Panel Discussions
April 22 - 25, 2010
Lectures will be held daily at the Hungarian Canadian Cultural Centre in the Seminar Room. Please see the IBCC 2010 Featured Speakers for more details!
The IBCC panel Discussions feature exciting hot topics and phenomenal speakers!
scroll below schedule to see detailed abstracts on Panel Presentations and Lectures!
Open Stage performance tickets: Non IBCC '10 Registrants can attend the Open Stage performances by purchasing the Seminar Day pass for $35, which grants access to all activities in the Seminar Room from 9:00am-6:30pm. There are no indivdual tickets for Open Stage performances available.
Seminar Room Day passes can be purchased in advance by VISA or MasterCard by calling: 1-416-920-5593 until April 21.
Panel Discussion Topics:
Thursday, April 22: Presentation Panel curated by Andrea Deagon, Phd - Dancing in Your Own Voice ... with Meiver de la Cruz and EmmaLucy Cole
Friday, April 23: Discussion Panel - Body Image - Delilah,Mayada, Jaene Castrillon, Andrea Deagon, Galiah
Saturday, April 24: Presentation Panel curated by Barbara Sellers-Young - Globalization of Bellydance - Lynette Harper, Brigid Kelly, Caitlin McDonald, Marthyna
Sunday, April 25: Discussion Panel - Tradition, Appropriation & Exploitation - Roula Said, Jillina, Tamalyn Dallal, Habeeba Hobeika, Sera Solstice, Hadia, Shira, Candace Bordelon
LECTURES:
Amel Tafsout - Image of Algerian dancers in Colonial paintings and postcards (Friday April 23)
Aurora Ongaro – The Anatomy of Bellydance (Thursday April 22)
How does a belly roll actually work? What the heck are pelvic floor muscles? Why does “this movement” hurt my back? Why doesn’t my maya look the same as yours?
These are all questions we have either heard or thought ourselves. The answers are rooted in Anatomy.
There is some basic and functional anatomy that all teachers of dance should know. Understanding how muscles and bones connect and move improves a dancer’s understanding of her body and enable Bellydance instruction to be effective and safe. Tips to correct student form and prevent or reduce injuries will be provided.
Mahmoud Reda - Dancing is My Life(Friday April 23)
Sami Abu Shumays - The Female Performer as Tragic Hero: Feminism in Egyptian Film Musicals (Saturday, April 24)
Music and dance push the boundaries of acceptability in conservative Middle Eastern societies such as Egypt, and public performance by women is doubly problematic, when many believe that women shouldn’t be seen in public at all, and some view them as little more than possessions of their male relatives.
Several films from the “Golden Age” of Egyptian musical cinema confront these dynamics head-on; the great bellydancer Naima Akif and the incomparable singer Umm Kulthum both portrayed courageous female performers on screen, dramatizing the tensions inherent in their own positions. In the films Aziza and Tamr Hinna, Naima Akif’s characters struggle with whether to hide or show their talent, and in Sallama, set in 8th century Mecca, Umm Kulthum’s character becomes more enslaved the more her singing talent develops. In all three cases, the social-class dynamic plays a significant role, and the characters are unable to escape their tragic destinies.
Illustrating my talk with selected dance and music clips from these films, I will discuss the ways in which these tragedies carried implicit feminist messages about the value of performance and autonomy for women, and therefore served as indictments of the contemporary societies in which the films were produced.
Meiver de la Cruz - Terrorists & Belly Dancers: Sexual Deviants in The American Imaginary (Friday, April 23)
Brief summary: explores how the adoption of bellydance as the performance style of choice by certain groups of mostly white American women within certain specific sub-cultures, may imply the channeling of American psychological attitudes towards Arabs, specifically those that assign sexual deviance to the terrorist, and by default to all Arabs--into these transformed performances of belly dance. My thesis argues that in the current political climate there is a particular value and import to culturally rooted performance, and that because of the great capital/technological resources of American dancers, they have unmeasurable, infinite power to spread globally American idealizations of the Arab as terrorist and/or sexual deviant through their modified performances of belly dance. If practices go unquestioned, we risk spreading negative American stereotypes about Arabs to the rest of the world, and for this to become more of the norm than the exception. I talk about the cachet with which American things are received outside of the US, because I grew up outside the US, and know the great sphere of influence of American cultural production- from my own experience.
PANEL PRESENTATIONS:
Dancing in your own voice: Feminist Approaches to Bellydance
Curated by Andrea Deagon, with EmmaLucyCole and Meiver de la Cruz
Andrea Deagon:
Dancing in Your Own Voice: Feminist Belly Dance in a Changing World Belly dance is often perceived as a “feminine” art, which raises prejudice and preconceptions about who belly dancers are and what we do. This panel explores the ways in which feminist perspectives can enable us to assert our varied visions of this art, and speak as the authors of our own dances. What cultural tools can we use to strengthen our voices – and which might actually contribute to misunderstandings? How can feminist insight help us to understand the concept of ‘fantasies’ and their strengths and limitations to us as bellydancers? Can our familiar feminist readings of Western belly dance navigate us through the changing global landscape, honoring both new artistic visions and the home cultures of belly dance? Or do we need to revise our idea of what “feminism” means?
EmmaLucy Cole: Inverting the Gaze – Medusa dualities in female Bellydance performance and how the ‘gaze’ continues to be relevant today
Medusa is the personification of all that is negative about the femaile gaze – visually represented as a ‘Gorgon’ with hideous looks yet she was once a beautiful priestess to the Goddess Athena. How was such beauty transformed into a myth of such ugliness? The Wife/Whore polarity of the Medusa still pertains to women today. I will use this example to discuss the expectations of beauty and power in our Bellydance performances and the history of ‘the gaze’ (in relation to Western Audiences). Many people mistakenly believe that the image dancers portray is somehow available to them as an extension of a fantasy presented on stage. The fear of the female gaze is the fear of being ‘turned to stone’; literally ‘petrified’ by lust.
This lecture will break down the Medusa Myth; looking at why the myth needed to exist in the first place; how ‘Beauty’ can both create and destroy us as dancers and how the role of ‘fantasy or myth’ is the key in our acceptance as female artists.
I will support this with research by writers such as Gadamer, Cixous, Freud and Buonaventrua; interviews with prominent Bellydancers; my own investigations and images from both the Dance and Art world.
Meiver De la Cruz: "Women of Color Feminisms and the De-Colonization of Arab Dances"
This paper tries to incorporate non-white, non-western feminist perspectives into an analysis of the feminist potentials of belly dance. It focuses on several key questions of how belly dancers might really seek liberation – not only from personal constraints, but from problematic cultural and social dynamics that permeate what we know about belly dancing and how we do it. Erradicating violence against women has been a major concern of feminists around the world. The empowering potential of belly dance -the potential to overpower this violence- has attracted feminists into this practice. This paper draws connections between interpersonal violence, and cultural, social, and state-sponsored forms of violence (i. e.: racism, appropriation, essentialism, homophobia and military interventions). While many belly dancers have embraced feminism as a philosophy of liberation, we are asking if a dance form can be liberated (de-colonized), if its practitioners are not. Who can liberate / de-colonize belly dance, and how?
Dancing Communities: The Globalization of Bellydance - Curated by Barbara Sellers-Young, with Brigid Kelly, Caitlin McDonald, Lynette Harper
The history and evolution of belly dance has taken place within the global flow of individuals either as sojourners or immigrants to urban centers across the globe. As travelers from one destination to another, dancers, professional and otherwise, have participated in the transference of dance culture. In some cases, the dance is transferred within the normative structure of its original location. For instance, there is the inclusion of solo dancing as part of Arab American wedding celebrations in New York. In other instances, the conception of the Orient, which belly dance represents, became part of a continuing Orientalist discourse and a process of creating and adjusting the image of the Orient through the input of a variety of dancers and choreographers. More and more the discourse of belly dance is taking place via the internet. This process has resulted in a revision of the solo dances of North Africa and the Middle East into new genres that are still part of the larger belly dance community as it presents itself at regional, national and international events, but is distinct in form and meaning from the dance as practiced within communities in North Africa and the Middle East and the related diasporas. This panel examines the globalization of belly dance and the distinct dancing communities that have evolved within it.
Panel Chair:
Barbara Sellers-Young is the Dean of the Faculty of Fine Arts and Professor in the Department of Dance at York University. Her research interests focus on the globalization of performance. Her publications include Teaching Personality with Gracefulness, Breathing Movement, Exploration, and Ed. Volume with Anthony Shay, Bellydance: Transnationalism, Orientalism, and Harem Fantasy.
Panel Participants:
1. Arab/Other: Performing identities on Canada’s west coast - Dr. Lynette Harper
Dr. Lynette Harper is an author, ethnographer and long-time dancer based on Vancouver Island. Her academic and popular publications address Middle Eastern diasporas and dance, life history research, cross-cultural education, and museology. She currently teaches anthropology at Vancouver Island University.
Abstract: In Vancouver and environs, a large, active and highly visible bellydance community has grown and thrived separate from Arab and Turkish ethnic communities. Orientalist fantasies and Egyptian styling currently appear onstage alongside Western tribal and other ethnic bellydance fusions. These performances do not challenge popular media stereotypes about the Middle East; they readily coexist with notions about veiled Arab women who represent oppressed victims of patriarchy and war. So how do Arab women experience and negotiate issues of identity and representation in the bellydance community? Findings from life history interviews reveal conflicts, tensions, and transformations experienced by Arab women dancers as they negotiate and re-negotiate their social identities within Vancouver’s bellydance and ethnic communities, and develop strategies in their creative practices.
2. Belly dance and the construction of a New Zealand identity - Brigid Kelly
Brigid Kelly (Zumarrad) is an independent belly dance teacher, performer and researcher based in Christchurch, New Zealand. She completed New Zealand's first masters-level academic inquiry into belly dancing in 2008 at the University of Canterbury. She retains a deep interest in the complex ways belly dancing plays out in our contemporary globalised culture
Abstract:
In geographically-isolated New Zealand, belly dancers have until recently worked with few resources, drawing on North American, British, Australian and Egyptian concepts of and trends in the form, but developing and reworking these in their own ways. This presentation looks at New Zealand’s unique belly dance environment and at the ways some of these dancers express and explore a globalised and localised New Zealand identity through their adaptation of belly dance movements, conventions, mythologies and costuming.
3. Digitizing Raqs Sharqi -Caitlin McDonald
Caitlin McDonald studies the globalization of Egyptian dance at the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies, University of Exeter where she is a Phd candidate. She is also a nationally promoted blogger for Skirt.com.
Abstract:
The dance tradition and unit of cultural capital known by one appellation as belly dance is currently practiced globally. Its international popularity has now advanced to imagined worlds such as the online virtual avatar game Second Life (Linden Lab). What does it mean to incorporate a culturally significant practice from one society not into another culture or social tradition, but rather into an imagined, fantasized and idealized world? Turning belly dance into a computer program strips it of any bodily representation, as well as transforming what originated as an improvisational dance form into a predetermined sequence of digitized movements. In the “real” world, belly dancers discursively negotiate norms and values that affect the global dance community as a whole. Is there a parallel structure in Second Life? Understandings of dance globalization will benefit from an analysis of whether and how dominant dance narratives arise within this digital, imagined world and if any challenging, subversive narratives contradict the overarching dance paradigms.