Submit your answer to the Contest Forum! Here's the question for March!

[Rosey]

Welcome to our March contest!

1. This forum is for your answers to our monthly question.
2. The admins pick the best 4 or 5 answers and create a poll for voting
3. Members then vote in our Poll Forum for the best answer.
4. Winner is declared when month is over, and gets free advertising on BHUZ.

March's question is:

Has belly dance become too commercialized?
Or is it not commercialized enough?
Tell us why.

Submit your answer with a new post in this thread. Voting on the answers will start on March 22nd.

This month's prize is a free 3 month Featured Event listing – a $105 value!

[shems]

March's question is:

Has belly dance become too commercialized?
Or is it not commercialized enough?

Belly dance has become too ubiquitous in general, so it isn't as rare and novel as it used to be. General market over saturation is a little different than over commercialization though. Belly dance has reached no where near the level of commercialization as many other activities, like sports or other dance forms. Depending on how the marketing of our dance form develops it can have the positive effect of setting a higher standard of professionalism by providing the opportunity for more dancers to make a full time living at Oriental Dance again, and/or the negative effect of transforming our art form into a shadow of itself to please the general public.

What we have now is not so much an over commercialization of our art form as a predominant largely negative or trivial stereotype that could potentially be reformed with more extensive, broad and positive marketing about our art form.

In short belly dance is currently over commercialized towards a reinforcement of negative stereotypes and market saturation of amateur level dancers taking on professional roles - not commercialized enough with more positive stories and with a high enough standard of performance excellence to bring our art form to a level of positive international acclaim that supports lucrative full time dance careers in the public eye.

[Tourbeau]

Ironically, I feel the dance is both too commercialized and not commercialized enough at the same time. Within our community, a combination of factors (the Bellydance Superstars project, advances in technology that have made it possible for small-time producers to make and distribute videos conveniently, etc.) have contributed to a situation where our market is dominated by glossy, often shallow, commercial products. In some ways, this has been good. Potential students in off-the-beaten-track places now have access to a world of resources that were either nonexistent or prohibitively expensive two decades ago. Unfortunately, this has also created a generation of students who aspire to a style-over-substance aesthetic, and working dancers chasing after the latest gimmicks, hoping to carve a niche for themselves as the purveyors of the "next big thing." Partially, this is not our fault. As human nature, it's easier to be superficial than sincere, and the collapse of the ethnic club scene has meant that many students will never perform anything but fixed choreographies to prerecorded music. It's no wonder the bright, candy-coated shell is winning over the raw, imperfect, older, mentor-based, improv style. Still, how many students buy into this system, simply because it's cheaper and easier than working for richer, more meaningful dance experiences?

Outside of our little bubble, we face the challenge of establishing ourselves as legitimate artists. When all the public knows of us is that we are a novelty someone purchases to embellish a party, or a cheap, sexy laugh in a television show, how can we claim we are anything but a glitzy, for-hire facade? We're not taken seriously as a commercial commodity in the fine arts. We're not understood enough that people would care to learn about us. We are ballet without the respect and Riverdance without the public recognition. Even the ethnic communities that should defend us sometimes want nothing to do with us--dancing is their pride and their disgrace. We are a cheap toy to the larger world, which is the worst sort of "commercial" endeavor.

Each of us has a responsibility to fight for the best: the best teachers we can afford, quality training materials, gigs that don't make us feel disrespected. We can't make this dance into the honorably performed, reasonably compensated art it deserves to be if only a few people care about not settling for less.

[zamora]

become too commercialized ?....yes ! and way to far away from it's roots in some cases.why does everything have to be for the masses ?....there are some things on this earth that need to be kept historically and culturally correct....left to those who get it and love it in it's true form..this is one of them..IMO.

[norma]

Part 1
Is belly dance to commericialized or not commercialized enough? The answer is yes and no.

When I began dancing in 1980 it was at the tail end of the belly dancing craze of the 1960's and 1970's. I'm sure back then they probably had the same discussions we are having now! The generation gap is one thing that never changes. In those days, teachers were retired belly dancers, so they brought to the classroom a wealth of knowledge and experience. Because the best teachers were retired working professionals, teachers were hard to find. If you were lucky enough to live in an area with a large ethnic community your chances of finding a qualified teacher was much higher. Until the late 1990's there were many ethnic clubs putting on live shows. Dancers had the experience of dancing to live music and performing before a live every changing ethnic audience from Americans, Greeks, Lebanese, Armenian, Turkish, etc.

We were all "belly dancers". We didn't try to compartmentalize styles as you see too often today. For the most part, belly dancers were really an underground community. In a large city of over 1 million people, there were less than 10 who could lay claim to being a professional belly dancer. Back in those days as well there was no internet. So if you wanted to be a dancer, you really had to work hard at it. You had to locate a teacher, drive miles to take lessons, you learned from the musicians, the singers, the patrons. You made your own costumes from scratch.

In the early 21st century. All that changed. The clubs started to die out, the internet sprung into being and all of a sudden there was a new resurgence and interest in belly dance but what a difference! Now you could go on line and buy costumes. You could download a single song and not have to buy an entire CD. You could change a song by editing out parts of the music you didn't like. Belly dance as an art for became more accessible to the general masses.

Enterprising people saw that they could capitilize on this new interest in belly dance but how to do so and appeal to the most people so they could make the most money? In my opinion, they attempted to do this by taking the "foreign" out of it.

However, in order to appeal to more and more people who maybe weren't interested in ME music and ME culture, the dance had to become more and more Westernized. Steps had to be named. Technique and athletic ability became more important then using the body to feel and express the music. Little by little, in the attempt to commercialize belly dancing, the dance itself started to lose some of the characteristics that made it a beautiful solo improvisational form of dance in the first place. The emphasis now is on short choreographed stage shows in a theatre setting and not the long live shows in a more intimate setting where a dancer could interact with the musicians and the audience. A fact that us old times lament.

[norma]

Part 2
Even the music became more westernized as the ME countries struggled with their own political and religious issues and tried to sanitize belly dance. It is rare now to see a new composition for belly dance that contains the quartertones that make ME so rich and complex. Even the traditional instruments have been replaced because the native instruments are foreign sounding and annoying to the Western ear.

Costumes as well have become sanitized. It's rare to find dancers who know how to make their own costumes anymore. With a click of a button you can pick out a "cookie cutter costume" and have a costume sent to your door within days instead of waiting months to complete a costume you did yourself. Dancers hung on to their costumes because they invested a lot of time, money and work to create them.

However, despite the fact that belly dance has become so accessible, and you can find teachers in every major city, and there is much music and knowledge and everything you could want and need so easily available to anyone who wants to learn, belly dance still has not become mainstream the way other dance forms have. At most public belly dance events the majority of the audience still consists of other dancers and their family and friends. It still is widely misunderstood by the GP (partly our own fault because most GP have never seen a professional dancer and their only experience may be a student hafla or a festival).

I think for belly dance to truly become commercialized it would have to lose almost everything that makes it special, interesting and unique. Which is kind of a catch 22 because if it loses it's specialness and uniqueness, it be can be mass produced, but would the masses still be interested?

[mayaraschad]

I do believe that bellydancing has become a bit too commercialized in some areas particularly. I love the haflas and recitals, but they are mainly for dancers to attend, generally.
When it is done commercially,eg: restaurant, public shows etc.I find that the performers are often technically good, but the spirit is lacking. They are doing the STEPS, but not performing the DANCE.
We have tried for so very long to educate the general public to see our art form as a cultural event, not just an exhibition of technique, which I feel it is becoming.
Teachers of our dance,should make sure that they are passing on the feeling and spirit of the dance, not just doing choreographies.
A dancer with feeling or emotions being expressed, is so much more satifying to watch, than just another person in a costume, 'performing' even if the technique may be less than 'correct'.

Welcome to our March contest!

1. This forum is for your answers to our monthly question.
2. The admins pick the best 4 or 5 answers and create a poll for voting
3. Members then vote in our Poll Forum for the best answer.
4. Winner is declared when month is over, and gets free advertising on BHUZ.

March's question is:

Has belly dance become too commercialized?
Or is it not commercialized enough?
Tell us why.

Submit your answer with a new post in this thread. Voting on the answers will start on March 22nd.

This month's prize is a free 3 month Featured Event listing – a $105 value!

[dunyah]

I wonder how the flood of commercial instructional DVDs is impacting enrollment in ongoing local belly dance classes. There have been threads on Bhuz about the lower class size phenomenon and I am experiencing it myself. Yes, it's good to have these resources to round out your dance education but it is a big mistake to learn only from them.

I also wonder about the rise in popularity of tribal fusion. The references in the dancing to popular culture and the use of Western popular music seem very commercial to me. I notice that tribal fusion dancers in our area are getting gigs in lots of non-traditional venues where traditional belly dancing would not be as appropriate or as popular. So I think that tribal fusion style belly dancing may actually be more commercially viable than traditional belly dancing. I have had students who take tribal fusion classes and they tell me they like it for the fun factor and because they don't have to memorize choreography. So the classes may also be more commercially viable than traditional belly dance classes.

Belly Dance Super Stars have popularized fusion music a lot, too. While I loved their latest Bollywood show and I think their music has improved over the years, almost none of it is "traditional." But it has had a certain commercial appeal.

Overall, I think the trend toward fusion styles is a trend toward more commercialization.