I have been involved in dance off and on throughout my
entire life. Since I was little I partook in ballet, jazz, and tap
dance. It
was not until I visited the Renaissance Festival as a junior in high
school that
I became familiar with cabaret belly dance and saw my first
performance. I
became fascinated with the moves and took classes, even performed in a
dance
troupe in the Twin Cities at a restaurant, club, bar, and park. College
began
and I moved away, thus quitting dance for a couple years to pursue my
academic
life. Finally, in my junior year at UMD, I got up the motivation to get
back
into it. I enrolled at Eman's Belly Dance and Fitness Studio in
My goal to have made the familiar strange, and look at belly
dance as if
it were the first time from an outsider's point of view has been very
difficult
as I am intimately involved with the subject matter and am biased with
my
outlook based on my love for the dance. I have used this, however, to
make
myself a researcher and interlocutor, or informant. The project is a
rather
reflexive perspective as I have used my own feelings, reactions, and
thoughts
as information.
Instead of totally focusing on book research I have taken lived
experiences,
including my own, to present a picture of belly dance. By doing so, I
have
encountered some truths behind beauty and found some answers to