[lbo-talk] middle-eastern dance

Sandy Harris sandyinchina at gmail.com
Fri Jun 26 03:37:21 PDT 2009


On Fri, Jun 26, 2009 at 1:19 PM, Joanna<123hop at comcast.net> wrote:


> "According to that infallible scholarly source wikipedia, belly dancing has
> nothing to do with femininity or gays or whatever at all. It's just a
> gender-neutral folk dance form, like line-dancing."

I've seen belly dancing in the home of an Iranian family who had been performers of various sorts -- musicians, dancers, actors, .. -- for several generations. It was emphatically not gender neutral.

For one thing, once she started moving the rather chubby sister who was a professional dancer suddenly became the sexiest woman in the room by a wide margin.

For another, at least in that crowd, the men had their own utterly different dance form, quite athletic with much leaping and stomping of feet, and some of the squat-and-kick moves I think of as Cossack dance.

-- Sandy Harris, Quanzhou, Fujian, China



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