City, NY: Anchor Press: 1982

It don’t matter if you’re black or white: MJs racial and gender ambiguity

Much has already been said about Michael Jackson’s racial makeover. Some have speculated that it was an attempt to deny his blackness. Others suggest his medical procedures were an attempt to erase the image of his father as it was reflected in his own face. Certainly he felt compelled to alter his nose again and again for reasons we many never understand, tho there is growing evidence that plastic surgeries can become an obsession.

But I’d like to offer another possible interpretation for these changes: that his desire was to become all races, all humans. I am not arguing that white is the universal default. No matter how white MJ came to appear, we never for a moment forgot that he was black. His music, dance, and other contributions to black culture (and to American culture) are undeniable. But examine his humanitarian videos: in Black or White we see Jackson metamorphize from human to black panther and back again (am I reading too much into that metaphor?). And in an exquisite representation of his belief in the oneness of humankind, we watch smiling face after smiling face morph from one race to another and from one gender to another.

Jackson’s ambiguous gender and sexuality were also frequent subjects of discussion. His pre-pubescent voice, underdeveloped physique, our doubts that his marriages were “real” (that is, that he was even capable of consummation), each contributed to MJ’s apparent polymorphism, as well as to the frequent references to his childlike nature. After all, children, in American ideology anyway, are pre-sexual and gender neutral.

Perhaps, not content with the narrowness of his given self, Jackson made himself over into a universal figure. He was both child and adult, man and woman, black and white, gloved and ungloved. He was not “either/or” but “both/and.” Jackson stood at the crossroads of socially polarizing forces. His music and dance shattered divisions of race, gender, and class. His corporeality came to reflect that. He violated the cultural order, unmasking its ability to divide us. And that made him subversive and threatening, and, for people who cannot tolerate that threat, perverse.

The body—its surfaces and its interiority—is a reflection of social norms and altering the body is a comment on those habits. Perhaps Michael Jackson’s body modifications and presentations were a somatic response to his social politics. This isn’t to say that the other explanations are false, only that there may be another way to look at it (both/and not either/or). It is, after all, just me speculating, but then speculation is all we will ever have regarding Michael Jackson’s fantastical transformations.