Belly dancers learn to roll with the music

Feel the beat

It was hips with attitude.

Sassy. Snappy. Sensuous.

Nine belly dancers moved to syncopated Middle Eastern rhythms during a recent class in downtown Kalispell.

The rhythm: Baladi.

Baladi is the most common belly-dancing rhythm played by fingers on the center and edges of a Middle Eastern drum called a doumbek.

Accents are played on the drumhead's center, with the lighter beats played on the edge.

Baladi is eight counts with the accents on one, two and five.

BOOM-BOOM-ti-ki-BOOM-ti-ki-ti.

BOOM-BOOM-ti-ki-BOOM-ti-ki-ti.

The accented action was in the hips.

The stories were in the faces.

Deep concentration molded some faces. Eyes wide-open and straight ahead. Mouths and cheeks tensed in contrast to their confident hips.

You could almost see their minds silently and intensely counting - their arms, shoulders and abdomens sometimes moving as afterthoughts.

Rock, rap and country music have straightforward four-count rhythms. Baladi is belly dancing's simplest beat pattern. Lots of belly dancing patterns are seven counts, nine counts, 11 counts and 13 counts - with the accents scattered in different places.

Meanwhile, the faces of Kathy

Spangenberg of Whitefish and April Rainey of Libby were in a blissful, somewhat otherworldly plane.

Facial muscles relaxed. Spangenberg's eyes peacefully closed. Rainey's eyes bright with excitement and joy.

Both undulated instead of moving - arms, legs, heads and torsos rippling like snapped ropes.

Ironically, both have lousy senses of rhythm - mentally counting the beats and accents would throw them off. Instead each felt and swam with the music.

"I feel like I'm flowing," Spangenberg said.

Peggy Stratton of Kalispell said: "It's easy to get the steps down. It's hard to perfect."

Perfection is a relaxed, graceful flow with spark and without the tense faces. And it's mastering more complicated moves. For example, the Kalispell class features lots of hip and arm movements, but little abdominal work, which is much, much harder.

Belly dancing tightens and stretches muscles - especially along the obliques and outer hips - in unusual ways.

"You're using muscles in patterns that you don't normally use," Stratton said.

Instructor Marti Kurth of Whitefish said: "All movement starts in the center of the body - your core. A lot of belly dancing is isolated movements. You try to move a definite part of your body without greatly moving the other parts of the body."

The classes meet at 7 p.m. on most Tuesdays at the center, 30 E. Second St. It's a drop-in class with the next six-week session to begin Feb. 14. The cost is $55 for six weeks, or $10 for a single drop-in class.

Belly dancing's origins are confused and murky.

Literature on the subject traces it to ancient Egypt and India, with some references to Africa, Turkey and gypsies. For most of its history, it was primarily women dancing for women in segregated societies - with literature downplaying the seduction aspects because men rarely watched it in ancient times. Fertility rites and strengthening abdominal muscles for child-bearing have been mentioned as possible reasons for some long-ago belly dancing.

Actually, the term "belly dancing" is American. A promoter of scantily clad Middle Eastern-style dancers at the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago coined the phrase.

Kurth began belly dancing in 1974 in Eugene, Ore. It was a "women's lib" thing in which Kurth wanted to be a rebel and openly express herself when social behaviors for women were much more constrained than they are today.

She studied, danced and taught different belly-dancing styles - some tightly choreographed and some loosely improvisational - for many years. She drifted out of belly dancing in the late 1980s, but renewed her interest in the 1990s. She moved to Whitefish in 2000, where she is a media and public relations consultant, and decided to teach belly dancing in Flathead County.

Her eight students at a recent session ranged in age from 17 to 57 years. All had different body types. Some came because they liked to dance. Some wanted to try something new. Some were curious.

Many wanted to tap into their femininity.

"I feel free to express myself in a way I choose," said Lindsey Kasper of Lakeside.

But the women found it difficult, almost impossible, to describe in words the feelings and expressiveness that the music and dancing unlocked within themselves.

"It does demand or ask you to let go of your need to control everything," Kurth said.

"It's a very sensual dance, not a sexual dance," Spangenberg said.

Kurth added: "It's like chocolate is sensual, but not sexual."

The eight students ranged in belly-dancing experience from one month to 10 years - with many leaning toward the rookie stage.

Learning from scratch among other women wasn't really scary, though a few felt self-conscious around the more-experienced dancers.

Kurth is good about breaking down the moves and teaching them in digestible bits, they said.

Also, Kurth teaches a style that has some basic steps, but allows for some improvisation.

That cuts the students some slack in learning the moves while also expressing themselves.

Kurth said: "It's hard for them to say it's OK to make a mistake. There are really no mistakes. That's the beauty of it."