I’ve spent my adult life writing technical, logical, persuasive documents. I’ve written cover letters, sales proposals, development plans, biographies, sales copy and training manuals. It’s been five years since I wrote my last poem.

I’m surprised to find myself here, frankly. I have always loved to write, and I loved it for the sake of playing. I remember I spent my teenage years rolling words around in my head, trying out their sound, pairing them, tossing phrases back and forth. I remember writing in a kind of free-form ecstasy where whatever word that came to me was accepted for being the perfect next word. I’ve dreamed of making a living at writing fiction, but lately it seems like all I can do with my writing is explain or argue.

What I really want to do is move. I want to move people and I want, for myself, to be moved.

I have the same predicament in dance. And I suspect that’s very common. What I want when I dance is to be transported out of myself. There is an ecstasy of having lost yourself in the moment that I want desperately. Having taken up Middle Eastern Dance only in my adulthood, I’m not sure I’ve ever quite had that moment. By the time I started dancing, I had already learned to overthink things.

But I’ve come close, when I’m dancing alone at home. And I crave it quite desperately. And then, beyond being transported, I want to have the power to transport others with my dance.

There now, that’s surely not asking too much is it? I want to write so I and my readers can be transported. I want to dance so I and my audience will lose ourselves.

In fact, while it is possible to craft your performance intellectually, I suspect that when it comes time to actually perform it, if you cannot lose yourself in it, neither will anyone else. If you are coldly assessing your technique, so will your audience be.

In ‘The Six Questions’, Daniel Nagrin wrote in depth about the high you can get from dance, the losing all sense of time. More to the point though, he wrote, ‘what we do onstage, we did as children: we “make believe” that what is not so is so. If this embarrasses, the performer is in deep trouble.’ I think this is critical information. In the making of ourselves as dancers, we put aside our self-absorption in order to see ourselves critically, from the outside, to correct and refine postures and techniques. But when it comes time to put it together and dance, you have to put aside the adult mind. Finding your voice as a dancer is the simple (though monumental) task of peeling away the critical exercises and returning to your child’s mind. It depends on your ability to make-believe unselfconsciously and with your whole self.

For myself, I have only just recently come back to writing with abandon and dancing with my whole self and the idea of approaching your raw art uncritically. I’m certainly not “there” yet, wherever there may be. But I feel like I’ve come home in both my writing and my dancing. For years now, I’ve kept myself away from the parts of these activities that drew me to them in the first place, thinking that once I reach some pinnacle of technique, then I will be good enough to stop being always critical and always logical. What a waste, right?

I think it would be better to keep the abandon and never develop the technique, than to develop the technique at the cost of your love for the art. Though coming back to the abandon is a process, and one I have really only just begun, I hope, over the next few weeks, to write some posts explaining the exercises I have been playing with that have allowed me to let go in my dancing.

The writing, I’m still working on. I have begun a novel which I have been logically planning for years, but have never considered myself ready to actually write. Now I’m writing it, and have thrown out most of my logical planning. I’m writing it, instead, on emotion and finding the writing much more compelling. We’ll see how that goes.

As a Belly Dancer, and a Feminist, I frequently find myself in a situation where I want to speak my feminist mind on the topic of Middle Eastern Dance and our attitudes about it. And then I tend to second guess myself and keep quiet because they feel like two separate worlds. If I engage in Middle Eastern Dance, then I do so in part as a cultural homage, because I want to convey the history and the culture behind the dance. So then I feel that I have to be able to quantify the dance’s original purposes according to its history before I can offer any criticisms.

I suppose the issue is that as a westerner performing Middle Eastern Dance, I want to do so respectfully and I’m aware that my perspective is that of an outsider. For that reason I want to be true to its roots and not paint over or taint parts of it with my western perceptions. So I tend to talk myself out of questioning anything about the performers’ culture that has built itself around Middle Eastern Dance.

I think the time has come to stop doing that. We can be dancers as well as feminists. When we assert that Middle Eastern Dance is not about tease or titillation, we’re taking a feminist stand. But then someone winks and says, “but it IS sexy, right?” it feels confrontational to continue the argument. It’s also hard to argue with people who may be a part of your clientele. If an audience member jokingly inquires as to how many camels it would cost for him to take you home, it’s easier to smile and try to take it for a compliment than to tell him he’s being not only offensive in the context of the western culture, but offensive and inaccurate in the context of the near east cultures.

There is no denying that Belly Dance is a very positive thing for women in general. From its historical and contemporary benefits in childbirth, to its emphasis on accepting and dancing with the body you have. The problems come when we don’t actively deny the titillation attitudes and the mysogynist cultural jokes.

I don’t intend to ignore these issues anymore. The contention that women are human beings with the right to perform physical arts without being harassed or objectified is an argument that can and should be pursued in every venue, even one where you feel like a cultural observer. And it has to be possible to do so with an attitude of historical and cultural respect, because it is the parts of a culture that don’t oppress women that deserve our respect. And asserting one’s right to perform without being treated like an object for male titillation hardly smacks of cultural insensitivity. Rather, it’s the other way around.