Belly Dance is Green

While I was filling out our application to perform at Earth day, I was puzzled by this question: How does your performance relate to the goals of Earth Day?

I asked myself: What does a belly dance performance have to do with the preservation or protection of the Earth?

The current state of affairs regarding our planet is a sad one. Our Greek and Judeo-Christian philosophical roots of duality and hierarchy, pastoral traditions of unbridled expansion, and mechanistic world-views of science and progress all sadly treat the planet as a large clump of inanimate matter with resources to be abused recklessly. We are told repeatedly that the solution to the current "energy crisis" is to keep grasping for more and more control over precious resources. According to Eckhart Tolle, in A New Earth, humanity seems to be cursed with a form of collective mental illness or veil of delusion.

Sad? Yes. yes. yes.

A socio-historical relationship exists between the ill treatment of the planet and sexual inequality. For several thousand years, patriarchal messages have deemed females inferior, limited and incomplete beings and placed an overarching importance on masculine culture. Until the seventeenth century, Europeans commonly regarded the Earth as a living, female being. Quoting from a number of Francis Bacon's works in the seventeenth century, Carolynn Mathews says this, "The new man of science must not think that the 'inquisition of nature is in any part interdicted or forbidden'. Nature must be 'bound into service' and made a 'slave,' put 'in constraint' and 'molded' by the mechanical arts. The 'searchers and spies of nature' are to discover her plots and secrets" (The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology and the Scientific Revolution, pp. 40-41). Moreover, "European campaigns of colonial expansion and enslavement of inhabitants of occupied lands prompted scientists, philosophers and theologians to categorize indigenous peoples with the Western worldview. The new attention to the Other was at once paternal and protective as well as oppressive and exploitive, regarding enslaved people as property and a source of free labor rather than as human beings. The female body especially bore the metaphorical weight of comparisons between women's fertility and the abundant riches of the conquered lands, 'penetration' into and 'conquest' of places like the 'Dark Continent'"(Willis and Williams, The Black Female Body, pp. 8).

Still sad? Yes. yes. yes.

The good news?
Belly dance is about personal transformation and empowerment of women. At both the personal and collective level it has parallels with political activism. When women embrace the sacredness of their bodies and the dignity of being female, they are challenging violence, be it against women and children or the Earth's ecological system.

When women come together to belly dance it is ritualistic. We warm-up in the same way every time, review the same movements, over and over again. The primary function is to connect the individual with the dance, the music and the group. Shared meanings, resolutions, and emotions are achieved. A relational bond is formed and it is enduring. "In time, ritual creates a new body, one body made of many, through which can be realized and understood the extremes of fear and love, the truly political dimensions of humanness...Ritual marks the ultimate ideal of the relationship between self and community, the fusion, rather than separation, of these two distinct realities" (Kay Turner, "Contemporary Feminist Rituals, pp. 226).

Growth is often slow and gradual. Moon Belly Dance Studio has the moon as its main metaphor for growth and development. A slow and steady process in one's transformation is the constant theme and meditation about gradual change is understood. A place in a dancer's journey for the waning moon encourages acceptance of inevitable setbacks and regressions. A place for the waxing moon encourages embracing the life-force. Belly dancers are images and models in process. We create possibility. This is a necessary step in our efforts to bring about social change.

The common ground between belly dance and the struggles to save mother earth appears to be boundless. Together in both our personal and political identities, we are moving toward change, both seeking an awakened consciousness. I am still working on these connections intellectually, but I know in my heart that belly dance is green.