Bellydance Man ... ager

So last weekend I did something cool. My friend Nif called me to ask my help. Nif is a long-time bellydancer, who teaches in town, and she was organizing and stage managing a bellydance concert of different area solo and group dancers (as well as one featured guest from Baltimore, picture here). As things progressed, she decided that she wanted to dance in the show as well, and thus needed another stage manager as she could not both perform and stage manage at the same time. And thus the call, asking me whether I was available and whether I was willing to step in and stage manage at the last minute.

"Well I don't know, Nif. It's the last minute. It's a lot of responsibility. I was going to gaze at my navel this weekend. I've got all this worrying and fretting lined up ..."

"But it'll be such a nice time, and you'll be around loads of women in bellydance costumes, including young UVA bellies and not just older mommy bellies like my students."

"Okay, I'm in."



And can I tell you, it was so cool! First off, I love dance but rarely get off my ass to go see it. Second, it was great to see such a variety of bellydance and see it with people who could tell me the history of the form as well as talk about the different styles. And who knew there was so much bellydance going on in this area? Good gracious! Plus, there's something very comelling in a non-prurient way (Not that I believe prurience to be bad. I'm just making the distinction.) in seeing a whole group of women, no, a whole range of women's bodies - from teens to 40s, from skinny to fat, from never pregnant to pregnant to had been pregnant before, from short to tall, from primarily European descended to primarily African descended - all onstage doing these subtle, careful, beautiful, almost hypnotic moves. And the music ranged from (what sounded like) traditional Egyptian folk music to a Middle Eastern version of "I Put a Spell On You." So very neat. Look around where you are and check out some bellydance. It really is a lovely form.