A thing about me.

I often check my email very early in the morning or very late at night. Before caffeine, my short-term memory blows.

As a result? I often have technically 'read' many emails of which I have absolutely no recollection.

I am going to go through the last week or so's worth of emails sometime tomorrow and start replying, but this is my tired, addled brain asking that if you've emailed me recently and not gotten a response, please tell me to search my mail for your email. I am not ignoring you on purpose, I promise.

Merci.

On 'Steampunk Bellydance'

Tribal Fusion being the tricky genre that it is, some people have begun coining the term “steampunk belly dance”. While this seems innocent enough, using terms without properly defining what they mean can lead to a slippery slope of “everything” belly dance. We need to remember that belly dance is based on movement and not on aesthetic. It is belly dance, not belly fashion.

...

Steampunk isn’t a dance genre either, in belly dance or otherwise.

-- Jasmine June Crabinaw's Not So Steampunk Bellydance on Gilded Serpent

WORDY MC WORD TIMES A BILLION.

"It’s never a good feeling, having your meticulous, time-honored craft dismissed or eclipsed by a trend you have no immediate connection to. It’s difficult not to feel uneasy, watching your art form be oversimplified, lumped in, or lazily dismissed by an all-too-easy and reductive definition. It’s not fun, being shoved in a box that you have no desire to be in, even if that box is comfortable, or even inspiring, for plenty of others who’ve willingly placed themselves inside of it." [- a comment in response to the above article]

Not to be flip, but I imagine this sums up the feelings of a large cross-section of the bellydance "culture" who feel that lots of different things have been tossed into a giant pile and called bellydance, for no other reason than someone likes bellydance AND something else, and they think that gives them the inalienable right to jam them together and call it bellydance. These sentiments ring true to artists of any and all ilk--there are always those who are trying to maintain a set of recognizable criteria and standards, and there are those who feel to do so is a constraint of their creativity. The former feels they are being undermined in their efforts to uphold their ideals, and the latter feels they are "taking it to the next level."

I always argue that a dancer should be able to remove their costume and even the music (gasp), and those knowledgeable of the style being presented should be able to recognize the dance they are doing. I have yet to see a performance called "Steampunk bellydance" able to communicate that fusion through purely movement. Tempest and I disagree on gothic bellydance as well--I have not yet experienced something under that moniker that didn't look simply as either simply bellydance or generally modern/interpretive dance.
Think of it. Can you recognize tap without any of the trappings? How about ballet? Flamenco? Hip Hop? Irish Step Dance? Contact improv? Salsa? Jitterbug? Stomp?

And within these styles, experts can even discern sub-styles fairly easily. yet with bellydance, often we throw on a different piece of music and a different costume, and we think we can call it something else. We need to look deeper, as a community of artists, to understand what really differentiates one style from another, and whether it truly is a new style, or an existing style in a new frock.

Shay Moore
Seattle, WA

I LOVE YOU, SHAY.