Belly dance festivals need more lecture classes
It’s trendy to advertise events as “accessible” or “inclusive,” regardless of what efforts have actually gone into that claim. After opening a dance studio in Chicago with my business and life partner Kamrah, we had lots of talks over how we wanted to make our classes accessible to neurodivergent dancers like us. However, this also got my brain tuned into another facet of belly dance culture that has remained mostly unchanged for decades: dance festivals.
After a discussion about accessibility in belly dance dance festivals with my colleague Minda Mae, Minnesota’s first wheelchair-using burlesque performer, I felt invigorated to share my thoughts on this topic. (She led a great workshop on this for this year’s Bellydance Bundle).
I want to preface this with my positionality: I am a professional male belly dancer who suffers from several sensory and mobility issues due to neurodivergence and chronic pain. (If you want to learn more about my chronic pain journey, check out these blogs.) While this blog is somewhat prescriptive by nature, I recognize that this advice doesn’t cover the needs of all disabled dancers. That being said…
If you want your belly dance festival to be more accessible, you need to offer more lecture classes.
Dance festivals are sacred places. They bring dancers together from all over, they reconnect local dance communities, and they bring in instructors that would otherwise be challenging to study with. As a professional opportunity, they are invaluable sources of networking and professional development—photo shoots, performance recordings, costume shopping. They’re important to all levels of dancers, both emerging and established. All that to say, we all need and deserve to enjoy belly dance festivals.
Moreover, we all know the deal with performing at belly dance festivals: Unless you’re a teacher, there is a minimum number of workshop hours you need to register for in order to apply to perform. This helps support the festival and the instructors, especially ones who may not have as much of a reputation as the headlining names. It depends on the festival, but you typically have to register for 4-8 workshop hours to qualify for performance.
If you’re able-bodied and uninjured, this may not be a barrier for you. If you’re like me and deal with chronic pain, this can be problematic. Dancing for several hours straight isn’t practicable for me. I can muscle through it, but my recovery will take days or weeks, depending on the amount of pain debt I accumulate.
I’m going to put you in my shoes for a brief moment.
You are headed to a belly dance festival across the country. You’ve been in intense rehearsal for this high-stakes performance opportunity, so your baseline pain level is sitting around a 4/10. You get on your 4-hour plane ride, which aggravates your sciatic nerve. We’re now at 5/10. However, you get to rest up Thursday night before classes start on Friday, so by Friday morning, you’re back down to a 4.
After finishing your Friday workshop, your baseline is spiking at a 5. You have to get ready for your photoshoot, and during the shoot, you have to pose and arch and stand for an hour straight. Pain level is rising towards 6. Then you have to check in for the show, but you’re performing in the second half, and they don’t provide seats for attendees without tickets. Instead of sitting and watching the show until you need to get warmed up, you have to stand at the back of the theater for an hour. Your pain level is solidly at 6/10 now. You perform, and now you’re tired and hungry, but there’s an afterparty that you need to be seen at for professional and networking reasons. You go to the afterparty for about an hour, and fall into bed with a 7/10 pain level.
Sleeping helps, so you wake up on Saturday at a 5/10. (Remember, yesterday you woke up at a 4, so you’re already in pain debt.) You have two workshops today. Not only that, but you are in the Saturday gala too, so you have to allocate your energy in order to make it through the show, and yet another after party. You half-ass your workshops to try and keep your pain level down, which is spiritually excruciating, because you know what you’re capable of on a “good” pain day. You fall into bed on Saturday night at an 8/10.
On Sunday morning, you’re wrecked. You have to fly home in the afternoon, so your only workshop option was at 9:30AM. The show last night didn’t let out until 10:30PM, and you were out networking until around midnight, so you didn’t get to sleep until 1 or 2AM. Since you didn’t get enough sleep, you accumulated even more pain debt, so you wake up at a 7/10. You were excited for your morning workshop, but instead of dancing with everyone, you’re left sitting on the floor for 2 hours “observing.” Flying home fucks up your sciatic nerve again, and you’re in so much pain debt that it takes a week of resting (as in, not dancing) to feel at a functional level of pain again.
Now that you’ve gone through that with me, let me unpack some of that.
Pain debt
My chronic pain is like a timer. Every time I stand up, the timer starts. Sometimes I can pause the timer by sitting, leaning against the wall, or stretching, but the second I become upright again, the timer restarts—emphasis on “restarts,” not “resets.” The only thing that resets the timer is resting overnight. So when I can’t reset my timer, I go into what I call “pain debt.” This is when my pain levels are growing exponentially day by day, resulting in a longer recovery time. Whereas after dance practice I can recover fully with one or two nights of sleep, depending on the amount of pain debt I’m in, it can take multiple days to weeks to feel functional again.
“Functional,” for people with chronic pain, does not mean “pain-free.” I use the term “functional level of pain,” because there is never a second of the day that I am not in pain. I am never recovered to a point that I am pain free, or 0/10. My functional pain level is usually around 3/10: I can do my daily tasks without much disruption, have dance practice, run errands, etc., but while I do that, the timer is running. When the timer runs out, the debt accumulates, and I have really high APR.
Lecture classes eliminate a barrier for me.
Thinking back to that scenario where you were in my shoes (sorry), if half of those workshops were lecture/non-movement classes, my pain debt would have been significantly reduced. I would have the luxury of resting during the day so that I can reserve my physical energy for when it’s needed: dance classes and performances. Even just reserving a chair for me at the show would have made a big impact.
My condition is degenerative. It will get worse over time. And while I can mind-over-matter my way through this process a few times a year out of necessity, I will not be able to do so indefinitely. And adding a single lecture class per day of the festival doesn’t seem like a huge ask, so why is it so hard to get?
Now, I don’t produce a festival, so I can’t speak with insider knowledge, but I know as someone who regularly teaches and attends lectures, it’s likely because of low enrollment. Very few people will attend a belly dance festival and take a lecture workshop. Maybe they don’t see it as worth their time, given the limited time they have with the high-profile headlining dancers they’d rather study with. Maybe they aren’t interested in lecture-style classes and only care about attending to the technical and physical side of their dance training. Maybe it’s because the only people they hire to teach lectures are emerging instructors who don’t have an impressive reputation.
Regardless of the reason, at the end of the day, few festivals offer non-movement classes for dancers (often they’ll have music classes for musicians, but given that we’re not all musicians, this doesn’t really ameliorate the issue). And when they do offer lectures, they’re very often put in the least-attended time slot: first thing on Sunday mornings, when no one, especially disabled people like me (remember when you were in my shoes, and how I felt on Sunday morning?), want to get up early. What’s more, as someone who is booked to teach lectures pretty regularly, since they are significantly less attended than movement workshops, I make a fraction of the profit that movement-based classes make, which is an additional barrier, as disabled people are historically underemployed.
Now that I’ve established my background, the issues, and my projections, I’ll go ahead and anticipate some criticisms.
If you’re in too much pain, why can’t you just sit and take notes in dance classes?
Believe me, I do this a lot, especially when the classes are 3-4 hours long. But you do not get the same experience or fulfillment out of a dance class when you’re sitting and taking notes. If you watched your favorite instructor and all your dance friends having a blast dancing together, would you feel satisfied sitting on the floor watching everyone else have fun? Or would you feel left out and depressed, because your body is screaming and you have no choice but to listen to it?
If dance festivals cause so much pain, why not just stop going?
As a professional dancer, where the majority of my time is spent working on my dance business (running a dance studio, teaching, creating online courses, marketing, performing, touring, etc), dance festivals are not an optional luxury. As fun as they are, they serve a vital function in my career, as explained earlier.
Where else can you get access to a professional photographer and videographer, a room full of costumes that you can try on and purchase (and costumes, for professionals, are our “work clothes”), an inlet to local dance studios and student bases to network with, and professional networking/collaboration opportunities with other working dancers?
This intersection of events only happens at festivals. There is no substitution.
Dance festivals are also some of the only times I get to see my friends. Given how spread out we all are, festivals are a place for reconnection and reunion. How would you feel about never seeing your friends again?
Dance festivals need to make money, so if lectures aren’t well attended, that’s not their fault.
I understand that festivals need to make money, but to me, this sounds like an opportunity to explore some solutions.
Suggestion 1: Don’t set them up to fail by scheduling lectures in direct competition with headliner masterclasses.
Like I said, I teach lectures pretty regularly. And the most common reason I hear for why someone didn’t attend my lecture is because it was happening at the same time as a high-profile dancer’s masterclass. And yes, every time I teach a lecture workshop, I have several dancers approach me throughout the festival telling me they didn’t go because they’d rather take dance classes with the headliner. It usually goes something like, “Oh I really wanted to take your class, but it was happening at the same time as what’s-her-butt’s intensive…”
No, it doesn’t feel good to hear that 10 times over the course of a weekend, compounded with the shitty feeling of teaching a poorly attended class.
That being said, I’d recommend reworking the schedule so that lecture classes aren’t directly competing with headliner masterclasses. In fact, lecture classes do really well in the afternoon when people are exhausted from having their asses kicked all morning. That being said…
Suggestion 2: Headliners can teach lectures, too.
Lectures are often victim to a vicious cycle of defeat: lecture classes are booked, but since they aren’t attended well enough, they are subject to cancellation, resulting in fewer lecture classes, which lowers festival attendee sensitivity to lecture offerings, which means they’re less likely to be booked in the future, which results in fewer lecture classes, which lowers attendee sensitivity… etc etc.
Like I laid out before, having 1 lecture class per day of the festival (so about 3 classes total) doesn’t feel like a huge ask. So how do you get festival attendees to sign up for them? Well, if headliners are a major reason why lectures are poorly attended, why not have the headliners teach a lecture?
I’ve studied with many high-profile dancers, and all of them have incredibly valuable perspective on various non-movement aspects of dance that any dance festival attendee could benefit from: stage presence, business practices, mindset, theatricality, costuming, touring, pedagogy, and a million other things I’m certain I’m missing.
How badass would it be to have a workshop with a super famous, successful dancer on how they negotiate contracts, or how they navigate the experience of teaching and performing internationally? Dancers who have formal training programs would have a wealth of knowledge on the art of curriculum building, pedagogy, and classroom management.
Would their lecture classes be as successful as their movement classes? Perhaps not, but in general, cultural transformation is a long-game process. That is to say, while in the short term it may be harder to sell, it can be a game-changer for festivals down the line for both disabled and able-bodied dancers.
Suggestion 3: Foster a culture of education.
As a belly dance history enthusiast and advocate for historical education, I think all dancers should feel obligated to educate themselves on the stickier, less glamorous parts of being a belly dancer: appropriation, cultural stewardship, ethics, racism, and Orientalism, among other things. These conversations have always circulated in belly dance discourse, and in the past few years, these issues have been incredibly prominent in our community due to various social and political movements.
Dance festivals are not only places for dance training and connection, but for education. In some ways, they are arbiters of the educational expectations of belly dancers. That is, the institution of belly dance festivals has great influence over the actions and trends in the belly dance community. If there is anyone who holds responsibility for promoting a culture of education, it’s festivals.
If prominent dance festivals were to start foregrounding the importance of non-movement education, I believe that this will help to steer the expectations of belly dance education to a more holistic model: historical, physical, and cultural. By offering lecture classes and explicitly marketing them as vital learning opportunities, they can be just as profitable as movement classes.
Final thoughts
Lecture workshops not only offer crucial intellectual development to complement a dance practice, but help ameliorate a barrier for people like me who are physically disabled. As I explored during this blog, dancing for multiple hours straight in order to qualify to perform is debilitating for me, and for many people, completely prohibitive. We all need the institution of belly dance festivals, and deserve to have equitable access to the joys and benefits they provide.
I’ve used a lot of generalizing language in this blog (as this is a blog, not an academic article). I realize that some festivals do offer lecture classes, and online festivals like the Al Raqs Conference are purely lecture-based. I believe that things are slowly changing, and with the added impetus of attending to the needs of disabled dancers and accessibility, I hope that things will start to change a little faster.
Plug…
And if I’ve sparked your interest in exploring lecture opportunities, allow me to shamelessly plug my virtual lecture series, “Men in Belly Dance,” starting Sunday, Nov. 26th. Read more about it and enroll here. Use my fancy Black Friday discount code SALE25 for $25 off.
Explore the rich history of belly dance in the United States: Learn about the misinformation that has circulated through belly dance discourses for centuries, and how modern research has combatted common myths and stereotypes about male belly dancers. We will learn about the impact of several formative male belly dancers in the US and North America, such as John Compton, Bobby Farrah, Ahmad Jarjour, and Bert Balladine.
