Hampshire Bellydance Collective Unrecognized

Overview
The Hampshire Bellydance Collective (HBC) is an open, student-organized collective dedicated to making the complex, beautiful, expressive art form we commonly call bellydance accessible and available to the local community. We provide weekly classes for students, faculty &amp; staff, and community members as well as workshops, film screenings, lectures, events and performances around the Pioneer Valley.

We teach American Tribal Fusion bellydance, an evolving contemporary dance form rooted in folkloric Middle Eastern and North African dance traditions but incorporating influences and elements from other movement forms as varied as ballet, Greek and Turkish dance, jazz, hip-hop, electronica, Balkan dance, and yoga. Our focus is on building strong communities and a joyful connection to the body through this dance; we stress the creation of both safe, welcoming, communal, supportive spaces and individual technique, musicality and expressiveness.

Our classes welcome every level of experience, every body type, range of ability, and gender identity. We work to make classes accessible to everyone, including those coming from populations who have traditionally struggled with exclusion, marginalization and invisibilization in dance classrooms. We strive to instill a sense of the celebratory nature of this dance in all of our dancers, honoring the diverse array of experiences, backgrounds, abilities and reasons for dancing that our students bring to our classes. Hampshire Bellydance is a safe space; anyone feeling unsafe or uncomfortable for any reason should approach us in person with the understanding that we will always honor your feelings and take your concerns as serious and legitimate.

The Hampshire Bellydance Collective was founded under the name Figure 8 in 2001 by Hampshire student Kaitlin Hines, who created it as a space for students interested in bellydance to come together to practice and perform. It has grown over the years to provide dozens of classes, workshops, events and performances involving hundreds of students, local community members, and Five College faculty and staff as well. Beginning at the end of 2008, the signers of the HBC began working to reenvision the group as a student-organized version of the Sovereign Project, a movement arts and social action collective directed by dancer and educator Donna Mejia. The Sovereign Project is centered around the concept of sovereignty in the body and the building of a more reverent connection to the human form, using fusion dance as a springboard. The Sovereign Project mission statement declares,

"Transgressions against physical self-determination manifest across international, cultural, religious, political and economic lines in a multitude of practices: genital mutilation; legally sanctioned infantile marriages; elder abuse; sexual servitude; censorship of sexual information; slavery; honor killings; media-influenced distortions of body-image; domestic violence; military torture; inaccessibility to affordable healthcare; forced medical intervention or end of life management; etc.

Rather than perceive the body as an obstacle to spiritual or intellectual progress, a tool to be mastered and punitively controlled, or an instrument of abusive escapism, collective members of Sovereign hope to inspire society to realize the body as an inherently intelligent life companion worthy of honor, attentiveness, and engagement."

As a result, we emphasize somatic intelligence, or the building of understanding, care, awareness and control throughout the body as an integrated whole. We do a long yoga-based warmup and break down all of our movements in every class. We value expressiveness and individual growth, working with all of our dancers at their own pace and encouraging them to be patient and kind to their bodies. We stress safe body practices and the mastery of technique in balance with the pleasure and delight of dancing for its own sake.

Finally, it is important to us to introduce this form as one that has been historically skewed, distorted and delegitimized; racism, sexual oppression, cultural appropriation, imperialism, colonialism, commodification and hypersexualization are some of the many interferences that have affected the perception of bellydance as a dance practice, from its roots in matriarchal cultures dating back ten thousand years to the present day. We ask our dancers to have these things on their radar, because we believe that it is impossible to study the form without eventually encountering them. Turning a blind eye to these issues perpetuates them, and that perpetuation affects all of us: how our dance is perceived reflects on everyone who dances it. This is not, however, a political studies class but a dance collective; those who are interested in the history and politics of the dance are more than welcome to engage further, but we are simply seeking to help our dancers make informed and honorable choices about their dancing. The HBC is meant to be a refuge, a sanctuary space and a community, and there is no obligation or commitment required from you. While you join us, we hope that you will lend your positive energy to the collective, bringing an open heart, an open mind and a willingness to find joyfulness in your body.