Q: Elisabeth, how did your belly dancing troupe decide to donate its proceeds to NaNoWriMo? What do belly dancing and novel writing have in common?
A: Originally, Bastet, our belly dance troupe, consisted of two writing majors and a 3D animation major from Pratt Institute (Elisabeth, Olga, and Kitty, respectively), an art school in Brooklyn. We're obsessed with telling stories, either on the page or on the screen, and when our troupe expanded to include Michelle and Lasha, we continued the tradition of story-telling through dance. For November, we chose one of our favorite groups, NaNoWriMo, to support. (Two of us have failed NaNoWriMo on a spectacular level at least five times total.)
We also have been raising money for charitable causes for almost a year as part of a unique program we founded called Belly Dance for Change. We have even danced in subway stations to promote LGBT, women's anti-violence, anti-poverty, and childhood education causes. We've been nearly arrested in several occasions, although we don't do anything against the rules. But only in New York will more people watch us dance when cops are standing by.
Just like writing a novel, a belly dance routine must choose a tone and a narrative. Unlike a book, we are taught to interact with the viewer, to improvise on the fly and to always offer a happy ending. Love, heartbreak, mischievousness, and longing can all be expressed through belly dance. One dance theory suggests that the same moves found in belly dance can be found in everything from flamenco to Polynesian dance to African folkloric dance precisely because it is so old and so widespread. Naturally, the terms for the same moves are different, but the physical dance vocabulary remains the same--women have been telling their stories through hips, hands, shoulders, and eyes before there were ever novels.
Bastet takes inspiration from the dances of the Middle East, Africa, and India in order to create unique choreography and to convey stories through dance. The dancers, Michelle, Olga, Kitty, Lis, and Lasha, come from a variety of belly dance traditions including folkloric, tribal fusion, and cabaret and draw from other movement forms such as yoga, martial arts, hip hop and bollywood.
