A good friend suggested that I write this blog, a chronicle of food and bellydance, after I gloated while eating a Good Fork oyster po boy at the Brooklyn Flea, "Because belly dancers are allowed to eat!" My comment didn't come out of nowhere.
As a teenager, I was a dancer. A ballet and modern dancer, more precisely. One year, I was leading some children for their recital. The costume (oh, how I love costumes) was a lovely lavender beauty, in a child size large, so I would match the little ones. When I tried it on, it was skin tight. I commented to my teacher, what if, perhaps at the time of our recital it was "my time of the month" and the costume then would not zip in the chest area. In a tone that implied "simple," she replied, "Don't eat." That was the advice she gave a 110 pound fifteen year old. "Don't eat."
And that was what I strove to do, because if you get to know me, you know that I make sacrifices in life for art. I didn't see then, as I see now, how troubling it was.
I had varying degrees of positive feedback as a dancer who didn't have a slight build, even in my skinniest days. The Russian teacher at my first university for undergrad ignored me in ballet class, no matter how hard I worked and whether it was because of my body type or not, I felt that it was. At Barnard College, where I ended up as a transfer student, the dance department is incredibly strong and progressively inclusive. I studied with some great teachers, and had I had more time at Barnard, rather than theatre, my major would have likely looked like my current art practice, in visual art and dance.
So, bellydance or raqs sharqi. I started dancing in 2007 when I stole away during a few lunch breaks at my work at a community college to dance with Rayhana. Rayhana is a wonderful, incredibly sexy dancer and I wanted to be like that! The class was fun, but it didn't really work with my busy schedule as faculty to dance at lunch. So, a few months later, in 2008, my gym began offering Middle Eastern dance and I clomped into the class in gym shoes, really not prepared to start dancing. It still seemed like a casual interest, not a passion, and I eventually encountered some strange dynamics with classmates and stopped going.
In 2009, I reconnected with an old friend from highschool on facebook and he asked me if I still danced. I laughed, feeling way too old and well, shapely in figure to be a dancer. I told him about dabbling in Middle Eastern dance, but no, I said, I am not a dancer. By coincidence, a person in his circle of friends is a beautiful Middle Eastern dancer, and she encouraged me to come to her class. And I did. Soon after, I was smitten with all of it: the music, the movements, the sisterhood of women in the dance, all of part of a weekly routine.
And food! Cooking has been an interest since my junior year of college when I began experimenting with stir fries to save money and eat lots of vegetables, rather than whatever was served up in the cafeteria. It was break time before study and I developed a sense of wonder and fascination with how what I ate was made. Since then, I've probably made thousands of recipes, collect cookbooks and also love experiencing New York through taste. Middle Eastern cuisine, by the way, is also one of my favorites. With dance and my food, the waiter at my favorite restaurant teased me that I was "turning Lebanese."
So that's my formal history with these passions, passions that place sensuality at the core of their experience. Skill and art come together to create experiential moments for savoring life. Dance and food really should, in my opinion, go together. Both are about being present in our bodies and our senses.
P.S. The photo above represents my day: playing zils and cooking. Right now my cooking is much better than my zil playing. I made a recipe for
Okra Gumbo with Chickpeas and Kidney Beans from Isa Chandra Moskowitz's awesome vegan blog, the Post Punk Kitchen. She's often called the Nigella Lawson of veganism and I agree. :)
