In the Belly of the Best

Ask a local belly dancer who the best dancers in town are and there's a certain amount of sniffing, sighing, and eye rolling that goes on in the answer, as each person weighs a complex formula of talent, beauty, style, and personal loyalty or animosity. But mostly the same names come up, if ranked differently on each dancer's list. Dallal, Jihan Jamal, a dancer and percussionist named Myriam Eli, and Kira from Miami Shores are all generally considered excellent teachers and good performers. The top performers of the next generation are mostly Dallal's students -- Bozenka, Hanan, Amar Gamal (who left town to live in New York and tour with this year's Lollapalooza), Virginia, Samay, and Aireen. "We all come from Dallal," says 27-year-old Bozenka, whom many consider the most beautiful dancer in town in every sense. "She is very selfless. She'll teach you everything she knows and encourages you to seek out other teachers. She's got the recipe for giving you a good base."

From that recipe, each student makes something quite different. "Bozenka's style is soft and sweet," assesses Jamal. "Virginia is more dynamic, and Hanan is a bit of both." Virginia Mendez has a strong stage presence, influenced no doubt by her years as the singer in a local altrock band called Agony in the Garden. Hanan is an accomplished dancer, but she often uses the art for social commentary, usually with a feminist bent (examples from her shows include drag belly dancing and female circumcision). "It's not a crime to just want it to be pretty, but that's a limited view of the human experience," Hanan argues. "I'm using belly dancing as a tool for change."

Every dancer has an opinion about who has the best technique, or puts on the best shows. "Everybody's style and approach is different," says Dallal. "Like Kahreen and Kira call their style Las Vegas style, which is the last thing I would ever want to be. It's very glitzy and production-oriented." Understandably, the mother-daughter team is equally sniffy about overly long Middle Eastern-style shows, which they feel are great for certain crowds but unpalatable for the general American audience. "We try to do something people can identify with," Kahreen explains. "We try to bring it to the people as entertaining first."

Inevitably, explains Dallal, "there's ego, and there's sisterhood, and sometimes sibling rivalry. It's very deeply psychological."

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Sometimes this rivalry has produced major catfights, perpetuated through the usual devices of rumor-mongering, price wars, and boycotts of other dancers' performances. "It's an art of selling themselves," laughs Fatahi, the Tunisian drummer and singer who frequently performs with local belly dancers. "'I'm better than the next one,' or 'I'm cheaper than that one,' is usually what you hear."

The mercantile side of the dance can be ugly. "The requirements of youth and beauty are very demanding of a person performing," Fatahi articulates. "They pay the price, the poor things. You'd be surprised what people ask [when booking dancers]. 'Is she young? Is she beautiful?' not 'Can she dance?'"

The competitive side of the business also touched Dallal's dance company as it morphed along with a changing South Beach scene. Toward the mid-Nineties, the success of her troupe and the lure of SoBe's skin-deep club culture resulted in some of her dancers "getting very full of themselves and very vain and totally out of touch with learning about the culture," Dallal remembers. "Around 2000 there was a phase where every little club in town wanted to have belly dancers, but dancing to house music on top of speakers. So a lot of my dancer students would get into that.

"It was that period where it was getting a little twisted," she continues. "People were getting so superficial, the customers would be like, 'I want this many girls with this color hair. Just make sure they have flat stomachs and they're thin.' I'm just like, wait a minute. What about the dancing? Hello! I see people fall prey to this image. At one time, most of my dance troupe were taking down time to recover from plastic surgery. It was like, this is not right. These girls are young and they're getting this tucked, added in, or zipped away. I thought, this is not what the dancing is about. I don't like to sell that."

The reality of belly dancing, she continues, "is really inner beauty and your smoothness, your calmness, and when you're comfortable in your own skin. That makes a good dancer. Someone can be beautiful but dance awkwardly, and they're not gorgeous."