Putting The Shimmy Into The Simcha

by Sarah Bronson
Special To The Jewish Week

Once the exotic symbol of the Middle East, the professional belly dancer is slowly disappearing from the Arab world, where fundamentalists frown upon this sensual dance form and the revealing costumes most often associated with it.

But in Israel the hip shimmy and the shoulder roll are increasingly popular, to the extent that Israel is now a center for belly dancing in the Middle East, second only to Egypt.

Belly dancing has shed its low-class image, and it is now de rigueur to hire belly dancers for weddings, hennas (pre-wedding parties TK), even bar mitzvahs. Sephardim and Ashkenazim alike hire belly dancers for corporate events, circumcisions, anniversary parties. In major cities, women’s gyms increasingly offer belly dancing classes for children as young

as 6 and women as old as 80, and there are several belly dance festivals in Israel throughout the year. An Orthodox synagogue in Jerusalem recently hired a belly dancing class for women.

“Most hennas have a belly dancer,” said Sharon Tourel 37, a professional dancer and instructor and a master’s degree candidate in dance. “Sometimes I don’t understand why they invite me to a bar mitzvah or to celebrate the birth of a child. In the beginning, I thought ‘What? A 13-year-old child, what do they have to do with belly dance?’ But it’s not for them, it’s for the guests.”

Indeed, every dancer interviewed said that her primary function at parties is not to provide a show, but to encourage the guests to get out of their seats and dance as well. Typically, after performing one or two numbers on her own, the dancer will then coax guests to dance with and around her. The cost for such entertainment is generally about $300 for 30 to 60 minutes of dancing, if the dancer is well trained.
Although the form has its roots in India, “Egypt is our mother in belly dance,” said Tourel and other performers. “All the Israeli dancers appreciate the dancers in Egypt, and we go to their festivals and study with them in master classes. At parties and bar mitzvahs and hennas I do a pure belly dance, but what is beautiful in Israeli dancers is that at stage productions and festivals, they give it a Western interpretation. We combine it with modern dance, with Moroccan music, Israeli music. I have a friend who fuses Bukharian dance with belly dancing, another who combines it with Spanish dance, another brings in gypsy dance. It is very colorful and vivid, and that is unique to Israel.”

While at festivals and in classes performers may fuse belly dancing with other dance forms, at events it is the pure Egyptian “Raqs Sharqi” (“Eastern dance”) style that prevails. It’s the one popularized in Hollywood films, typified by elaborate costumes and dancers who stand on the balls of their feet and extend their arms far from their bodies in undulating motions.

Shoshana Friedman, age 50, typifies the positive image that belly dancing enjoys in Israel. Like many women here, she began belly dancing 10 years ago as a form of exercise and stuck with it because it helped her feel womanly and proud of her body. She started dancing every day, and lost 130 pounds as a result. She now owns the Oriental Rose dance studio in the Galilee’s Kibbutz Machanayim.
Although not comfortable performing at large events where “people expect you to be Miss World,” she said she performs regularly at hennas in people’s homes. “It’s usually at the home of the bride, with the family. I feel comfortable to be with the women,” she said, “to make them dance with special music and songs for the bride.”

Belly dancing is also increasingly popular in the United States, especially on the West Coast. But American Jews who come to Israel to celebrate family events are unlikely to join this particular Israeli trend. “On occasion I suggest it to my American clients,” said Shani Falik Roth of Jerusalem’s Eventfully Yours, “and their response is ‘that would be fun, but no.’”

Joan Summerfield of Anglo Israel Events said that one exception is the American Jewish family who decides to hold a party in a Moroccan restaurant, when they will hire a belly dancer “because it goes with the surroundings.” Darna, a popular Moroccan restaurant in Jerusalem, routinely offers belly dancing as part of its party services, and reported that “Jews from New Jersey” hire belly dancers for parties there two to three times a month, though the clients often request “more modest dress” from the dancers.
“It’s not a show here,” explained Darna owner Ilan Siboni. “The dancer is there to get people up and dancing. It’s to make people happy. It’s also not like in the Levant where people put dollar bills in the girl’s costume. It’s more elegant and pleasant. The girls who dance for us are extremely educated women. One of them has a Ph.D.”

Interestingly, one group that harbors antipathy toward belly dancing is Egyptian Jews. Two years ago, this reporter attended the annual New Year’s Ball of Egyptian Jews in Haifa, where a belly dancer entertained guests. “But people protested, so we don’t do that anymore,” Ada Aharoni, an academic and prominent member of the Egyptian-Israeli community told me last week. “In Israel it has become a folk thing,” she said, “but in Egypt it was prostitutes who did it, and guests would put money in the dancer’s bra. It was a Muslim thing. Jews did not have belly dancers. So this year, at the ball, we had classical music and ballet and it was much nicer.”

Today, few Israeli party guests are as gauche as to try to slip 20-shekel bills into a dancer’s costume, though Tourel reported that sometimes a man will hand her money and she’ll place it into her clothes herself. She said that she is often invited to perform at functions hosted by groups of academics, or to explain her moves and the history of belly dance to guests.

“A few years ago, belly dancing was not something that a father would want his daughter to do,” she said. “Now it is everywhere and considered classical.”