Thread: Showing your Soles

I was watching a new Randa clip from Sept 2010 in Egypt. Several times, she shows the soles of her feet to the audience (1:25-8, 1:52). I thought that this was rude for cultural reasons. Is Randa just allowed to do what she wants because she's a star, or is it because her feet are spotless?

[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rivy0RqJxZo]YouTube - Randa Kamel on The Nile Maxim dining cruise - Cairo 17 Sept 2010[/ame]

This came up once in a class with a native teacher, and she wasn't particularly adamant about it. There are occasions when showing your feet are rude (e.g., if you are intentionally making an antagonistic gesture out of lifting your foot, like you're going to kick someone or take off your shoe and throw it), but in the course of normal dancing, she didn't seem to think it was a big deal. With any high-legged dancing, if the foot is way off the ground, the sole can be visible. In traditional Saidi dance, you can often see glimpses of sole.

Showing a full-on view of the soles of the feet sometimes involves standing positions that are ungraceful, if not somewhat obscene, which is reason alone to avoid it, but if the soles of your feet are dirty, putting them directly in the audience's sight is even more ugly and distracting. If you know you may be flashing the bottoms of your feet at the crowd, clean soles or shoes (unless you have something obviously stuck to the sole) are preferable to black feet.

i was taught the foot thing was turkish !

Originally Posted by zamora

i was taught the foot thing was turkish !

Well, I have heard that the soles of feet and the bottom of shoes are insulting in various degrees from Nepal to Turkey. Consider the fate of the Iraqi journalist who threw his shoe at President Bush, three years in jail?


A friend of mine who was a Peace Corps volunteer in Nepal said that she hit men over the head with her shoe when they harassed her too much and this would drive them away.

Sahra Kent said that even touching someone else's shoes was so repugnant that she had to hire a homeless man to pick up her Malaya Leff costume shoes for her at the end of the show, no one else would do it and she was even told that she could not touch them. She was having to replace them every night.

Marya

Yeah, apparently calling someone a shoe is an insult.

But I think it's not physically possible to prevent showing soles EVER, you just avoid pointing them directly at people.

Ditto Zum - there's a difference of intent. Like, if I'm dancing and I'm doing wrist circles, I might have my middle finger point up briefly. That doesn't mean that I'm giving the audience the middle finger.

If Randa was to sit down, glare at someone, and purposely place the soles of her feet on a chair so they had to see them, then that would be rude.

And this just gives me a reason to post one of my favorite Samia Gamal photos - LIFE: Samia Gamal - Hosted by Google

Originally Posted by phillyraqs

And this just gives me a reason to post one of my favorite Samia Gamal photos - LIFE: Samia Gamal - Hosted by Google

That's awesome!

That's a great photo!

Thanks ladies for the responses. I'll file the issue under "unresolved, but don't be a jerk about it."

PS: I don't recommend googling up things like "dirty feet belly dancing". Too many weird sites.

Originally Posted by phillyraqs

Ditto Zum - there's a difference of intent. Like, if I'm dancing and I'm doing wrist circles, I might have my middle finger point up briefly. That doesn't mean that I'm giving the audience the middle finger.

If Randa was to sit down, glare at someone, and purposely place the soles of her feet on a chair so they had to see them, then that would be rude.

And this just gives me a reason to post one of my favorite Samia Gamal photos - LIFE: Samia Gamal - Hosted by Google

Yeah, exactly!

Originally Posted by Margaret

PS: I don't recommend googling up things like "dirty feet belly dancing". Too many weird sites.

HA!! lol.

So it's not any "less offensive" if you're wearing shoes? Same symbology?

Originally Posted by aziyade

So it's not any "less offensive" if you're wearing shoes? Same symbology?

The symbolism is probably comparable. I'd expect that whatever comes in contact with the ground is the dirtiest part (your feet when you're barefoot and your shoes when you aren't), unless you are showing your clean, bare foot because you've taken off your shoe to hit someone with it, at which point, maybe you can claim double insult points or something. I was thinking that from a theatrical perspective, dirty soles on shoes are less distracting to look at than filth on flesh. You expect shoes to be dirty on the bottoms, but black feet make you wonder about hygiene and floors that need mopping, which take you out of the moment the performer is trying to create.

Well, I'd heard that too, but I took a workshop with two Reda troupe dancers about 3 years ago and the woman, Magda, taught a really lovely Oriental piece which at one point included a sort of grapevine step to left and then to right that ended on each side with lifting foot off floor twice to a count of four and bending knee each time gracefully twisting and pointing foot just enough to show sole of foot a little. So I guess in Egypt it's okay if part of a dance routine and stage is clean so foot is clean. Magda wore dance shoes the entire time teaching and during the evening show. Maybe the sole of foot thing is more Turkish????? I mean this was the Egyptian Reda Troupe so I doubt they would do anything culturally offensive, being sponsored for so long by Egyptian Government and they are famous for being "sanitized" in terms of their choreographies.

I performed this combination in a dance on a stage that was clean, if I had to do it in a restaurant on *dubious* carpet, I'd wear my sparkley heeled dance sandals.

I was thinking that from a theatrical perspective, dirty soles on shoes are less distracting to look at than filth on flesh. You expect shoes to be dirty on the bottoms, but black feet make you wonder about hygiene and floors that need mopping, which take you out of the moment the performer is trying to create.

I've never understood the "bare feet are unclean" notion people have in the U.S....my feet get washed daily. My shoes? Never. Plus I'm a lot more discriminating where I put my bare feet than my shoes... (We won't talk about hands...heaven knows what I've been touching out in public and I'm sure we've all heard those studies about how filthy keyboards, phones, door handles, money, etc. are...I just shook your hand before lunch and you didn't bat an eyelash, yet you're worried about my feet, which won't get anywhere near you and won't be anywhere but the ground...)

LOL, reminds me of college...I love running around barefoot, and once my ex and I had to run into the local pizza shop for a minute. They said I had to put on my shoes to go in.

Funny part was that just before we went in, I'd been looking dubiously at their (carpeted) floors and all the crap on them and wondering if I actually WANTED to put my bare feet on them...when the guy told me I had to put my shoes on, I wanted to look around at the floors and say, "you're right, I might get my feet dirty." Yet most people would've freaked out as if my feet were biohazards. It's a food place, people. Vacuum your floors!

I think we take these taboos and blow them up way out of proportion, for fear of offending someone.
I've asked some Arabs who confirmed that it's offensive to show the sole of your foot, and others who didn't even know about it.

Originally Posted by Kat144

I've never understood the "bare feet are unclean" notion people have in the U.S....my feet get washed daily. My shoes? Never. Plus I'm a lot more discriminating where I put my bare feet than my shoes... (We won't talk about hands...heaven knows what I've been touching out in public and I'm sure we've all heard those studies about how filthy keyboards, phones, door handles, money, etc. are...I just shook your hand before lunch and you didn't bat an eyelash, yet you're worried about my feet, which won't get anywhere near you and won't be anywhere but the ground...)

Don't get me wrong. I am equally grossed out by telephones that appear to have wax accumulated in the earpiece, dirty railings and doorknobs, computer keyboards that have little halos of filth around the edges of the keys, carpeting with mysterious stains and mummified gum mashed into it, etc.

Still, if you are going to dance on stage in your bare feet, I personally would rather see feet that are skin-colored than floor-colored, especially if you are dancing around in an expensive costume. It's one thing if you are playing a street urchin in "Oliver!"--grungy is part of that character, and looking immaculately scrubbed would be just as wrong there. This isn't about how sanitary your feet are or aren't. It's about creating an aesthetic and elegant, sequined dance gowns and visibly soiled body parts just don't go together for me.

Oh, Tourbeau, I'm all about clean feet. For sure. I'm talking about people who assume feet are filthy simply because they're bare feet, even though they haven't gone anywhere shoes would not have gone and in fact get washed, unlike shoes. I could walk into a place two steps after scrubbing my feet with antibacterial soap, and someone would say, "OMG, that's so unsanitary." Then someone else could walk in wearing absolutely grimy shoes and that'd be okay!

(I won't talk about some people I've known who wear light-colored flip-flops into the ground, and the footbeds are all grimy. Ew! I have a pair of light-colored flip-flops I almost never wear because I'm afraid they'll end up like that!)

Originally Posted by Kat144

I could walk into a place two steps after scrubbing my feet with antibacterial soap, and someone would say, "OMG, that's so unsanitary." Then someone else could walk in wearing absolutely grimy shoes and that'd be okay!

I don't think anyone is afraid that you'll get the floor dirty with your bare feet. It's not unsanitary for the floor. It's unsanitary for your feet!
You could get gross stuff all over your feet, or even cut yourself in broken glass or other sharp objects that can be lying around the floor.

Don't get me wrong, I love walking and dancing barefoot. But sometimes, it's just too risky. Please, never dance (or even walk, for that matter) barefoot in a restaurant. I've given this advice to every single one of my friends who started dancing in restaurants, and all of the ones who ignored it (because they prefer dancing barefoot) ended up stepping in broken glass and cutting their feet.

Hrm. Most of the people I hear railing against bare feet do so because they think it's unclean...it's like they think germs are going to jump off your feet up from the floor and onto their food or whatever. It's not even in food places they think this, thougn. There are a few businesses themselves that might be worried about lawsuits, but that's not the general public.

(FWIW, back in college the hardware store in town never minded. I didn't either! Their floors were always spotless and even though I watched where I was walking, I never once saw a stray nail or anything on the floor to be worried about)

Okay, I'm done hijacking!