Dance Magazine Index and Article Extracts

Dahlena, An American Classic
Faida Gamal, Habibi Magazine: Vol 17 No 4, Dec 1999

Introduction: Dahlena's work, with its characteristic high standard of excellence, is intertwined with the story of the development of Middle Eastern Dance in the United States. The author feels that Dahlena's contributions and accomplishments have not been sufficiently acknowledged in the dance community.

Early training and performance career:

1. Studied classical ballet as a teen-ager.
2. First professional dance job was a Vegas-style production in 1959 in a Boston nightclub.
3. This venue also employed Middle Eastern dancers, whose powerful performances and perks impressed her. "The featured dancers were Middle Eastern dancers. They came to work late, left early, and made more money than those of us in the production show... and we [production dancers] had to practice afternnoons to change our numbers every two weeks."
4. Coworkers took her to an ethnic nightclub where she closely watched the dancing of the Mediterrranean patrons, and then practiced what she saw at home.
5. Her first Middle Eastern dance job was at Club El Morocco in 1959, "only because I was young and cute."
6. At that time, dancers were expected to play rhythm instruments with the orchestra when not dancing. Dahlena took this opportunity to learn Mediterranean music and to observe the ethnic community's family dancing.

Dahlena's professional career: the right dancer in the right place at the right time.

1. Middle Eastern dance became very popular in the early 1960s.
2. Dahlena became a member of the American Guild of Variety Artists, and agents sent her to venues in Boston, New York, Washington, Detroit, Chicago, Hollywood, and San Francisco.
3. She continued to use the movements of first-generation dancers as her primary source.
4. In the mid-1960s she began to teach and to document document the movements she had learned. Dahlena published the results of her documentation in 1978 as a book, the 'Art of Belly Dancing.' Belly dance had become a craze and Dahlena's book was very popular.
5. Dahlena became a very sucessful workshop teacher, teaching at colleges as well as private studios.
6. Her troupe performed at concerts and exhibitions across the country.
7. In the early 1990s, she moved overseas to perform six-month contracts in France, Syria and Iraq, returning to the US after a month in Egypt.

Her later-life projects and observations:

1. Document the music and dance world of the 1960s.
2. She regrets the separation of dancers from ethnic communities, caused by the loss and many ethnic clubs and the migration of the dance from cabaret to concert stage.

Feminism and Belly Dance
Andrea Deagon, Habibi Magazine: Vol 17 No 4, Dec 1999

"While many individual philosophies of dance exist, and while there is often heated discussion about them within the community, on the whole dancers take a more or less feminist view of what they are doing. Most dancers feel that they are dancing for themselves and for a wide audience, rather than to please and seduce men...

"On the other hand, the view of the general public has not kept pace with the feminist bent of dancers' images of their art. Belly dance continues to be marginalized as an art form; a professional dancer may have a difficult time being taken seriously. The chief venues for performance in the United States are parties (often requiring short "bellygrams" rather than full length performances) and restaurants. The restaurant or social occasion is a very volatile venue for dance performance... She may appear as a mild source of amusement, a fun way to tease and humiliate the birday boy. She may appear as an intrusive source of sexual energy. Regardless of her own intent, she may not be able to break through the preconceptions of people who are inclined to see her multifacted performance according to their own lights... Western society takes various distancing positions toward belly dance: ignoring, joking about, diminishing."

Gender Issues in Oriental Dance
(Erotic Fantasy or Female Empowerment?)
Stavros Stavrou, Habibi Magazine: Vol 17 No 4, Dec 1999