Personal Profile of a Belly Dancer
Professor’s comment: The personal profile is a standard assignment, but students often struggle with it since it requires that they not only interview someone who is generally a stranger to them but also become an instant expert on their subject’s particular talent or expertise. In writing the piece, the student resisted the impulse to talk about her own experience and focused squarely on Shakar. In doing so she presents a vivid portrait of her subject and demystifies belly dancing.
In the picture, Belinda Shakar wears a satin bra with sleeves and a split skirt that reveals the entire length of her leg as she lunges on the ground. Her eyes are swept in dark makeup, and on her lips sits a seductive smile. The Belinda holding the picture is decidedly non-exotic, wearing glasses, a sweatshirt, and two layers of workout pants. She scowls when a young man accidentally walks in to the just-ending belly dance class. “I don’t like to have men in here at all,” she says. This, from a woman who spends her evenings shaking her hips at restaurant patrons.
Although she doesn’t like men ogling her classes, Belinda Shakar does not shy away from the sensual aspects of her dance. In fact, that’s what attracted her to belly dancing as a teenager. “I really liked the sensuality of the dance and even the blatant sexuality,” she says. She had been taking traditional dance classes in Los Angeles in hopes of becoming a performer but thought belly dance seemed more interesting than the styles she was learning. She finally switched to belly dance after injuring herself in a ballet class. The accident convinced her that ballet is unnatural: “It distorts the body and torments it. That is still my feeling o...
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...lly dancers have to love the dance, because for all that work, dancers get little money—workshops with master dancers usually cost around seventy-five dollars, costumes average five hundred dollars each, and dancers are usually paid only fifty dollars for two and a half hours of work. But Belinda Shakar cannot imagine her life without dance: “I’ve gone through so many careers, but I’ve always stuck with belly dance. I’ve just been doing it for so long.” From dancing, she has found freedom in being in touch with her body and the healing powers of movement. She is now working as a massage therapist, helping others free up their bodies as well. For her, dance is about enjoying her body and expressing her sensuality, not entertaining others or making money. So she is not at all concerned about making it to the top. Besides, she says, “in belly dancing, there is no top.”
The concept that belly dance is a constantly evolving dance might surprise most people, as the static Orientalist image of the belly dancer is the one that pervades American popular culture. I and other scholars attempt to remove belly dance from the ridged framework of Orientalism and the harem fantasy. By the following how belly dance arrived in America, and how images of belly dancers and harems became part of the visual culture of the West I have attempted to demonstrate that there are aspects of power and a different reading of images of belly dance is possible. Through continued scholarly inquiry and research I look forward to the emergence of a new image of belly dance, one that represents the power and beauty of this dance, an image that is respectful of the many cultures that it represents.
... social dance. Many people in today’s society enjoy social; dancing. Chapter eleven dance concert, properly planning and establishing a dance concert is of the utmost importance. The partnership with the lighting designer usually takes priority over all other factors. One of the most important issues concerning customers has to do with mobility. The dancer must be able to move comfortably in the costume. The task of producing a dance concert is an overwhelming and tiring one. Chapter twelve dance in education and career in dance, many dance educators present the argument that teaching and learning dance as an art form is obviously absent from the American student education. There has always been and always will be people who have a love, desire, and passion to instruct and learn the art of dance, will ensure an important place for dance in higher education.
I considered myself a performer, and after years training as a classical ballerina I expanded into stunting and tumbling. While on tour, I developed friendships and bonds with dancers strengthened by a mutual love for dance, a commonality over the pain our bodies endured daily, and conversations on bruised and broken toes.
“The nation 's first drug court was established in Florida in 1989, and there are now more than 2,500 operating nationwide” (Rankinf and Teegardin). From that moment in 1989, America’s judicial system decided to re-evaluate how the courts had been approaching drug addiction and crime. Instead
To begin with, Martha’s desperate effort was one of her strong strengths. When Martha began dance, many people murmured that Martha would fail because she was “quite a few years above the average age of all the other girls in the school” (28), “dumpy, [and] unprepossessing” (28). However, she astonished her dance teachers and others “with her determination to learn and her quick mastery of difficult exercises, gestures, and steps” (30). Martha usually spent her time on the studio alone all day and night, seeking for unique, exotic, and alluring movements of her own. Ted Shawn, Mar...
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Li’s passion for ballet shows on and off stage through his arabesques, flexibility, fouettés, grande jeté and pirouettes that were nothing less than perfection. I understood that becoming a dancer requires commitment, passion and having a great memory as there’s many moves, routines and ballet terms that you need to learn. When I was performing on stage, I felt free and that I could own the stage as it felt like it was my second home. I also felt complete within myself just as Li felt. To perform on stage, you need to be light and graceful along with connecting to the music using precise steps, poses and formal gestures. The film used dance, music, scenery, and costumes to portray a story characterised by Li’s dance. Classical ballet dancers require the utmost grace and I’ve found that you also need a tremendous level of concentration and memory. This portrays when his choreographer Ben Stevenson asked Li Cunxin to replace the main male role due to an injury on the day of the performance to memorise new dances and perform them in front of an enormous crowd. Many of my performances have been in a group where we all need to be in sync and work together. This film highlighted that in order to become a professional ballet dancer, you have to prepare to work extremely hard no matter how gruelling the schedule is in order to
The typical idea of a dancer is that they are tall, slender, full of energy, and lucky because they dance with all of the “stars”. Much of this is true, however, what many people do not think of are the many hardships that a dancer goes through in order to achieve their high status in the dance world. It takes much hard work and determination along with good direction to become a dancer. However, nothing good comes without a price. Dancers often times have many pressures put on them which can lead to physical and emotional damages. These damages occur through the pressures from the media, parents, teammates, and the stereotype that society has placed on dancers.
Since former President Nixon’s declaration on the War on Drugs, imprisonments have been on a continuous rise. Citizens caught with illegal substances have been sentenced to harsh punishments in the form of lengthy detentions. What appears to be a great movement to halt the use of drugs has been counterproductive. “Between 1980 and 1997, the population of drug offender inmates alone increase by 1000%” according to David N Khey, a Professor of Criminal Justice at the University of Louisiana and co-author of The Encyclopedia of Crime and Punishment. In Professor Khey’s article “Privatization of Prison”, he correlates the rise of incarcerations to businesses and governments who take advantage of the ever growing prison population (Khey, “Privatization of
“Just as musicians have their instruments, dancers have their bodies” (Price and Pettijohn 991). The body is the only tool in which a dancer has to create art and express themselves. For this reason, there is a constant focus on the body. This constant focus, and constant pressure, can cause the dancers to develop concerns and a negative body image. The term body image can be defined as “the way in which people see themselves in the mirror everyday: the values, judgments, and ideas that they attach to their appearance” (Kelso 1). From childhood people perceive themselves in a certain way. They learn of how to feel about their ...
Drug violators are a major cause of extreme overcrowding in US prisons. In 1992, 59,000 inmates were added to make a record setting 833,600 inmates nationwide (Rosenthal 1996). A high percentage of these prisoners were serving time because of drug related incid...
Miami Dade College’s very own dance majors, who were challenged by the artistry of guest choreographers as well as themselves, performed The Art of Dance. Watching this performance truthfully made me question if the dancers in this program were being trained properly to be professional dancers
Research shows that the U.S. hosts the highest incarceration rate among all nations in the world with 40 percent of the arrested inmates having been convicted for non-violent drug crimes. The federal government has spent billions for drug control while only a pi...
Criminal justice is composed of many lateral departments that help us as a society to better understand the process that is started when criminal activity is suspected. We will examine how individuals learn how to commit crime and what motivates them to do so. This paper will discuss the steps that are taken once a crime is determine and how the Criminal Justice System is put into place to help solve and come to some type of resolution for the crime. This paper will further discuss the types of deterrence that are placed into society minds to help curve criminal behavior and activity. After reading this paper the reader should have a better understanding on how the Criminal Justice System works and why it is needed help promote a safe environment for our society.
To the United Nations, nearly a quarter of children under the age of five are expected to remain underweight in two thousand and fifteen. The World Health Organization has reported hunger and related malnutrition as the greatest single threat to the world's public health. Improving nutrition is widely regarded as the most effective form of aid. Nutrition-specific interventions, which address the immediate causes of under nutrition, have been proven to deliver among the best value for money of all development interventions. In Africa, rates have been increasing for malnourished people (Hanson 204-5). For hundreds of millions of people, starvation is a daily threat. In the poor nations of Africa, Asia, Latin America, billions of hungry people face starvation. It begins with an ache in your stomach that eventually weakens your heart and stops beating. Today about five billion of the world’s five point nine billion live in poor nations. (“Hunger and Malnutrition” web).