paula on 'the politics of bellydancing'...

well it just goes to demonstrate that you can resurrect cultural work from
the early nineties and still be relevant! 14 years ago a group of arab women
produced a performance work (with mostly sold out nights in both sydney and
canberra) called the politics of belly dancing. in this piece, issues around
cultural and gender representations, appropriation, orientalism and racism
were played out through the forms of poetry and movement. everything in
that choreopoem came from our collective frustrations with how we were
figured in western spheres and equally with how we felt silenced by the
dominance of orientalists and arabists who variously want to exotifiy,
fetishise, commodify or be the expert on all things arab. and where are we
in 2007? still frozen in the desert* (name of a chapter in my thesis :). i
am still interested these days in making work which speaks back to those
concerns, but am probably more aware of the limits of what we do. if
anything, i write more for arab disaporic audiences now than 'to make
westerners think about their own prejudices and colonial behaviours'. i am
acutely aware of the reception environment in which our work arrives, so
irony is my preferred weapon of choice. having tried most everything, there
is no other place to go than to irony. and what a satisfying place that is!
in short, rather than trying to 'correct' orientalist logic (which is
circular at best, dead-end at worst), in my contemporary work, i play with
it so that it loses some of its power through humour and satire.
paula