*ALSO* A Belly Dancer: Jazz Dance

"She's not a REAL belly dancer! There's more Jazz in her than anything."

Apparently this is what was said about me, over and over to anybody who would listen during the first years of my recovery after my big car wreck.

Why did so many dancers keep telling me this? Because the woman who had inherited my restaurant gigs and students after I was hit by a drunk driver didn’t want to give those things up. But I was rapidly scaling mountains in the efforts of proving the pessimistic half of my medical team wrong.

They’d told me I’d been too injured to be a professional dancer again.

I told them, “Watch me.”

Everybody around me was watching. They were cheering. Except the person who had the most to lose if I succeeded. So the Colorado belly dance community abounded with the condemnation that I wasn’t a “real” belly dancer, therefore they shouldn’t hire me, invite me to perform in their shows, or study with me.

When that wasn’t quite enough to get people to turn on me, the rumors shifted to the tales that I had gone off my rocker, had become a malicious, abusive jerk, and was “faking my injuries.” Apparently she knew this with 100% certainty because she’d “seen my medical records.” She did work in the office of one of my physicians, after all.

Of course, nobody ever asked to see my X-rays. Nobody ever asked me what my official diagnoses were, why I had to be medically removed from my day job, or why I had said what I said to her. They just believed her.

Until she did similar things to them.

Eventually, the other exiles who refused to quit belly dancing wound up migrating out to the toolie bushes with my dastardly derriere.

Eventually, Camp Exile grew so big that it turned into the main Southern Colorado belly dance community.

Eventually, her web of lies and manipulations brought her house of cards crashing down on her head, and I received multiple letters and phone calls of apology.

But for a few troublesome years there, that smear campaign did great damage to my reputation and the recovery of my dance career. I got blacklisted from the restaurants where I had once performed every weekend. I got dropped by my students and our mutual acquaintances. She also sabotaged things with my insurance adjustor and my cognitive therapist, damaging my connection to those relationships—one of them irrevocably.

I could have sued her for all that.

My former “best friend.”

The woman who had called me “her dance partner” (except when I wasn’t standing next to her—then she told everybody I was “her protege”).

(Unless it was inconvenient.)

(I’ve always found it interesting that I was simultaneously “not a real belly dancer” but when she wanted to lay claim to my fame, she called me “her protege.”) 🤨

Alas. I didn’t have it in me to take her to court for slander and breach of medical confidence, because…

Too many to list without derailing this post. That’s what I have an entire personal memoir publication for.¹

Today, let’s address one of the most successful selling points of this smear campaign, shall we?

The first statement — that I was not a real belly dancer — could be well argued from either direction. In truth, it’s both wrong and right, because I was ALSO a professional belly dancer for two decades of my now 49-year love affair with dance.

The second statement—that there was more Jazz Dance in me than anything…

Let’s analyze that, shall we? Then you can come to your own conclusions.

The footage below captured the last dance I did before my car wreck, and hence, the last dance I did before the above-mentioned statement was broadcasted about me. This video was shot during our monthly student recital the night of December 20, 2000.

YES. That Night. This was taken about 3 hours before I was rammed into a construction median on my way home after the show. In fact, I was still dressed in the bottom layers of this very costume when the paramedics hauled me out of my car on a stretcher.

MORE JAZZ THAN ANYTHING?

It is absolute fact that I took Jazz Dance in college. Loved it. Was good enough at it that I was cast in a Jazz-Funk choreo for a showcase.

That style also affected the types of dances I had choreographed as a high school cheerleader, as well as the way I danced-just-to-dance, because Jazz was one of the many influences that bled into the pop dance cultures of the day — we’re talking about the 1990s here.

In case you don’t remember what the dance and music scene during that time looked and sounded like—or in case you are as nostalgically entertained by these jams and groovin’ moves as I am—here ya go:

Here is an example of some things Jazz Dance was up to in 1997:

This is totally the style of Jazz that I was taught:

Okay, you didn’t think we were gonna get out of here without pointing and laughing at teensy 20-year-old me in my first year taking Jazz, did you? Remember that choreo I said I was cast in? Here ya go. Let’s assess the real-time evidence of the dancer I was in the year I began belly dancing:

IT WASN’T ONLY ME

I’ll tell you what though, the Jazz that seeped into my belly dancing was less influenced by my one year of collegiate training in the Jazz style, and more through a secondary filter: the nightclub/cabaret styles of the belly dancers I had been exposed to in my formative years, most of whom were from the Western Hemisphere and Europe. Any of we baby belly dancers who cut our teeth on dreams of becoming the next Suhaila Salimpour² were likely to have this slant.

I certainly did, especially during drum solos and any other intricate, percussive musical phrasing.

One of Suhaila’s early instructional videos is why. (And I mean “video” literally. I had that sucker on VHS!) It’s the oooold one where she’s teaching in front of window blinds. Remember that one?

🤩🫠🤩

That video is one of the many reasons I teach dance the way I do, and it’s also one of the reasons why I belly danced the way I did in my restaurant years: because the Five-Star Queen herself had also studied Jazz Dance, among a host of other styles.³

When I originally published this post on my old blog, I could show you a clip of that video that someone had uploaded. Not anymore. Instead, now I can show you something even more valuable that explains—to you and me both—why I was so instinctually drawn to Suhaila.

Not only was she a legacy belly dancer who had additional training in the Western format and many other ethnic styles, but there are ways that my belly dance experience echoes aspects of hers.

For all my first years, I had to flounder and drown around, trying to remember and replicate what my first teacher had taught me. My only tools with which to do this were my nineteen years of watching dancers on a screen, monkey-see-monkey-doing it in the mirror, and the ways I had been taught how to dance: in the analytical, technique-based, muscular formats of my collegiate training.

To my shock, I would eventually learn that the Legend Herself had developed her teaching format in a similar way, for similar reasons: inaccessibility to the things she envisioned and dreamed of making reality. So she had to create them through trial and error, using the techniques she had grown up with.

Sheesh! Did you hear that? Even the notion that the storytelling and expressive aspects of dance are like…imagine your entire audience is hearing-impaired. How will you show them in this visual medium what you’re hearing in the music and how it makes you feel?

Ask any of my students. This is one of my primary theories of dance expression. No wonder I was so drawn to Suhaila, even when all I knew of her was from one old instructional video with zero production value and invaluable knowledge, and one of her earliest performance videos. (Remember: by the time I discovered her, I had only just gotten email. There was no YouTube or Amazon.)

This is one of the poor, slain VHS tapes I obsessed over until it gasped out its last:

Well, what do you think? Would you say that Suhaila Salimpour is not a “real” belly dancer? If so, you could definitely say that I wasn’t one, because I don’t have belly dance in my blood or my childhood upbringing to weave into my fusions.

*ALSO* A BELLY DANCER

At the time of my first big car wreck in 2000 when the smear campaign was launched, I could boast:

• an obsession with dance since childhood

• a handful of performances on the lawn or in my uncle’s living room with my cousin after she taught me some choreographies she had learned for competitions and dressed me up in her costumes

• six years of cheerleading

• a university degree

• not nearly enough instruction by the two belly dancers teaching in my hometown (not my choice)⁴

• one glorious hour-long class with the illustrious Cassandra while I was destitute in Minneapolis⁵

• six gawping years of copying any skilled dancer I could find around the campfires of the Society for Creative Anachronism⁶

• the same six years applying what I had learned in medieval heavy weapons armored combat to the shiny dance sword I’d been gifted (things I later learned most belly dancers didn’t do with their swords)

• a handful of blessed belly dance workshops and private lessons I had managed to sporadically scrimp and save up for⁷

• an ever-growing collection of killed VHS tapes

• eight years developing my entire movement and artistic arsenal into the performance style I brought to the Greek and Moroccan restaurants where I danced 2–4 nights every week

• six years of figuring out the hard way how to answer the question, “How did you DO that?!” to people who eventually wanted to pay me money for my replies

So whatcha think? Was I a belly dancer back then? Was there more Jazz in my dancing than any other style? Those answers are quite subjective, they depend on one’s perspective, and are colored by one’s directive.

I am simply retrospective.

I honestly don’t care about the answers much anymore. I am so far removed from that lifetime that I have to watch videos, read my journals, and rifle through my gobs of writing to remember a lot of it. The young woman in that December show died on the highway that night, and I have Phoenixed again multiple times in the quarter-century since. I’m in ashes once more as I write this, recovering from knee surgery, but I’ve been blowing on the embers of whatever will emerge in this next incarnation.

In the meanwhile, here’s who I was back then, at my most jazzy, funky & spunky. This video was shot a few months before my big car wreck:

UP NEXT: All those attempts to convince people not to study with me or hire me to perform? In the end, it had the opposite effect. This smear campaign and my resulting exile completely broke my dance shackles, setting me free to dance the way I really wanted to. Which gave me my international career.

Because if my detractors thought there was “more Jazz in me than anything” in 2000? Sheeeee-it. They hadn’t seen nothin’ yet. Not from me, and not from the Tribal Belly Dance scene.

But we can't talk about the Jazz, Swing and Tap Dance that influenced my style without naturally sliding into this touchy topic. BEAUTIFUL, SEXY, SILLY, SAVVY - My Quest to Unearth Missing Black Muses & Dance Founders

© 2020 Hartebeast

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You can find the entire trajectory of my dance mis/adventures in the DanceStory Section of this publication. For example:

How I became a belly dancer in the first place

1. The successes and failures of this smear campaign, as well as my car wreck recovery are completely different stories from today’s adventure. You’ll have to go over to the NSFW waters of my personal memoir publication if you want all that dirt.

If you’re curious what that entails, this is why I didn’t have it in me to start a slander suit or even deal with that smear campaign on top of everything else—because I was up to my eyelashes:

• already battling criminal and civil suits against the drunk driver

• but first I and all my people had to fight to get the DA’s office to acknowledge that I even had a vehicular assault case because the emergency room hadn’t tested me properly for either concussion or spinal injury. I could have sued them, too. Didn’t have it in me because I was too busy:

• trying to recover from said injuries (big ole faker that I am!) 🤣🤪🙃 while my car insurance company cut my medical care too early

• battling to get the other half of my lost wages for the first 6 months because I don’t get W-2s for dancing, and I don’t get 1099s from students

• learning to navigate Traumatic Brain Injury

• weathering abuse in my own home

• and being slut-shamed out of a decent settlement by my attorney because he said he could never put me in front of a jury for the…way I had danced just hours before my car wreck.

• Because apparently we sluts deserve to become disabled by drunk drivers…

• 🤨 Ahem. 🤨

You can dive into that aspect of the story HERE.

2. Suhaila Salimpour and her legendary mother, Jamila

3. Suhaila’s Dance Legacy

4. My first belly dance class

How I lost my first teacher

5. Cassandra & Jawaahir Dance Company

6. SCA - medieval reenactment

7. Maya Christina

Eva Cernik

Suzanna Del Vecchio

Sakti Rinek