Raks Sharqi By Any Other Name...

Why I Dance

I am a belly dancer. I enjoy it considerably to see people react to that label which carries all sorts of connotations with them, few of which are actually wrong. With this dance I can educate people about the history of a thousand cultures from whence it came, all the ways that dance and pleasure and morality and gender roles interplay.

For many belly dancers, belly dance is a source of power and a source for understanding one's own body and capabilities for grace, humor, wit, and improvisation, but my motivations are simpler than that.

Belly dance is play, a pure unadulterated form for dancer and viewer to enjoy themselves. It gives me, as a young woman, space to breathe and move in a space I carve out for people I choose to perform for and enlighten about an intensely personal side of myself that doesn't get expressed through my writing. You can't write out play or joy in the way you can dance it.

Current Dance Projects

I've been belly dancing ever since, heading the Bastet Belly Dance Club on the Pratt campus and becoming a founding member for the Bastet Belly Dance Troupe with regular shows in Brooklyn and Manhattan.