Middle Eastern pop music is thumping at Sahara Hookah Lounge, a cavernous BYOB club in Sharonville. Dancers in bejeweled bra tops and voluminous sheer skirts writhe and wriggle, expertly manipulating a sword, 6-foot metallic “wings,” and hand fans trailing floaty chiffon.
The performers weave and twirl through the crowd, pausing to give patrons an up-close look at precise isolations in their belly, shoulders, or backside. A grinning fellow jumps up to shimmy with one performer. DJ Fatty (a.k.a. Fatty the Baddie Who’s Your Daddy from the Nati) pumps his hands and sings along in Arabic from his booth.
Fadi Shalash, a first-generation Palestinian immigrant, owns the Sahara Lounge and delights in the cross-cultural exchange between his customers, who come from all over the globe, and the dancers, who are Americans enamored with Middle Eastern culture. “I was gagged on that energy,” he says later. “It was so much fun.”
Emily Marie was the star of the show, with abdominal movements as wavy as her long, dark hair. A professional dancer, she books the performers at Sahara and, on this particular night, led a handful of novice students for a few numbers. The women were Black and white, old and young, ample and lean. After just five weeks of study with her, they had enough skills and confidence to show off their nascent hip drops, body rolls, and shoulder shimmies in public.
“Post-COVID, I have gotten a lot of new students,” says Emily Marie, who does not use her last name professionally. Her pupils are more diverse demographically than ever before. “People want to get out and get moving, and they don’t just want to jump around to get fit. They want something free-flowing and creative.”
Belly dance is alive and well in Cincinnati. Besides the weekend performances at Sahara and at Andy’s Mediterranean Grille in Walnut Hills, frequent showcases bring the ancient art form to festivals, Renaissance fairs, charity benefits, and (especially) Halloween events. Pro dancer Meleesa Mink has more than 13,000 Instagram followers; Emily Marie has 15,000. “There were only two belly dance instructors in Cincinnati when I started,” says Azha, a tall dancer and teacher with the requisite long hair, which she can whip around with aplomb, who arrived on the scene in the 1990s. “It’s grown by leaps and bounds ever since.”
Most Cincinnatians, however, are unaware of all this hip-shaking and veil-spinning. Despite a surge in students, shows for the public are modestly promoted and attended. Part of the secrecy, though, is intended.
Due to the age-old association of belly dancing with more salacious kinds of entertainment, a lot of women don’t let everyone in their social or professional circles know about it. Few agreed to use their full names here, and some preferred to use their mono-moniker dancer names. There’s no getting around it: Belly dance is the most misunderstood of dance forms.
Torso-centric movements in belly dancing started as a simple folk dance in North Africa and the Middle East. Some historians believe that, like flamenco, it originated in India as long as 5,000 years ago and spread westward via migrating Travelers (also known as Roma). Turkey, North Africa, Egypt, and Lebanon remain its strongholds, even though it’s restricted (for “immorality”) in some of those places.
When belly dancing arrived on American shores in the late 1800s, it was dubbed the “hoochie coochie” by promoters cashing in on its lurid reputation. Exposed bellies were shocking to Victorian-era audiences. Movies and TV shows ever since have characterized belly dance as a bump-and-grind for men’s ogling eyeballs. The Hollywood stereotypes cheapened its perception but also spread and influenced its movements and costumes, both of which became more glamorous and flamboyant.
Historically, belly dance was more about celebration than seduction. It originated by and for the delight of women. In the late 1960s, when it took hold nationally in the U.S., it became an unexpectedly feminist endeavor. Classes were a “safe space,” especially for women who felt their curvy bodies were not something to be proud of or show off. Belly dance turned such thinking around. Trending again now—with social media disseminating instruction, music, and performances—the sounds and the culture that belly dance embodies are coming to the fore.
“We are not talking about an art form only,” says Kathy Godber (a.k.a. Nataj), Cincinnati’s pre-eminent belly dance teacher and owner of Habeeba’s, the city’s longest-running belly dance studio. “We are talking a culture and a history.”
To a public weaned on So You Think You Can Dance or hip-hop videos on TikTok, belly dance’s subtleties and repetitions can seem anachronistic, like other historic dances such as kabuki, waltz, or flamenco. To the untrained eye, it may even look easy. (It is emphatically not.)
“If you see a belly dancer and think, She’s just walking around doing suggestive moves, that’s not it at all,” says Jeanne Miller, a retired chemist who, at 76, might be Cincinnati’s oldest belly dancer. “It’s very complex, which you don’t realize until you get into it. Certain parts of your body move in opposition to other parts. Then you have to think about where your feet are and keep your knees soft and thumbs tucked. Your head has to be lifted, and on top of all these movements in different directions you’re doing a belly roll, or snake, or shimmying. There are eight or nine types of shimmy! And you have to make it all look effortless.”
Unlike ballet or hip-hop, belly dance was not originally performed in choreographed ensembles for a large audience. It developed in small settings and is best observed up close. Eye contact between audience member and dancer is crucial for many performers. As such, traditional belly dance, in its thousands of years of expansion worldwide, has never been supersized for modern pop-culture consumption. In the Middle East, it’s done in clubs and at weddings and other relatively small celebrations, where women and men do it.
An effort by impresario Miles Copeland 20 years ago to bring his “Bellydance Superstars” to the masses fizzled. Shakira is the only pop star to seriously undertake it. There still isn’t a huge audience for it—yet. But that may be about to change, especially in Cincinnati, where the subculture is growing. Offshoots of the dance, mixed with everything from industrial music to acrobatics, have expanded its appeal.
Ericka, a lifelong Cincinnatian, is one proponent. In many ways, she’s a typical Queen City belly dancer. She’d been an athlete, not a dancer, in her youth, and, as a teenage foreign-exchange student, she was intrigued by all things international. A 2005 radio story on belly dance piqued her interest, so she looked online for classes. “I loved the costuming and the music,” says Ericka. “It was just so different and alternative. It was a mix of liking the energy and the women in the class.”
Two decades later, Ericka is retired from her corporate career but still sews shiny accoutrements onto stagewear and performs. Of late, she’s started to produce belly dance showcases. Her semi-annual “hafla” (Arabic for “party”) enlivens the Kennedy Heights Arts Center each spring and winter.
Becoming a show organizer was the last place she imagined her interest in dance would lead her. In fact, the mere concept of stepping on a stage herself initially freaked her out. “After an eight-week beginner class, our teacher said, We’re going to do a hafla so invite friends and family,” says Ericka. “I thought, I’m not doing this in front of anybody. I didn’t even take my husband to it. But I danced in it so I could check it off the list. I wanted to feel the fear and do it anyway. And then I just got hooked. After that first little performance, I felt relaxed and happy with a sense of accomplishment.”
Ericka has since taken hundreds of classes and traveled to other cities to attend shows and workshops. She now adores performing. “I want to be an ambassador for anybody trying this out,” she says.
In her Amberley Village home, Ericka has converted the living room into a personal dance space, complete with mirrored wall. On a summer evening, she cues up “Dance of Life” on a boom box. The heady, slow-tempo Middle Eastern classic oozes layered guitars, drums, and a ney (think: “snake-charmer” flute). Azha, mentioned earlier, sits in Bermuda shorts on the hardwood floor near the fireplace, giving Ericka pointers on a number she’s choreographing.
Azha: Your shoulder thingies. Don’t do them all at the same speed. You could do these cutesy ones fast and, when you get to the top, do them slow.
Ericka: Sassy!
Azha: I want the drama on the up at the end. I like your head there.
Ericka: What is it doing?
Azha: Dropping a little bit. Your eyes are cast down. But the veil needs to go below your face.
Ericka: Or the belly dance police will arrest me?
Azha: If you’re going to spend that amount of time on your makeup, the last thing you want is the veil covering your face.
The small scene encapsulates so much about belly dance in this city. The women come for the music and the exercise, then stay for the body positivity and the sisterhood. It becomes their social life and their therapy. “Belly dance changed my relationship with my belly,” says Mrs. Knueven, who prefers to use her last name only. “I have a pudgier belly and have always thought, I wish my belly could be flat. But now it’s, Wow, look at how strong my abs are! I can do this move and it looks so cool!”
There are three main varieties of belly dance in the U.S.: American Cabaret, which is the most traditional, involving age-old movements to Middle Eastern music; Fusion, which blends aspects of other dances, such as hip-hop or jazz, often done to modern music; and American Tribal Style, which also mixes various kinds of choreography and music and is done by a group of dancers who take turns to cue each other on a series of moves. Tribal has a hippie-ish personality, while Fusion, which is often slower than traditional belly dance, leans toward a goth aesthetic.
When Ericka started in belly dance, she first landed on Tribal, in part because the costumes weren’t skimpy (“I’m a prude!”) and in part because group dance appealed to her. She has since migrated to American Cabaret (a.k.a. Am Cab), the choice for purists. “You have to understand where the dance comes from, using the correct terms and music, and understanding the instruments,” says Nataj, who has taught Am Cab for five decades. “If you’re dancing in Middle Eastern clothing and using Middle Eastern music, the dance should be Middle Eastern.”
Ericka’s haflas feature Middle Eastern and Turkish music exclusively. “Most shows have Fusion dance in them, but I wanted to see more traditional stuff,” she says. “I do it as a love letter to the art form and the music.”
Pretty much every metropolitan city has a belly dance scene, but few can trace their origins as clearly as Cincinnati can. It all started with Habeeba (“Sweetheart” in Arabic), who grew up of Italian and Lebanese origin in Detroit, which has a sizable Arab population. “I loved the music,” she says of the live bands in Greek and Middle Eastern nightclubs and restaurants she frequented with her parents in the 1960s. “It has a lot of passion and makes you want to move.” The belly dancers, Moroccan and Turkish, dazzled her. “But how did they do it?” she says she always wondered. She learned by watching and practicing on her own; there were no classes in Detroit at the time. Habeeba became that rare novelty of an American belly dancer in the 1960s.
“Men thought it was burlesque and would say, When are you going to take something off?” she recalls. At restaurants she would change into her fanciful costumes in an office or “in with the pickles” and sometimes give notes to a jazz band in order to approximate Middle Eastern rhythms.
Habeeba was a pioneer, hiring a booking agent and traveling internationally for gigs. She landed a residency in Las Vegas and posed for photographs for record-album covers. She settled in Columbus, where she opened Habeeba’s Dance of the Arts in 1971. “I spent hours in front of a mirror with music on, trying to break down every movement I did,” she says.
Fifty years later, those same notations and pedagogic choreographies are still taught at her namesake studios in Columbus and Cincinnati. “In the beginning, I got a lot of publicity,” says Habeeba. “Women’s lib was really heavy. Most of the students were housewives in their 20s. It was a way to express themselves, be more independent, and accomplish something very different.”
The students wore basic leotards and tights, as hip scarves with fringe or spangles were hard to come by. Until the end of the ’70s, Habeeba says, “There was no music to buy or get, and you had to sew your own costumes.”
Nataj, a belly dance aficionado from Northern Kentucky, bought the Habeeba studio in 1977 when she was just 20 years old. It’s changed locations several times and now resides inside Anaya, a Fusion belly dance studio in Silverton. Nataj has kept it pumping through successive waves in the popularity of belly dance—classes in the 1980s took a hit from competition with aerobics, and in the ’90s Zumba and yoga drained some students, followed by pilates. But a core of belly dance aficionados kept coming. Today, a third generation of students now learn Habeeba’s OG choreographies from Nataj and her colleagues.
Nataj laments that Cincinnati no longer has venues for live Middle Eastern music, especially since “we have more instructors than ever and more people who want to perform than we’ve ever had.” Says Ericka, “The old generation of oud, kanun and doumbek players has retired or died, and their children don’t follow in their footsteps.”
The dearth of musicians is changing the dance, says Nataj, who in the ’70s and ’80s performed professionally every week to live music. Besides lacking the excitement of live music, recorded music has led dancers to prepare choreographed numbers rather than allowing the music to drive impromptu movement.
Nataj was a queenly presence at the Summer Sizzle show produced by her studio in August. Booze and baklava were dispensed at the bar of The Place in Elmwood Place. More than 25 dancers, including Nataj, took turns on stage, ranging in age from 23 to 67. Aside from a bra top that popped mid-performance, the show was a triumph. Azha led the latest crop of students in Habeeba’s choreography, and Ericka drew hoots and claps when she filled the entire stage by twirling with 6-foot wings. The audience could have been bigger, but there was a palpable feeling of artistry and connection.
“Still belly dancing?” friends will ask Ericka. It irks her when they suggestively shake their chest or wiggle their butts. But yes, she replies, “I’m still dancing.”
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