Ethno Identity Dance for Sex, Fun and Profit

Staging Popular Dances Around the World

Anthony Shay

• Editorial: Palgrave Macmillan
• Año: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781137593184
• Categoría: Mezzi di comunicazione e arti performative
• Categoría: Danza

People all over the world dance traditional and popular dances that havebeen staged for purposes of representing specific national and ethnic groups.Anthony Shay suggests these staged dance productions be called "ethno identitydances", especially to replace the term "folk dance, " which Shay suggestsshould refer to the traditional dances found in village settings as an organicpart of village and tribal life. Shay investigates the many motives that impelpeople to dance in these staged productions: dancing for sex or dancing sexydances, dancing for fun and recreation, dancing for profit - such as dancingfor tourists - dancing for the nation or to demonstrate ethnic pride. In thisstudy Shay also examines belly dance, Zorba Dancing in Greek nightclubs andrestaurants, Tango, Hula, Irish step dancing, and Ukrainian dancing.

Part I
Ethno-Identity Dance for Sex

Abstract

In this section, Shay address several ethno-identity dance genres, the basic primary motive that he identifies for dancing and viewing these dances is that they are sexual, sensual, erotic, have sexual allure or in some way point to ways in which the performers display aspects of sex and gender roles in a manner that is sexually attractive or arousing to viewers. The author also poses the notion that race and ethnicity also contribute to the shaping of what constitutes sexy and sexiness, demonstrating this with the display of sexy dances encountered in the tourist trade and the many world fairs that drew millions to view them. Viewers sought out sexy dancers in tourist venues like Egypt and in photographs and postcards as early as the nineteenth century.

In this section, I address several ethno-identity dance genres, taking the approach that the basic primary motive for performing and viewing these dances is that they are sexual, sensual, erotic, have sexual allure, or that the performers display aspects of sex and gender roles in a manner that is sexually attractive or arousing to viewers. Gerhard Steingress observes that the early performers and denizens of the dives in which the beginnings of flamenco, tango and, rebetika ¹ dancing and music (which in this study I call “Zorba dancing” as a newer iteration of the rebetika dances, hasapiko and zeibekiko), “were soon converted into models of extravagant behavior, represented above all by bohemian artists and imitated by members of [urban] lower and middle classes. In the course of the stratification of the bourgeois society, these excluded ‘others’ became ‘objects of desire’” (1998, 164). They became objects of desire because, “the sensual attraction of the male and female body was cultivated and particularly pronounced” (ibid., 165). This was especially the case for dances that were developed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This period was noted for social and sexual repression, and these dances represented sexual and social freedom to many who made an adventure out of observing and performing them.

Other motives, such as profit and fun, may also be present, but the sexual motive appears to be the principal one for both viewers and participants. All of these motives will be displayed during an evening in a restaurant or nightclub that features belly dancing or tango. However, it is the sexual motive that draws many viewers to watch the performances, as was the case for the belly dancers at the 1889 Paris World Exhibition and the 1893 Columbian Exposition (a World’s Fair held in Chicago), and during the following years on Coney Island, and other entertainment areas of America, when the scandalous dancers attracted thousands of male viewers who had heard of the provocative North African and Egyptian belly dancers in Chicago (Buel 1894; Çelik 2000; Edwards 2000; Hinsley 1991; Jarmakani 2008; Monty 1986; Salem 1995; Shay and Sellers-Young 2005).²

White American females generally found such fare too racy, and the Female Managers of the 1893 Columbian Exposition attempted, without success, to close down the highly profitable appearances of the uncorseted Egyptian native dancers because not wearing a corset was considered to be lewd and lascivious.

Race as well as sex also played a role in this reaction of disgust. The image of the Arabs as a degenerate “race” added to the mix of repugnance. Holly Edwards notes that, “In 1890, Jacob Riis described the [Syrian] enclave in New York in words that reveal the anxiety and hostility that indigenous populations felt toward these immigrants: ‘Down near the Battery the West Side emerald would be soiled by a dirty stain, spreading rapidly like a splash on a sheet of blotting paper, headquarters of the Arab tribe …” (2001, 21). This deep-seated sense of repugnance was echoed by a 1914 court decision in which Michael W. Suleiman observes that, “George Dow was denied a petition to become a U.S. citizen because, as a ‘Syrian of Asiatic birth,’ he was not a free white person within the meaning of the 1790 U.S. statute” (1999, 7). Dance scholar Lori Anne Salem states, “In the minds of bourgeois [white American] women, then, the immorality of the ‘Arab’ dances represented a disease which could infect the men in their own families” (1995, 189. Emphasis in the original). Thus, women were largely fearful of the effect on their male kin of viewing this dance and its degenerate performers from another, alien race.

Ethno-identity dance as a sexually motivated performance is frequently treated as a way of using the female form to attract men, and to objectify women’s bodies. However, in the chapters that follow, I will suggest that we must extend our view beyond the heterosexual male gaze, and include gay, lesbian, and female standpoints to discuss how both male and female dancing bodies can potentially sexually arouse the viewer (Caton 2000). I will present four types of sexuality, with four types of target audience: feminine, masculine, gay, and lesbian. In addition, I note that, in contrast to many expectations, ethno-identity dancers can perform for members of the same sex, not necessarily to attract them sexually, but to display their masculinity or femininity through the sensual aspect of their dancing. This can be found, for example, in domestic belly dance performances in which women display their sensuality before other women, principally to display their sexual prowess—their ability to attract and keep a husband, for instance (See Dancing 1993, VHS, tape 3). In such situations, they often display gifts made to them by the husband such as beautiful clothing and gold jewelry as tokens of his attraction to her (Deaver 1978).

Male sexuality is displayed in several ethno-identity dance genres as well. Male performances of “Zorba” dancing in Greek tavernas, and tango, both queer and straight, constitute examples of male sexual display. As Donald Castro points out, “The tango as both a dance and as a song is filled with latent sexuality” (1998, 72). In tango, we find both male and female sexuality on display.

It was the promise of sexual display that led certain ethno-identity dance genres to lend themselves to slumming, especially those that I group under “ethno-dancing for sex,” but also those that I categorize as “dancing for profit.” Slumming is the practice in which elite individuals, especially males, flock to watch and participate in dances and music genres like the tango, flamenco, jazz, and rebetika dancing, especially in their early years. It was the promise of seeing sexy dancing, and perhaps illicit sexual encounters, that drew these individuals to the lowlife locales where these dances largely originated.

As I mentioned in Introduction, it is crucial to keep in mind that, when we describe in essentialist terms “the viewers” or “the audience,” we are following Robert Georges’s (1969) description of an aggregate of individuals who may or may not be responding and reacting to a performance in the same way. One viewer may regard a performance as sexy and sexually arousing, while another may not experience those reactions. However, most viewers of a performance is classified as dancing for sex will recognize the primary motive of the dance and the dance event as being sexual or sensual, even though their own reaction may be different.

In general, I will follow Jeffrey Weeks’s definitions of “sex,” “gender,” and “sexuality”: “sex” will be used, “as a descriptive term for the basic anatomical differences, internal and external to the body, that we use as differentiating men and women … [‘gender’] to describe the social differentiation between men and women, [and] ‘sexuality’ as a general description for the series of historically shaped and socially constructed beliefs, behaviours, relationships and identities that relate to what Michel Foucault has called the ‘the body and its pleasures’ (Foucault 1979)” (Weeks 1992, 224). In addition, I will use the term “sensuality” as indicating a display of sexiness and sexual allure. As well as the aforementioned definitions of “sex”, I will also use the term to mean a display of sensuality and the potential for sexual congress.

Race and Ethnicity

I will suggest that race plays an almost invisible role in the interaction between sexuality and dance today. This is in contrast to the past, when racist reactions to ethno-identity dances and dancers, at least in the United States, were much more overt. Arab Americans, such as Amira Jarmakani (2008, 2013) and Sunaina Maira (2008) and other theorists might disagree with this assessment, asserting that the orientalism and racism among privileged white belly dancers in the early years of the twenty-first century reflects American foreign policy in the Middle East after 9/11, a topic that I will address in Chap. 1.

By all accounts, contemporary readers might find the overt, naked, and sometimes violent, racism displayed at the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893 in Chicago shocking. I will discuss this response by European and American viewers of dances they perceived as sexual, but repugnant because of the race of the performers, and how that attitude changed over time. On the other hand, I suggest that some white Americans, British, and French found the dance performances arousing precisely because of the forbidden aspect of seeking sexual congress with individuals who were culturally off limits because of their race or ethnicity. Historian Robert W. Rydell notes of the different world fairs in the United States.

Rather, the vision of the future and the depiction of the nonwhite world as savage were two sides of the same coin—a coin minted in the tradition of American racism, in which the forbidden desires of whites were projected onto dark-skinned peoples, who consequently had to be degraded so white purity maintained. The Midway, with its half-naked ‘savages’ and hootchy-kootchy dancers, provided white Americans with a grand opportunity for a subliminal journey into the recesses of their own repressed desires. (1984, 67)

Belly dance was probably first seen in the United States at the Chicago Columbian Exposition of 1893 in an atmosphere where non-whites, according to Rydell, “were the victims of a torrent of abuse and ridicule” (1984, 63). The “dusky” dancers—to use a frequent phrase from the contemporary press—from North Africa fit firmly into the racialized atmosphere of the period as non-white (Hinsley 1991; Jarmakani 2008; Monty 1986).

In part, the lack of scholarly, and popular (in journals like Arabesque and Habibi) engagement with race in studies of belly dance, for example, stems from the fact that many writers today ignore, remain ignorant of, or have minimal knowledge of, the degree to which race affected the acceptance of dance genres by audiences in historical periods. (See Salem 1995; Jarmakani 2008, 2013 for extensive studies on how Americans perceived Arabs and the belly dance in the late nineteenth century.)

Contemporary readers might forget, or be ignorant of, the intensely racialized environment that existed in the United States until the 1960s. Racism was so deeply ingrained in the American psyche that the government not only financed racial displays that proved the superiority of the white race, but also contributed financially to those displays in the World Fairs. Rydell, Findling and Pelle state that the exhibit of the government-financed Smithsonian Institution’s Bureau of American Ethnology “dealt with language and race and emphasized the cultural distinctiveness of Indians, making clear to visitors that racial typologies were legitimate categories for understanding human evolution and that racial types could be arranged into categories of savage and civilized” (2000, 38). It does not take too much imagination to guess on which side of the savage–civilized divide whites and Native Americans, not to mention African Americans, fell in the “scientific” exhibits provided by the Smithsonian.

The newspaper accounts of the first appearances of belly dancers were full of descriptions that we would today characterize as racist, often referring to “dusky” women who were, by implication, not beautiful (Hinsley 1991, 358). Contemporary scholars and lay people, such as dancers and audience members, can be uncomfortable with the degree to which race featured in the rejection of dance genres, such as belly dance or hula, which were introduced into Europe and America in the late nineteenth century. Women especially found belly dancing disgusting in its authentic, “in the field” form, that is, performed in its native format by uncorseted, non-white women. They wanted “oriental” dance to be mediated by white bodies such as those of Ruth St. Denis, Loië Fuller and Maud Allan, whose performances as Salome, Indian nautch dances, and other oriental dances became all the rage a decade after the Columbian Exposition of 1893, but the female public accepted it only in the inauthentic versions performed by white dancers (Koritz 1997; Monty 1986; Studlar 1997).

Filmmakers of the period understood this demand for white bodies to perform “exotic” dances. As Ella Shohat and Robert Stam observe: “Exoticizing and eroticizing the Third world allowed the imperial imaginary to play out its own fantasies of sexual domination. Even silent era films featured eroticized dances, improbable mélanges of Spanish and Indian choreographies plus a touch of Middle Eastern belly dances” (1994, 158).

The early filmmakers found non-white bodies useful in presenting nearly naked native people in ways that censors would not have permitted for white bodies. “The study of a hypersexualized ‘other’ in scientific discourse was paralleled by the cinema’s scopophilic display of aliens as spectacle. Hollywood productions abounded in ‘exotic’ images of moving native bodies … Hiding behind a respectable figleaf of ‘science’ and ‘authenticity,’ ethnographic films focused directly on the bouncing breasts of dancing women” (Shohat and Stam 1994).

As sociologist Joane Nagel writes, “I had tended to overlook—sometimes consciously, more often unconsciously—the role of gender and sexuality in any and all things racial, ethnic, or nationalist” (2003, ix). She notes “the power of sex to shape ideas and feelings about race, ethni...