This is an essay from one of our contest winners Atisheh who won second place.
The Solo Surprise
When I read the topic for the essay contest, I thought it would be easy to
answer. My passion for bellydance is in no small part due to its delicious,
languorous movements. I love the meditative quality of the dance: holding a
pose while tracing soft curlicues in the air with my fingers, stretching out a
large hip circle to its utmost extension and letting my upper body sway down
and then up again, unfurling my snake arms deliberately as though the air were
made of maple syrup.
Given my love for the gooey, sensuous aspects of bellydance, answering what my
favorite part of the bellydance routine is should be easy. It must be the
chiftetelli, of course, or at least the veil section. What better chance to
delight in slowness, moving and breathing with the music, letting an entrancing
veil waft through the air, or doing sinuous undulations in floor work? And yet,
I couldn’t commit. Because the more I thought about it, the more I realized that
a different part of the routine has been winning my heart lately. And it is the
utter opposite of everything I have always loved about this dance. But first, a
little background.
I am not a professional dancer. I am, in fact, the eternal amateur. I go to
classes, I take workshops, I buy a ton of DVDs, I read blogs and write one, I
peek into conversations on online forums. Very, very rarely, I buy some little
bit of a costume. I adore this dance, and it takes up a very high percentage of
my physical and mental life, but no one is going to be knocking at my door
tomorrow to ask me to perform a routine.
So the question for me is a bit theoretical. And yet, it’s also not. I’m not a
high-energy person, a fast mover, so the slower aspects of bellydance always
appealed to me. Given a choice between following a melody or following a
rhythm, I almost always incline to the melody. I also liked the fact that slow
movements, as in the chiftetelli, really made me feel my body from the inside,
gave me a sense of deep connection to my own movement. I came to bellydance
partly because I wanted to learn a dance I could do alone, for which I wouldn’t
need a partner. It has always been something I did for myself, and only for
myself.
But a few things changed for me recently. For one thing, I was pregnant – for
the usual amount of time – and I had a baby. I danced a lot while pregnant, I
worked with videos and I improvised on my own to many hours of Middle Eastern
music. But something else also happened. I had taken a class on world drumming,
and though I only picked up some basic skills, I did wind up with a very nice
doumbek. My husband, who is much more talented musically, started picking up
the doumbek now and then and improvising some rhythms. Some were Arabic ones
that he had heard me practicing, and others were his own invention. And I
started to dance to them.
Among my favorite memories of being pregnant, before the tornado of dirty
diapers and nighttime feedings and inexplicable crankiness hit us, was my
husband playing the drum, me grabbing a hip scarf if one was near by, tying it
on, and happily improvising to his beats. It was a time in our lives when we
both lived with constant awareness of my growing body, and somehow it made
sense to play with an art form in which my body was also the focus. As his
playing got faster and faster, I would forget my weightiness or my painful back
and get carried away with the intensity of the music. There was no audience
outside the two of us (and, well, a little creature who was along for the
ride), but we had the conversation between drummer and dancer I had heard the
pros talk about. While I had been attracted to the way bellydance allowed me to
be alone and introspective, the drum solo allowed me to explore it as a partner
dance.
This is how I started to fall for the drum solo. It can be fierce and tight,
full of pops and locks, but it can also be cool and relaxed, with travel moves
and big shimmies. And it’s the perfect do-it-yourself version of bellydance.
You don’t need to have a lot of space for traveling moves, or the right floor
for spins, or ceilings high enough to practice the veil. I can listen to a drum
solo while waiting for the bus, and play with the rhythms under my winter coat.
And even more exciting, you don’t need a full orchestra to enjoy dancing to
live music. Find one drummer who is really into it, even if he or she hasn’t
mastered all of Arabic or Turkish percussion, and you can have music and dance
to it.
As I’ve recovered from childbirth and from the first, hectic year with a new
baby, I’ve found the athleticism of the drum solo – the very thing I used to be
wary of – to be a new attraction. I am spending more time dancing than I ever
have before in my life. In fact, dance has become my lifeline. And doing a drum
solo workshop or DVD, with all the sweat and speed and rehearsing of tiny,
precise moves, has become a way to measure how far I’ve come in my dance
training. The drum solo doesn’t let me stay where I’m comfortable. Whether it’s
learning a completely new shimmy or drilling a series of bumps and pops until
it comes naturally, working on a drum solo forces me to learn new skills in a
focused way.
Sure, a drum solo is not as meditative or as soft as a chiftetelli or a taqsim.
Those will always have their place in my heart. But I’m now a fan of the
euphoria that comes from practicing and dancing with the drum, the excitement
of give-and-take with a live drummer, the thrill of following crisp patterns
with my own movements. Composed of rhythm and energy, the drum solo represents
everything that I’ve always thought I didn’t have. Falling in love with it has
been my solo surprise.
