In the Belly of the Best

A young Tamalyn Dallal studied with her for several years, as did Jihan Jamal, another well-known local teacher who essentially took over Aziza's classes when she retired. Although now she's out of the game ("What else could they teach me after all this time?" she asks), Aziza keeps tabs on the local belly dancers through Fatahi, a Tunisian drummer who lives in her home, and Jamal. She doesn't much like the trend of dancers these days fusing Middle Eastern dance with Latin, jazz, or other styles. "Aziza is very particular," Jamal notes. "There are no gray areas with her."

In her living room, Aziza tries to conjure the old magic. Tottering down the hall to a bedroom, she returns with a hip scarf, which she fastens low around herself, just under her ponderous belly. Standing with feet wide for balance, she begins to shift her weight from side to side. Moving slowly at first, her hips build speed to a rapid vibration, causing the miniature gold coins on the scarf to jingle. But the weight of the scarf combined with the hip work disturb the integrity of the elastic at the top of the tube dress, threatening to send the entire mass to the floor. Unperturbed, Aziza yanks her dress back up a few inches. "It's all in the shimmies," she reveals confidently. Her eyes intently appraise an awkward attempt to copy her movements. "Well, you gotta practice," she sighs with dissatisfaction.

While Dallal is the better known of her two star pupils, Jihan Jamal is Aziza's truest protégée. Jamal, a 52-year-old Cuban American, is considered by most other local dancers to be the purest practitioner of the classical Egyptian style, which features bare feet and elegant flowing movements. "It's amazing the way she dances," remarks Dallal. "Very passionate, very grounded, very subtle. I'm much more eclectic. It's funny that both of us studied under Aziza, and yet we are so different." For her part, Jamal is equally complimentary of Dallal's ability to turn out so many good dancers -- almost all of the best dancers working in Miami today were trained by Dallal (although most expanded their training with other teachers). Both dancers have won Ms. America of the Bellydance titles -- Jamal in 1987, Dallal in 1995 -- and two of Dallal's students won in 1996 and 2000.

In the late Seventies and early Eighties, Jamal, Dallal, a Miami Shores mother-daughter team by the name of Kahreen and Kira, and a few others were the backbone of a small but active core of dancers either performing or teaching around town. There was also a thriving Middle Eastern cabaret scene that kept everyone working steadily. Then restaurants stopped paying for quality, and belly dance as a workout fad was replaced with newer fads like jazzercise. Dancers moved, had families, or retired. Dallal spent several years dancing in South America and New York City. By the late Eighties, Kahreen and Kira were almost the only major belly dancers operating in Miami.

Dallal was disappointed with how the belly dance scene had dwindled when she came back to Miami in 1988. "It wasn't much," she recalls. "I was used to making my living as a belly dancer at that point but the opportunities in Miami weren't that great. The restaurants were paying badly, the belly gram services had mostly become stripper grams, and they were expecting longer shows for less money."

After a trip to Egypt in 1990, Dallal decided she needed to start a school that could be the focal point for building a better local belly-dance culture. The studio/school was founded in the bottom of a dive hotel on Lincoln Road, which, to save money, also became Dallal's apartment for two years. Her timing was spot on. The Mid Eastern Dance Exchange opened in the heart of South Beach just as a young, arty, and urbane crowd began to flow in, and just before the place got too hip and expensive to maintain its more interesting fringe characters.

The studio had windows at street level, so passersby could press their noses against the glass, watching troupes of women move to complex Oriental rhythms. "It really did put belly dancing on the map because the public could actually see it," Dallal remembers. After Hurricane Andrew and the beginning of SoBe revitalization, the hotel owner jacked Dallal's rent, so the studio moved a few blocks down the street to its current location at 350 Lincoln Rd. There the dance exchange, which had included many types of dance classes, concentrated almost exclusively on belly dancing, and became a nonprofit organization seeking arts grants and a degree of credibility from other local dance cultures.